Watercolor stamps and a sunset

I've been very busy lately, as M's lovely family was in town. We spent a lot of time showing them around, and taking walks by the river. I was still working on things in the evenings, but I wasn't able to properly photograph and post them. I'll be putting up several different posts over the next day or so.

First, however, there was the most amazing sunset tonight. We've been having rain and thunderstorms all day, so the clouds were very impressive.

In craft news, I ordered a Speedball stamp making kit a while ago, and finally had a chance to play around with it. I've got to say, it's the neatest thing I've done in a while. It was just really so fascinating to take a simple sketch and transform it into a personalized stamp.

These are fairly small, on the order of an inch to an inch and a half. I think that's about the smallest I can accurately carve something at this level of detail. 

I think my favorite is the sheep :)

The material is surprisingly easy to carve. I was expecting it to feel like carving an eraser (probably due to the pink color), but it's a lot smoother, and doesn't crumble at all. I see myself making a lot more stamps in the future.

The reason why I originally wanted the stamps was because I'd had an idea for greeting cards that wasn't quite working out. I made some watercolor backgrounds, and wanted to draw images on them. However, the black India ink wasn't working - it was too harsh against the softness of the watercolors. Luckily, the stamps worked much better.

For all of this, I inked the stamps with some colored brush markers. It worked well, but also gives me a somewhat limited range of colors - not to mention that when I try to mix them, it seems to contaminate the marker tips. My next plan is to use a higher concentrated watercolor for the inking, and if that works, it will give me a much wider range of possibly colors. 

I haven't mentioned this before, but some of the things I talk about on this blog are/will be for sale on my Etsy shop, Piping Hot Tea. Often they'll show up here on the blog before they're on Etsy, because I'll show progress shots here, and the Etsy listings have to wait for final glamour shots.