In Which a Lesson is Learned

So, I finished carving the melon heads yesterday, and I went to do a test stamp. I pulled up the carving, and there was only a very faint ghost of ink on the paper, and the stamp itself was still black. So, the regular, super-tough battleship grey lineoleum? Not great for stamp carving, as it turns out. I should have done it on a medium with more "squish," but the other linoblocks I have are soft to the point where I didn't feel comfortable leaving it out to be stamped with over and over again, afraid that it would break down or tear pretty quickly. On top of that, the lineoleum seemed to suck up the oil-based ink. I tried cleaning it afterwards and it doesn't want to budge. Rather than go to my linocutting supplies or the admittedly small circular plastic-y stamp blanks I have, I'm going to get a hold of some of Speedball's SpeedyCarve material, which comes highly recommended by other stamp carvers.

You can take a look at the (mostly) finished product after the jump. I may yet do some fiddling and clean out some of the undercutting.



So I think I'm going to make a set of ATCs with the current block anyway since it's an appropriate size--I really like the way the carving turned out... it's just a printing block instead of a stamp.