Making rubber stamps

This post is way late, as I started making these nearly a year ago, but here are a couple of rubber stamps I put together. I got some 95 x 79 mm pieces of rubber, each 1mm thick, from one of those art reject stores, where they recycle odds and ends for craft purposes. I got them in the distant past when Melbourne's shops were actually open. Anyway, these floppy pieces of rubber sat around in my house for a long time, until I suddenly thought "Hey, I need a cheese sandwich." And also "Hey, those bits of rubber would be great to make stamps with."

In January 2014 at the City Library in Melbourne – the same month as my comic artwork was part of an exhibition there – I joined in a stamping workshop where the girls running the session made their own stamps out of erasers. I've always liked rubber stamps, date stamps, postage stamps, and the actor Terence Stamp is pretty good as well.

Well, enough talk, let's carve up some rubber.

This photo and the one below were taken on December 22, 2020, which means this so-called spontaneous stamp-making exercise has taken nearly 10 months to see completion! Some things have to take a back seat in the production bus, you know? Anyway, I liked this design of a polar bear, a simple line drawing which used to feature on a badge I used to own. So I drew it on a scrap of paper and then used pencil lead to transfer it in reverse onto the rubber.

Next I used lino-carving tools to carve the image in relief onto the rubber. Don't be a fool and do the carving on top of your graphics tablet as seen above. This photo is for demonstration purposes only.

Once that's done, get out your scissors and bull glue and cut the designs out. Using the scissors, of course, not the glue. I'm fairly sure glue wouldn't be of much use in cutting tasks. For the second stamp I did a garbage bin. I used to draw them on my folders in high school for some reason. So, let's glue the rubber onto the blocks of wood and see how they stamp up, shall we?

Ver' nice. My polar bear does look a bit sheepish, but I'm pretty happy with the result. Be sure to check this blog in another 10 months to see if I've made any more!