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comment by _refugee_
_refugee_  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Craft Fair v1.25 - January 8, 2020

Hi. I didn't want to make a stand-alone post, and I remembered seeing this thread pop up at relatively regular intervals, and it seemed like a good place to drop something I (just) made that I'm pretty positive about.

I know at least applewood probably remembers that I was experimenting with lino/stamp carving a few years back. I have continued to experiment. This year for Christmas I carved stamps to decorate my wrapping paper. The wrapping paper turned out well -- well enough for my mom to tell me about some other stamp-carving lady she'd read about in Oprah who also carved her own stamps and sold cards she printed online. Mom and I talked about hand-carved stamps twice actually and both times she had a different name or two of people who practiced lino carving and sold their stuff and who had websites which I could check out, if I wanted.

I did want. I was interested to see what and how other people were doing with lino that was sellable. I've had my etsy store continuously open for just over a year now and it has been a bust. I have lost money through the etsy shop hands-down, the entire year. I'm not exactly surprised or disappointed by this, as the etsy shop was always a bit of an off-the-rails venture for me, but it certainly hasn't helped me feel like I make anything art-wise that interests the masses, either.

One of the artists I looked had a different technique than my usual approach. This person would take an entire lino block or stamp block (a block the size of the card faces she was printing) and carve out an entire scene in the block. She used the carving to create black lines, and then colored in the white spaces with watercolor. Yesterday as I was messing around with stamps all day I decided, hey, why not, I have never done anything like this before, I should give it a try. All the lady's products were nature scenes and it made sense for my first attempt to do the same. (Mostly because, I had no other direction and "why not?" ref said.)

I decided I'd carve a fox, googled my way across this particular fox-picture, started sketching and shortly after, heck, I started carving.

After some intensive carving time, here's my end result (the print).

I am pretty darn happy with this. It's absolutely the most complex thing I've carved.

Next I am going to take one of the black prints and try coloring it in to see how that might change the finished product. Instead of watercolors I'll be using crayons (because I don't have watercolors and I've had a surprising amount of success with using crayons on art lately).

What's different/interesting about this piece and approach to carving is that, if you notice, there's a fair bit of solid black in my print -- uncarved lino. I don't think it would benefit this particular stamp to have the background fully detailed. I think a fully detailed background would distract from the fox, which is supposed to be the focus of the print. However, I bet there are other ways to deal with black areas (maybe just pattern them with lines or something) etc...

Well, let's just leave it at I have a lot to learn here, still. Also, it's worth noting that to use an entire stamp block to carve 1 stamp is...ridiculously resource-heavy compared to what I usually do (carve single image stamps out of a larger sheet and try to reuse scraps). However, I do have an untouched mounted lino block I got as part of a stamp carving set which is 4"x5", which means I will be doing another one of these full-image attempts someday in the future. I was thinking maybe a snowy pine tree, but now that I've carved this whole fox in the forest, a snowy pine tree might be boring.

I'll have to think about it.

Anyway, I'm glad this thread exists! It's good to have a place to share.

PS. Another stamp I carved yesterday, this one done in my "traditional" method and colored in with crayon:





OftenBen  ·  1536 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That second pattern of wrapping paper made me super happy.

THEN I SAW THE FOX. HOLY SHIT.

That's pretty damn sick. I'd love to see you do more carved blocks. I'm certainly having you make one for my woodworking stuff.

user-inactivated  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Shame about the store, but both stamps are total wow!

_refugee_  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's OK. I've learned a ton this past year experimenting. And my mom's convinced that Christmas wrapping paper is going to be/should be my breakthrough. (Too bad the paper I bought is semitransparent -- that's the main thing preventing me from throwing anything like these guys up for sale -- pics below -- ok yes i'm oversharing.) I have theories about how to fix the paper problem, and if that doesn't work, who cares because yet again I've been forced to try something new in the face of something I planned not quite working out.

On a sidebar, when I move to a new state mid-this-year, I'll arrive in a town where I actually know someone who co-owns a specialty paper/stationery store. I have a crazy hope I'll have a decent number of really compelling creations by then, and maybe I can lean upon that personal connection and see if they might be willing to carry my stuff in the store. I think that cards and the like probably sell better in person -- the counter to that is a pure-white card is pretty fragile and easy to smudge or bend or otherwise devalue, which is why I haven't tried schlepping all my cards around to the small & local indie art fairs (the most popular of this type of local fair is held at a bar...)

In the meantime, I will continue learning how to make more random paper-related shits!