Last May, when I attended Donna Downey's Inspired! event, I took an evening "mini workshop". Jane Powell, from Random Arts store in NC, taught a stamp carving class.
I've had these two carving blocks and set of carving tools (from Hobby Lobby) for . . . oh . . . say . . . 3-4 years. It's something I always wanted to learn, but just never took the plunge. I was thrilled to get the chance to have someone show me how.
And it was sooooo easy! Anyone can do this! My kids do this!
In the class description, she told us to bring in small images that were very plain and simple - all black and white, no shading. This made sense to me because my parents both have done sand-blasted art on glass and you use this kind of high-contrast, clip-art looking pattern. So I pulled some pics from Google images, changed them to black and printed them out to take with me.
To transfer the image onto the carving block, you first trace the square outline of the carving block onto tracing paper. This gives you your size so you know your image will fit. Then trace your design in the center of this square.
The cool part is that a little square carving block has 6 sides you can carve on, so keep turning it and finding images that will fit on these sides. The little ones I used for this I bought after the class. They are available at Dick Blick here for only $2/each. Scroll down to the bottom for the various size options.
Then you simply turn over the tracing paper (pencil drawing side onto the carving block) and rub it with your fingernail.
Repeat for all the sides - or do one at a time (the pencil will smear a little when handling, but not too bad).
Then you start carving. The blocks are very soft and cut easily. Most carving sets come with three or more different sized carving blades. This comes in handy when you need a tiny, fine one for intricate details - or a larger one to carve away excess background. You get to decide what parts you want to carve - if you carve the lines you drew, you'll get a relief look (negative). If you leave those, but carve out the background, you get a positive stamp. You can also leave some carved texture in it for added interest.
One tip Jane mentioned was to stamp your carving block in black ink as you are carving so you can see how you're doing - see if you want to keep carving or stop. This was helpful for me. Here are my blocks after they've been carved. I use Staz On ink most of the time, so my images are now stained (which I like).
I left some background lines on this one because I liked the textured look of it.
The small size of these blocks makes them easy to take anywhere. I would throw these and my three carving tools into a ziplock sandwich bag and work on them while my kids were at swim practice.
Here are some stamped images that were made at Jane's workshop. All the ladies at my table decided to stamp our images on each others' cards so we could have ideas of what everyone did.
Jane suggested using our images on the smaller, skinnier sides to make borders (by repeatedly stamping the same image).
It would be fun to make holiday sets!
