E and I are gearing up to go letterboxing (the orienteering game), so I’ve made a couple of stamps. E says that selecting a letterboxing alias and signature stamp is a serious and irreversible ritual, similar in gravitas to the naming of a child. I think that that’s silly, because this is a game where grown adults run around in the woods looking for stamps.
I really like the “SLUG LIFE” stamp, but I think it may have too little gravitas as an alias, even for letterboxing. E suggests that I go by the alias of mr toad (also the name of my pet toad! more on him later). I think I will use the fish on a bike as my signature stamp, regardless of what alias I choose.
At the Internet’s recommendation, we used a piece of Speedball® Speedy-Carve™ stamp rubber as the base for the stamps. I’m fairly new to cut-block printmaking, but I didn’t have any problems getting the material to do what I wanted. One thing I learned in the process of transferring my pencil sketches to the rubber is that it’s very hard to get graphite off of stamp rubber. I’m glad I taped my drawings in place before rubbing them down onto the blank stamps, because, had they slid around, the transferred images would have been irreparably blurry.
That’s all I’ve got.
4arms 