Studio Mo

StudioMo’s hand carved stamp tutorial

Super simple hand carved rubber stamp tutorial!  I’m going to keep it short and sweet and you can email me if you have any questions at ‘mo’ at studiomomelissa.com and I’d be happy to help you…but you won’t need it!

Start with a design you want to carve.  I like to draw it onto paper with a pencil and then press the design onto the rubber block and rub it firmly to transfer the pencil onto the rubber.  (this  technique will also make any words you wish to carve backwards on the rubber so that  they will be right when you stamp your image)

design your image to carve

rub your pencil image onto rubber

now your image is transferred onto your rubber

Now you are ready to start carving!  Be careful not to slice your fingers.  With your finest tip Speedball (mine is the #1) carve out the outline of your image.

Now carve away the outline of your image...watch your fingers!

Here is a picture of my carving tools that I use.  I use a Speedball carver with a #1 tip.  This is as far as I know the finest tip you can get.  This is the one I do all my outline carving in.   I use the bigger tip to take off more rubber from around the edges.  Then I have a knife which I use to trim off excess rubber and clean up the stamp with.   And an awl (that is a bookbinding tool) to make small marks with maybe like eyes etc.  and that’s it for my tools.

my carving tools

now I trim off excess rubber with knife

now use a bigger tip to carve away more of the excess rubber

you're getting there! Now continue to clean up the edges etc.

Double check your stamp and make sure it looks good!

So now your stamp is finished you need to get off the pencil marks that might be left behind.  You don’t have to but it looks nicer if you do!  You don’t want to dry out your stamp with harsh chemicals so here’s what i use…. a natural non toxic nail polish remover and a q-tip.  I dab the q-tip into the polish and then gently rub off the pencil and then quickly run the stamp under warm water to wash away all residue and then dry your stamp off and you are ready for testing it out.  And remember i only use this ONCE to clean off pencil marks but when I’m cleaning off ink after using it I just use warm water with sometimes a dab of gentle dish soap.

earthly delights non toxic polish is what I use to clean off pencil marks

So here's your stamp ready to be tested with ink

Yippee your stamp looks great!

At this point if you see anything that you don’t want still on your stamp then just carve it away to get it just perfect.  Remember hand carved stamps look all the more charming when they aren’t perfect.  Sometimes I like to leave lots of  edges and bits around the image because it looks sweet, and sometimes I will carve it out cleaner…it just depends on my mood!

Beautiful...nice job!

And as far as cleaning your hand carved stamps just run them under warm water and you can use a dab of gentle good for the earth dish soap if you like and rub ever so softly to clean.  Then just lay them on a towel and pat dry.