When I posted some of my eraser stamps on Instagram, some crafty friends were surprised to learn that the X-Acto Knife is all I’ve been using for carving¹. It seems that most rubber stamp crafters — and I’ve noticed this on a lot of web tutorials I’ve read and watched  — prefer to use lino cutters, more specifically, the Speedball Linoleum Cutter set which I want myself. That set contains a thin, V-shaped blade that looks especially useful for gouging out narrow “canals” between outlines — a pain to attempt with the straight-edged X-acto blade.

X-Acto Knife vs. a V-Gouge

See what I mean? (via Lime Green News)

As mentioned previously, I’ve already ordered the set but while waiting I had to train myself to carve using the humble, easily available, and familiar² pointy blade. Drama aside, if you want to start carving and like me, a craft knife is all you have, I will now share the process with you. I’ll even start from the very beginning — a very good place to start. *cue Julie Andrews*

** I’m by no means an expert at this. I just want to share what works for me so far. 🙂

Materials:
– a 2B lead pencil
– tracing paper
– a rubber eraser
– an X-Acto knife
– an ink pad
– blu tack (optional)

1. Plan out the image you want to carve. Shade-in the areas to keep solid to guide you when you carve later. These doodles are “parols” or Filipino Christmas lanterns and I plan to use these on homemade gift tags.
2. Trace your “master” illustration onto tracing paper with a 2B lead pencil.

3. Place the tracing paper on top of your eraser or carving block, penciled side down. Rub on it with something firm like a pen’s bottom or a bone folder to transfer a mirror image of your sketch.

4. Totally optional but if I’m not using a two-tone carving block, I like tinting my surface lightly with some color. This is so I can easily see which areas have already been carved. Just dab a piece of tissue paper into your ink pad then pat it onto your eraser / carving block, just gently enough to tint it with color.

5. Start outlining your image with the X-Acto blade at a 30-45 degree angle << — very important. Remember to slice lightly because if you insert the knife too deep, it will be difficult to maneuver the blade which will result in tugging and therefore risking (a) ruining your stamp, and (b) piercing the finger you’re holding the stamp with. (Unfortunately for me I encountered all of the above on a couple of my initial carving attempts).

6. After you’ve outlined an area, lift the blade and turn the eraser around. Again with the blade inserted on a 30-45 degree angle, carve a curved line a short distance away from the outline you made towards the opposite direction from where you made the cut earlier. Try to “meet” the already-sliced areas with your blade’s tip, you’ll see that areas will begin peeling off. This is my favorite part. 🙂 (Gosh I hope that made sense. Please see photo above for reference.)

7. Soon your stamp will look like this. See how all my cuts are angled?

8. Completely optional again but if you have some Blu Tack (mine’s about 15-years old and it still works and lol it’s not blue) lying around, you can use that to remove pencil marks as well as stubborn little bits of eraser stuck inside crevices.

9. Trim your stamp using a box cutter. Trimming it to size will help in stamp positioning later on.

10. Make a test print. This will allow you to see which areas still need fixing. It doesn’t really need to be perfect though — part of a rubber stamp’s charm is its rough handmade quality. (Such a good excuse, ‘no? 🙂 )

A photo posted by Cynthia Bauzon-Arre (@arncyn) on Dec 12, 2014 at 5:57am PST

11. And here are the finished stamps. 🙂

If my instructions — especially in #6 — weren’t clear to you, watch this demo by the amazing Tsukui Tomoko. She uses both a box cutter (!) and a V-gouge in the video but the box cutter method at the beginning of the video is what I’ve been doing with the X-Acto knife.

Did this help you somehow? If you have other carving tips or techniques, I’d love to hear all about them!

1. Our discussiions are here and here [ back]
2. oh X-Acto, how many frisket films did I cut with you back in college? [ back]

What I’m working on right now…

… is a continuation of the update I posted on Instagram last night.¹ I made these jeepney, tricycle, and pedicab doodles ²  a week ago and thought of printing them on the Gocco… until I realized that I didn’t have enough screens.*headdesk*  But as explained in the previous post, this is what led to my interest in rubberstamping in the first place which just proves that necessity is the mother of inven innovation (and crazy new obssessions).

***

On the home front, Arn is happy that I’m spending evenings being artistic — not just vegging out in front of the TV watching J-dramas (Teehee. Now you know. ) So now I’m either carving or doodling while my iTunes blasts out J-pop. Same difference. 🙂 I’ve actually been semi-passively studying Nihongo since 2011 but I’ll reserve that story for another time…

Before I went off-tangent, I was gonna say that Arn and I have been talking about what sparked this sudden desire to create with my hands.After some thought, I had the answer: Design Festa!!!

This cheezy photo below was taken at the Design Festa Gallery in Harajuku, Tokyo in 2006. (Whattapose *cringe*)

(More photos — and cheezy poses — in my old Flickr gallery)

That was the first time I heard of it. Since then I’ve been wanting to attend the actual festival but our timing was always off. When we planned our trip for this year, I made sure to check the schedule. They usually hold it in May and November. We chose to go in the fall because Tokyo would be just as hot as Manila if we went in the summer.

So here I am all giddy, holding our pre-bought tickets which we purchased at the HQ in Harajuku (the same place in the 2006 photo I posted above). We actually arrived at Tokyo Big Sight 30 minutes before it opened.

This is not even half of the crowd that was there bright and early. See how behaved and properly-queued up everyone was though.

Inside, the place was bursting with kawaii, I didn’t know where to start!

I went bananas over all the cute stuff and even had photos taken with the very friendly and talented artists who were only too happy to indulge our whims.

Arnold, meanwhile, enjoyed taking photos and videos of the kids who were painting on the scene.

We originally planned to stay until around 4pm so that we could go somewhere else afterwards but we ended up leaving at 8pm, closing time, because there was so much to feast our senses on. Indie bands were playing outside. Strange short films were showing upstairs. A diverse selection of food carts dotted the place. At the end of the day my tote was filled with handmade puraban brooches, plushies and some stationery. Arn bought several art cards and  indie comics. Ironically, I didn’t notice any keshigomu hanko (hand-carved erasers) although I’m positive there was a whole section devoted to it…

There are more photos in this Google album.

***

Hope you enjoyed this post and hopefully I’ll have finished prints to show in my next post! 🙂

1. Please pardon the dirty cutting mat… I’ll clean it this weekend![ back]
2. The jeepney was especially tedious to carve because of all the detail I put! Masochist much?[ back]