Stamping Fun

This week, our challenge from Laura McHugh East was to carve a stamp with the theme "April Showers."
 
We've finally had some rain, but everything in my yard is in bloom so all I could think was "Flowers."
 
I follow the blog of Gennine Zlatkis, who is a stamp carver extraordinaire. If she has any pre-make stamps, you wouldn't know it because she custom makes all the stamps she uses in her work.
 
Some instruction from Geninne that I followed on how to make my stamps can be found here.
 
Here's my Staedtler & Mars white eraser ready to go. I had tried carving a few months ago, but was too busy and distracted to make it work. This eraser is about 3 inches long and 1 inch wide. For this activity, I used both sides.



I used the Speedball tool to simply remove the eraser from around where I didn't want the stamp. For this side, I made a leaf. The other side was the "flowers." They are oddly shaped (square) partly because this was the side I previously tried to carve and partly because I didn't have the skill or the space to make things nice and round.

 

To make the images, I used this black stamp pad on a piece of Yupo paper I had. I am not fond of the Yupo paper - it is really slick so inks and watercolors don't really dry on it. But it is really good for getting a sharp graphic image. 

 

Here is the flower I created with the leaf and flower sides of my new stamp.

 Close up of the leaf portion.

I got these images done and I thought - wow - these are pretty, but not very spring-like, so I imported them into my Picasa program and fiddled with them to add color, borders, etc. 


Here are the results of my playing with Picasa.