Saturday, February 24, 2007

Ups and downs of printmaking


For the past two days I've been working on this rubber stamp of my sister's dog Marcus who I had done a watercolor several years ago. I really need to find a book on printmaking because it seems to be hit or miss with each inking. This image was sketched with a sharpie pen on a 4" x 6" block. I initially had just carved the details of Marcus and a lot of the stamp was still filled in. I think I got carried away with trying to get his features to standout; I probably carved too much of the block and had to make some correction with his nose and I'm not to happy with his eyes. As for inking...I was laying the stamp on the paper and found that I wasn't picking up enough ink and had missed spots. So I would ink the stamp and place the paper on top of the stamp and then use a brayer to roll over the image. By having the paper over the stamp I got a better inking onto the paper. I probably will do another stamp of Marcus now that I know what I'm trying to accomplish. After getting frustrated with the inking processes, I broke down and ordered a Speedball hand press today, that way I should have no problem with the ink being uniform over the paper.

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