Rubber stamp carving

I have always liked Lino cutting and really enjoy the feeling of cutting into butter that you can get when carving rubbers. I use Lino and wood cutting tools. Last year ‘The ‘Flying Tiger’ stores sold kits. https://uk.flyingtiger.com/ which were very reasonably priced.

I have been wanting to add to my Edinburgh building collection – I have a stamp of the Scott Monument that I have used regularly in my art over the past couple of years

I wanted to do an Edinburgh Castle. I found a view without too many crenellations. I always draw designs on the rubber with biro- it’s easily removed if you make a mistake and is a good sized line to cut.

The problem with making stamps is that they have to be a reflection of what you want printed …. the Scott Monument is symmetrical …..

I now have a fab back to front stamp of the Castle. I decided to leave the back ground in the stamp and to carve at an angle so that it looks like rain …..

I look out for rubbers in office supply shops and Paperchase sales have been a great source they reduce their’s in different shapes and sizes down to 50p regularly.

I was so fed up with my back to front Castle, that I had a go at doing a variety of smaller stamps

I wanted to try a mandala – this is quite tricky because you have to decide what you want black/ white/ line etc – instead of just solid shapes. I am not naturally neat enough to do very neat complicated designs, when cutting.

I was pleased with this one so I did another. Remembering to take some prints when it was just an out line, so that I could do two colour printing

I also really liked the bird design so I added it to a pen and ink mandala

The bird worked so well I decided to carve a larger design with 6 birds

This uses the Flying Tiger rubber blocks – which look like liquorice Allsorts from the side – they are layers of colour so that you can see how deep you need to carve. Which is very handy.

The blocks come in black and white or blue and pink ( when you can get them ….)

Below is a selection of prints. I used acrylic paint applied with a paint brush ……..

Below is a collage of some art journalling pages I added the stamps to

Advertisement

Visiting emotional triggers

2 years ago my son was in a road accident in South Korea – this week my daughter was poorly with asthma and flu and had to go to hospital. I am doing an initial counselling course and found it very difficult to do an empathy exercise with another student.

My irritable bowel has also been playing up, so all my emotional stuff is roiling around my stomach. I wanted to see if I could work through all the rubbish visually to see if that helped

I started off having flash backs after Face book reminded me that I was in Korea 2 years ago. My son was not really in any critical danger but he did fracture his skull in 3 places. So I went to Korea. It was a difficult time as you can imagine.

I came up with this image as a starting point after searching for flash backs in google images

https://www.writermag.com/2015/11/19/dos-donts-flashback/

Thinking about PTSD – which I don’t have, but being a visual animal and sensitive to being over stimulated – I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what images came up for PTSD

I love this one but it didn’t resonate with me at the time.

https://becomingsoldiers.wordpress.com/

Here are some more I found interesting

https://themindsjournal.com/

https://agileleanlife.com/emotional-flashbacks/

I decided to start messing about digitally with a couple of these to see what I came up with – this is how I usually work. I liked the scribble and the spiral

Unfortunately when I worked in my journal I didn’t do a step by step, but after a series of layers this is what I came up with.

You can’t really see the resemblance to the original images. I started off with a spiral clock doodle and then added layers of pattern, text , and a big loose scribble. I tried adding a lady in the middle but it didn’t seem to convey what I was feeling. however I liked the phrase ‘in the eye of a storm’ so an eye seemed more appropriate.

After lunch I doodled while waiting in a cafe, for a friend. Typically I forgot paper, but I had a pen. A few companies produce nice weight paper advertising leaflets which were on display at the cafe, so I decided to appropriate a diary to work on.

It helped to situate the doodle in a time frame of Feb/ March to anchor my thoughts. I like the look of asemic writing – what I use is technically not that – I write on top of my words a couple of times to hide the meaning from the reader – so I write out all my feelings but you can’t read it.

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content,” or “without the smallest unit of meaning.” With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret’ (Wikipedia)

Making ‘zine’ formats

I can’t remember if I have written about these before. I like working in a ‘zine’ format because of the 3d element. My friend @dar63 on Instagram started making some recently and I loved her lush layers and jewelled colours do I asked her if she fancied doing some collaborations. We have worked together in the past.

You can tell which pages are mine because of the black ink doodles 😂😂

I have been experimenting with using water soluble pens and spraying my mandalas so I used some of these as a base layer.

I added designs to the front and the back and added gesso to surface to seal it and add texture

I added a variety of things to the surface

Strips of typed text, large text, more gesso, stitching, white pen , spray ink and magazine images.

I like drawing of the inside of the zine. So that when they are standing up you get an interesting juxtaposition of the two sides

The bottom design in the above pic includes a zine designed by a friend Fran that is based with me in Edinburgh.

I hand stitched the edges in this case