Day 23 – New Stamp

After creating my little balloon head stamps the other day I had the idea for another stamp. The design is a reproduction of my grass quote paintings and prints.

I thought it would be cool to carve the stamp, leaving the center blank so I could draw in new quotes. I originally planned that they would just be little prints, but then with all my sticker graffiti stuff, I thought it would be really cool to turn them into stickers as well. I’m still ironing out kinks in how to print them. Even though I took 5 printmaking classes in college, we never worked with this linocut shtuff. In my Relief Printmaking class we only carved and printed from woodblocks, so this stuff is really new to me. I never even did it when I was in elementary school, which I’ve heard was a common art project for a lot of people. When I made the really tiny balloonhead stamps, using a stamp pad worked fine, but I don’t know if it is because I’m running low on ink or because of the linocut material isn’t really made for ink pads, but I could never get a solid print. I had to resort to using real printmaking ink, glass plate, roller and the whole nine yards which I still had from my college years. Of course I don’t have a press, so I just had to press the stamp and burnish. I originally had the linocut mounted on a woodblock, but then realized I probably need a padding to go between the relief and the wood so I took it off. I really don’t want to have to mess with all the chemical ink again for this simple piece, so I’m going to get a fresh ink pad and hope that works better.

You can see in the top image that the ink is still wet so I couldn’t draw in any quotes yet. I also watercolored the background green, to continue the theme. This was a fun project. When I post again about my sticker graffiti pieces, hopefully there will be some of these as well.