Putting Potatoes to Work
Cork and rubber have been fun materials to work with, but this weekend I decided to go for a homier approach to stamping. Potatoes are cheap and easy to cut, so they’re a lot of fun to experiment with. Take a peek at my results and I’ll show you where you can learn to get stamping, too.
The materials you need are pretty straightforward:
- Potatoes! ;)
- Knife (I used a Fiskars hobby knife)
- Cookie cutters (optional)
- Cutting board
- Paints & paper
The first thing I noticed with potatoes is that you don’t need to use as much paint. The starchy juice from the potato helps keep the paint going for longer, especially in comparison to cork. I got an average of three clear impressions before I had to reapply colour, too. If you look at the picture below, the ‘extra faded’ stars were often the fourth or fifth impression!
My best impressions came from carefully holding the potato stamp in place, and rolling my wrist to apply pressure evenly across the stamp.
I’ve left it drying for now, but this starscape will become a pretty night-time art piece. The paint I used was watered down so it left beautiful outlines on each star.
Want to make your own potato stamps? Cheska from mooshpie showed me how, and you can learn to make potato stamps too by following her tutorial. Or if you want to venture into cork stamping, Erlend Johansen from Morning Creativity has a great wine cork stamp tutorial.
Happy Stamping!
Next week is National Stationery Week in the UK!
Are you ready to celebrate? ;)
Looks great! I’m about to try a lino print on a blind…if you’ve got any tips, I’d really appreciate them :)
I haven’t had the chance to work with lino this month, but this woman talks about printing with lino quite a bit on her blog. (Both carving and printing with it.) Maybe something she mentions will help!
http://sketchy-notions.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/printmaking
Good luck with your project, hope you’ll be sharing your results on your blog! :)