Year: 2009

I’m always doing projects with my kids’ artwork, so here’s one I’ve been meaning to try for over a year now.  I finally bought Lena Corwin‘s beautiful book Printing by Hand, which has reignited my interest in printmaking. This is such a practical and handy book, by the way.  I look forward to learning to screenprint.  She doesn’t make her own stamps in the book, but here is a great tutorial from Geninne’s Art Blog.

With the right tools, making your own rubber stamps is a simple process.  It took us just under an hour from start to finish.  I had the kids draw with pencil directly on the rubber carving block and I used the  super nifty carving tool from my printing kit to carve out the design (both the tool and a rubber block come in this kit along with other cool stuff).  You can see that I need some practice with the carving tool, but I found it to be lots of fun.  Once I had the stamps carved, I cut some balsa wood and used a glue gun to adhere the stamp to it.  Seems to work fine since all you need is even pressure to make your stamp image.  My older daughter drew the star, but when I was carving it she saw my lines and wanted to turn it into a shooting star.  My younger one drew the flower and I added the lines around it to give it a little movement.  And my kids had so much fun playing with the tiny little pieces cut from the carving block that they had pretty much lost interest in the stamps by the time I was finished carving!

Stay tuned for more stamping ideas in the coming week.