RELIEF PRINTING

Hand Carved Stamp, The Relief Print

Rubber stamping is a hugely popular activity that is enjoyed by people with and without formal art training. Rubber stamps have been in use for a long time for commercial purposes and in crafts, and have been used in fine art since the DADA era. They are easy to print and provide a quick way to make multiple copies. These qualities make rubber stamping attractive for smaller scale and ephemeral art forms such as greeting cards, pins, and mail art, although many artists create large scale art works with rubber stamps or use them as accents on larger pieces. You can buy rubber stamps in just about any design or motif you can imagine, or adapt stamps that were originally made for business use. Nothing beats the creative possibilities, however, of carving your own.

^{Picture from CraftPudding}

 

Check out this 10 min video of hand carving a stamp.

(FYI: unless you want to buy stock in band aids, make sure to cut AWAY from your fingers, unlike what you may see here in this video

What you’ll need:

 

• A carving tool – Without a doubt the Speedball Lino Cutter is the carving tool of choice and can be found at most arts & craft stores. There are lots of other brands out there, so don’t worry if you can’t find a Speedball, just look for a Linoleum Cutter.

You can purchase all of these online at Blick Art Materials.

 

• Carving Material – If you’re just getting started you can practice on small plastic erasers, or purchase rubber stamping material which should be in the same section of your craft store. There are several brands out there, and you may want to try a few till you find something you like to work with. They all carve slightly different, but some are less likely to crumble.

Carving Material at Blick Art Materials.

 

• Ink pads – Not only will you need ink to actually use your stamp, you’ll need it to test your stamp and make sure you’ve carved away enough of the rubber surrounding your stamp.

• Obviously you’ll also need a soft pencil, some paper, and if you have an Exacto knife they can come in handy as well.

Carving

 

 

Create a simple design to start, one with simple positive and negative shapes.

The raised area will print and the carved area will not.

*** DON'T FORGET that your design will print in REVERSE.

 

 

THE STEPS:

 

 

Here are some other tutorials:

• Geninne’s Tutorial
• Inky Squid’s Flickr Tutorial
• Atlas Quest – Stamp Carving 101
• Alma Stoller Tutorial

 

Inspiration:

Be sure to check out the great flickr pools for inspiration as well as the many great crafters selling their stamps on etsy.

 

 

 

Artist of Inspiration: SWOON

 

Swoon (born Caledonia Dance Curry, in 1978) is a street artist who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of human figures. She studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999 and large-scale installations in 2005.

 

Curry was born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York when she was nineteen to study painting at the Pratt Institute.^[1]
Then, Curry joined groups in New York City like Grub, which provides free Dumpster-dived dinners in Brooklyn. She also founded the Toyshop collective, known for organizing events such as a march through the Lower East Side consisting of 50 people playing instruments made out of junk.^[1]

Street pasting

  A work by Swoon in Berlin

 

Swoon regularly pastes works depicting people, often her friends and family, on the streets around the world. She usually pastes her pieces on uninhabited locations such as abandoned buildings, bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs. Her work is inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets.

Swoon started her street art in 1999. At the time she was attending the Pratt Institute, studying painting. However, she began to feel restrained by the sense that her life was already laid out for her. She believed that she would simply paint a few pictures that would end up on a wall in a gallery or someone’s home. Her art would only be seen by those affluent enough to go to galleries and buy art. At the same time she was trying to find what she describes as context. She stated that she wanted to become part of the world. Her response to this desire was what she believes to be a very literal one: gluing her art to walls.

 Wheat pasting became a way for her to discover and understand her impact in the world. Swoon describes that as a young woman, she did not have a sense of her ability to make a change. By putting up a small wheat paste sticker, she was able to transform a wall and it would be there when she walked past it the next day. It was a tiny literal change.^[2]

The majority of Swoon’s street art consists of portraits. She believes that we store things in our body and that a portrait can become an x-ray of those experiences. She wants her portraits to capture something essential in the subject. She tries to document something she loves about the subject and has seen in him or her. It is a way to connect with the subject. By putting the portraits on the streets she is allowing for others to witness this connection and make their own.^[3]

One such connection, she says, has stuck with her throughout the years, as she mentions it in multiple interviews. She met a woman who asked her about a small piece of art that she had put up in a neighborhood. The woman proceeded to tell her that a mentally disabled man who lived in the neighborhood had started to call it “The Secret” and he would take people to it and show them. The little piece had become a special thing in the community. This moment has had an impact on Swoon, telling her that one tiny thing can make an opportunity for connection and can inspire the feeling that maybe there is another world existing around us and that we only need a perception shift in order to see it. She has since tried to evoke this in all of her other artwork. Originally she believed her series of portraits would be a two-month project but she has continued to make them for over ten years.^[2]

Living in New York City had a great impact on Swoon as an artist. She loved its graffiti, its layers, and others' feelings toward the graffiti and other aspects of the city. She wanted to interact with the layers of the city, what she describes as “the naturally occurring collage of the city”. Her first series of prints were done on tracing paper so that the colors of the walls and the chipping paint could still be seen. Her prints tried to create life in what would be an otherwise dead space.^[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon