Let me introduce our SUPER students!

 

Saturday, my friend Thea and I taught our first stamp carving class at the local art center.  It was a great class with four students.....three were first timers and one had carved stamps before, albeit several years ago.

Jan and Erika took to carving like the proverbial "ducks to water"!  Jan, recently, started journaling and wanted to make stamps for her journal.  Erika wants to share her new found skills with her two daughters and their Girl Scout troop.

 

Meet our "whiz kid", ten year old Diego carved and stamped two stamps and was GOOD at it.  The first stamp we did was a simple, "getting use to the tools by carving a stamp with straight lines".  Diego whipped right through that project.  Then he drew his own design, a helicopter, and carved that, too.

His uncle, who recognizes Diego's talents, brought him to the class.  He's a lucky and talented young man.

 

 

Barbara was our experienced student.  It has been about ten years since she carved stamps and she is hoping this class will get her motivated, and back creating special occasion cards, using her own hand carved stamps.

She designed her own "love" stamp based on the stamp the other students were doing.

Thea and I had so much fun encouraging all this talent and showing them some basic carving skills.

The end of February we are teaching another class.  That class will be geared more toward print making and methods for using more colors.

 

All this enthusiasm encouraged me to design and carve this print!

Then I cut stencils/masks so I could print the stamp/plate using several colors.

 

I printed two test sample prints, first, on different papers and slightly different colors. 

When I was happy with the test, I printed two more on watercolor paper using acrylic paint and printer's ink.

 

 

 

Here's one print, matted and ready to frame!

 

It was a good weekend all the way around.