Hand carving stamps

I recently found a blog by an artist living in Mexico, Geninne Zlatkis, who, among other things, makes wonderful hand-carved stamps. She wrote a book about how to do it too, Making An Impression: Designing and Creating Artful Stamps, which I got for Christmas. Here are a few photos of some stamps I carved recently.

Pencil images are very easy to transfer to the stamp carving block. I used Moo Carve which is easy to cut and good at not crumbling. (I had used a different product before which wasn't bad, but this stuff is better.)

Here you see my first prints of the tree and birds. The exacto knife beside my sketch book is used for trimming the outside of the block.

This picture shows the lino cutting tool used to cut the lines in the stamp and a couple of ink pads. I was given the lino cutting tools years ago but hadn't used them in a very long time.

I decided to add veins in the leaves and the fox, as well as trying the tree in different colors. I don't have a lot of different stamp pad colors - the green one is from a kids' stamping kit that is rather running out of juice.