New and Improved?

It's always tough to spend three or four hours drawing and carving a stamp only to press it and discover that it’s not quite as amazing as you anticipated. This is precisely what happened to me last night. My feeling about the rose stamp was lukewarm at best, so today, after re-assessing my carving, I decided to go for bust and try to fix it.

The main problem with the stamp was that I tried to make it somewhat modern looking by emphasizing the outline, but I also included a bunch of scratch lines to make it look realistic and shaded. Not a good combination. My only option was to take out the shaded parts and try to clean up the image.


I also opted to chop off the leaves.


I like the simpler lines of this stamp, but the extra carving has left parts of it damaged and the imprint is always going to have broken lines. One option is to fill them in by hand like I’ve done in the image below, but I think having to do that for every card is going to be too time consuming. Maybe a different colour or multiple imprints might pick this one up.


In other news, my big goal for this weekend is to set up my etsy store and get at least four cards posted. Actually, I have two major weekend goals – The other involves soundly defeating my husband in a dessert pizza cook-off! I'll definitely be posting updates about the former and I just might have to include a separate post for the latter (with a photo of my winning pizza, of course!)