Mini Workshop: 1 on 1

Last week, my best friend told me that her mom is interested in learning how to carve a rubber stamp; because I gave my friend a personalized rubber stamp (made from simple eraser) as a gift last christmas. She (my best friend's mom) was thinking that it would be a good hobby to do, so I accepted and said that I would be very delighted to be able to share my knowledge on rubber stamping. 

So we arranged to have our mini 1 on 1 workshop at their house yesterday, at first I was a bit awkward because it is the first that I would teach other people about my knowledge and thoughts on stamp carving. Truthfully, I'm still not an expert on this hobby because up until now I'm just using Xacto cutter and box cutter as my tools and not the usual Speedball Linoleum cutter, because for me it is still expensive and I still need to save some money to buy it; also here in the Philippines, Speedball products are still not readily available in the market. But hopefully in the future I may be able to buy one and be able to make a rubber stamp design out of it (fingers crossed....x x). 

Going back to our story, we eventually started our mini workshop with introduction of tools and materials to use, also presenting my previous rubber stamp works. Then we started by making an outline of the eraser that we will be using on a Japanese paper (It is a cheaper paper than tracing paper and good in transferring the design from the paper to the rubber material/ eraser), then we started drawing our designs using a darker shade/ lead pencil (recommended are the one from "B, 2B, 3B and so on" for it to be darker and easy to transfer) inside the drawn outline of the eraser; transferring the design by scrapping lightly on the backside of the paper which faces the eraser. After which we started carving. 

Carving at first would be very difficult, most especially if you wouldn't know the tricks in making a shallow carving on the surface or even to avoid ruining the design. The key to it is to angle the cutter while carving the outline of the design then make a V- cut for the 1st and 2nd cut would meet. Good thing that auntie was a very quick learner and we made a very simple designed stamp in more or less an hour. It was a very good experience, hopefully I maybe able to teach other interested people in learning stamp carving, because rubber stamping for me is a very relaxing hobby though it requires your concentration and focus, I still enjoy every minute of making it. 

I also made one while teaching auntie to carve her 1st rubber stamp masterpiece; unfortunately I didn't took a photo of auntie's work. I made this stamp for my officemate who requested for it. 

Would anyone also be interested in stamp carving? Hopefully other people can try doing this also. 

Til' next time, 

M