Day 17 – Stamp

Earlier this week we were cleaning out our car and Matt found a bag from Dick Blick where I had purchased a huge sheet for Quick Kut for making stamps or prints. I ran across this bag again yesterday and decided to make my own mini stamp like some of the awesome ones I’ve seen out there on Flickr and Etsy.

It’s definitely a lot harder than I was hoping and once again I have greater respect for those that make stamps. At first I was going to just do a simple circle with stripes, but it just wasn’t looking how I pictured it. I took a break and then suddenly it came to me… my little balloon man! I’ve been drawing him for over 10 years and he’s even my flickr avatar. My friend Nicole (that lives in Seattle) has always loved him and has told me on several occasions she is going to get a tattoo of him someday. He came out really cute, so now I think I’ll either have to send him to her, or make another to send to her and keep this one for myself.

I couldn’t find any tutorials on how to attach a handmade stamp to a wooden disc base so I just had to wing it. I scored the back of the stamp with an Xacto and used hot glue and it seems to be holding up fine now. To show you some of the awesome stamps people offer over on Etsy, I’ve created a treasury. Check it out!

I’ve also seen that Swap-bot has a whole category for stamps and I must have seen some stamps in my flickr contacts stream where someone said they doing a swap. I think it would be fun to do a handmade stamp swap, but before I do that I need to either get my tools sharpened, or use a much denser carving material. The Quick Kut is so soft that it actually is harder for tiny precise work, than if I were carving a wood block for printmaking.