What to do when you have left making a linocut Christmas card too late? … I turned to carving my design in rubber stamps, easy to carve and stamping ink dries instantly! A flourish with gold and volia!
I was wondering what I could do for a Christmas card design, and sometimes an image just seems to arrive in my brain, this time at night, so I had to get out of bed and make a quick sketch in blue ink. The next morning I fiddled with it and added the carrots, and immediately knew that was not a good idea.
Next step was to look up images of mince pies, sherry glasses and sherry bottles, and draw them, until I found forms I liked, and thought I could carve into a small stamp.
As you can see from my drawings above, my glasses, bottle and pies are out of scale with each other. I scanned my drawings and in Photoshop arranged them, making sure their sizes worked in comparison to each other. I printed out two designs, the only difference between them was the glasses, I wasn’t sure if I could carve the fancy etched glass.
Discovering static cling foam was an early Christmas present. I saw an instagram post by @the_wonder_struck_printmaker describing its benefits. One side of the foam is sticky, which you attach to your rubber stamp. The other side is smooth and unsticky, this side will attach via static quite strongly to an acrylic mounting block. You can use the acrylic block to help you position your stamp when printing – my block has a grid scored into it. Using the acrylic block also helps to get an even print and avoid side-rolling which might pick up unwanted background ink. You can easily pull off your stamp from the acrylic block, meaning you can reuse the block with other stamps. I used Stix2anything A4 Mount ‘N’ Stamp Foam.
For the glasses and pies I used rubber blocks created especially for carving stamps to print with. They were really easy to carve, and I was pleased that I could capture the cross-hatching detail on the glasses. I had an actual rubber eraser that would take the size of the bottle; this was more difficult to carve beacause the material was more elastic. I couldn’t recarve over the lines on the bottleneck for example, because the ‘rubber’ edges of the cut just bulged away. I’m pretty happy with the result regardless; though in future I will only use the specialist rubber stamp products.
I am really pleased with how the rubber stamps printed, but the design did need a little something more to make it special. I played about with adding Winsor & Newton Gold Drawing Ink to the stamped designs.
And just like that, it all came together pretty easily! I am very pleased with the result, I used Ranger Jet Black Archival Ink to stamp the designs onto Clairefontaine Maya white card 120gsm. The card measures 10×11 cm; as usual I never think to design to a standard size, so I will have to make the envelopes myself too!
Check out my instgram reels to see print process and shiny gold results.
(© Catherine Cronin)
Cat Among the Pigeons Press 