PROCESS BLOG
Christmas Card Stamp/Lino Process
After 11 months of this intense digital illustration stuff I slammed shut my laptop screen, climbed on top of my desk and proclaimed to the room, “No more! This years Christmas Cards shall be traditionally designed and hand printed, every single one. Not only that, I will right a blog about the process, not just for SEO but for me and fellow craft people.” You now are reading that very blog.
With a very rough sketch of what my designs could be, I started looking into ways to make them.
I find the traditional way of carving Lino quite hard and time consuming, I also always get the printing mirror thing wrong*. So using a scalpel I cut out some shapes from my design and after testing them with Lino ink, which is again time consuming, takes ages to dry and thus tricky to add multiple layers I found the perfect solution. Stamp Ink!
Hobbycraft have this stamp ink which was perfect, the colour is bold enough, and the ink drys quickly and can be layered up nicely. I used 4 colours and stuck with the initial shapes I had cut from the Lino. I found sticking to these constraints really fun and challenging leading to some designs I believe I would never have gotten any other way.
Finishing off some of the Santas, I used a Posca black pen for the line work and eyes.
I really loved how these came out, each print was slightly different and it wasn’t crazy time consuming to make 50 or so cards.
Funnily enough some people still thought these cards where digitally made and printed, but oh well!