Carving your own rubber stamps can add a beautiful and professional touch to your hand-made items. It’s so easy to do and worth the time it takes to carve.
I’ll be carving a version of the Megnificent Made logo to stamp my shipping products with. For this project you’ll need a printed or hand drawn design, a stamp pad, carving tools (speedball makes really great gouges with interchangable nibs), and a rubber eraser or carving block.
I’m using ezy carve printing blocks by Renoir. They’re really really easy to carve and cut like butter! I have memories of carving blocks in high school and struggling to get through the materials and gouging my hands with our super sharp carving tools….but no worries these blocks are heaps better!
I used a printed piece of artwork for this stamp. If you’re artsy you can draw your artwork right on your carving surface and skip this step. If you are using printed work, color in the image with a soft drawing pencil.
Put your artwork face down on your carving surface and tape it in place.
Rub the back of your artwork with a pencil, credit card, or bone folder. This presses the pencil off of the paper and transfers it to the carving block.
Your image should show up nice and clear! It’s backwards but that’s perfect for a stamp…
Use a sharpie marker to darken in your image and keep it from smudging while you carve.
Use your various sized carving gouges to carve away the negative space of your design.
Stamp Away!
You may find after your first stamping that there are some high spots in the block leaving ink on your page. Carve them back further as you find them.
You can mount your stamps on wood blocks for a more professional look. Some craft stores sell stamp handles. Clear ones are best so you can see where to line up your stamp.
Good luck and happy carving!
Tags: art, carve, craft, How To, ink, print, printing, rubber stamp, speedball, stamp
November 7, 2009 at 9:19 am |
Love it! I remember carving out a rubber stamp art in school art class too. Will have to find the materials to make my own
December 3, 2009 at 4:47 am |
[...] black tape to hang across my table that says Megnificent Made. I also used the stamp I made in my blog tutorial of my logo to print heaps of fabric to put on parts of the table (I also have a plain black [...]
December 6, 2009 at 5:46 am |
[...] by adding a piece of cotton that I had stamped with my hand-carved logo stamp that I made in my blog tutorial. The piece was stamped mostly in black but with a rainbow colored stamp scattered at random. I [...]
December 7, 2009 at 9:08 pm |
[...] try but haven’t but she makes it seems so easy maybe I’ll give it a try now:) Visit the Megnificent Made blog for her [...]
December 8, 2009 at 12:49 pm |
How do you mount the stamp to a wood handle/block? I’ve carved stamps but I haven’t succeded with the mount yet…
December 8, 2009 at 2:04 pm |
Use to make similar ones in school during art classes… miss those times a lot
December 8, 2009 at 3:45 pm |
Great tutorial! Will have to give this a try
December 8, 2009 at 5:02 pm |
Thanks everyone!
I haven’t mounted stamps before either but the craft stores sell clear backed stamp mounts that I’m sure have instructions on adhesive. I’ll look into it when I’m in the store next!
December 29, 2009 at 10:31 pm |
[...] custom coloring books so a little bright tissue paper, a book, and this cute bag customized with my hand carved stamp worked out [...]
March 22, 2012 at 1:12 am |
[...] also have seen many different blogs provide tutorials for stamp carving. This looks like tons of fun! I like to personalize my gift wrap by drawing designs onto kraft [...]