Art Journal Cafe- Handcarved Stamp Challenge

France Papillon and Carol Lechatquitousse have issued a challenge over at the Art Journal Cafe  to carve your own stamps. There is a video tutorial as well! I'm fortunate enough to have a small stamp block started- I took a workshop at Diana Trout's studio a while ago, and she gave us a little block that we carved- we used it during the workshop and I brought it home, where it promptly got buried under other stuff. Well, I finally found it, and carved up the rest of the block. Here's a picture of it, along with some of the images it creates.

 

And here are all six of my new stamps. I am challenging myself to use all of the images on my page...

I worked on my `portrait a little more, so here's where that is now...

And then I made a few toner copies of it so I could play with the image, without ruining the original. After adding my stamping with pigment and solvent inks, I added more color with paint, Portfolio pastels and some Neocolors for her face. I got a little carried away on painting the face, and ended up making a hole in the paper right on her chin! So I just got that part off. Et voila- here she is. Its not intentional, but she definitely has a mad hatter look to her, don't you think?

 

Here's what my workspace looked like when I was done....

I think I'll make another page out of the scraps. :)