I have been wanting to make stamps for ages now and I have had a couple of goes with some success but nothing amazing.

Boosted by the fact that I said that one of my goals for May was to make a stamp set, yes, not just one lonesome stamp, a lovely friendly set of them, I got to work.

I am not a get the equipment and dive in kinda girl, I have to look at at least one book on the subject if possible.  I checked out ‘Carve, Stamp, Play‘ by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer and ‘Making an Impression‘ by Geninne Zlatkis from the library and got studying stamp making.

Of course I don’t get far into any books about making stuff without wanting to jump in and have a go.  I grabbed my carving equipment and some stamp blocks and decided what I wanted to make a stamp of.

I love to use sumi ink with a sumi brush so I wondered if I painted a basic design on each of my three stamp blocks, would it leave an impression I could carve around.  Yes!  It worked, I painted some test designs in my sketchbook, then onto each carving block. I left them for a few minutes then carefully blotted off the excess ink to leave behind the shape I was to carve.  This way I got the flow of the lines I wanted to create the stamp because I used my brush directly onto the stamp block.

After some carving and book consulting and more carving and stamp testing and final carving, success, I have three stamps I love! These are pretty big as stamps go, about 4 inches tall, maybe I will try my hand at smaller ones next.

Now I want to carve a feather stamp, a raindrops stamp, maybe some dots of various sizes all over a stamp, the alphabet…..the possibilities are only restrained by my dedication and trips to the art store for more stamp blocks!

I made this last page in my ‘season of play’ journal for the latest Get Messy Art Journal season.  I painted the flower type marks and stamped over them with my new handy dandy stamp!

Happy Wednesday x

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