This week's project was an opportunity for me to explore block printing. If you don't know what block printing is, click here. I have done printing one time before, in Mrs. Davidson's art class in elementary school. I made a picture of a cat on a sunny day sitting in the middle of flowers. There was no dimensionality to it. I still have a copy of it somewhere. So why not try again? I don't know why, but I decided to make glass coasters with a printed pattern on it. Not sure if glass is really the most practical material for coasters but they look pretty.
The Process:
I bought a stamp making kit. It came with a rubber pad and a carving tool!
Clearly the first step was to draw a pattern. I decided to make my coasters 4" square.
Then the fun part is carving the block!
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| This picture looks funny. The parts that look raised up are actually the part that I carved. I guess it's a trick of the light. |
Last step is to ink up the block and print. The issue was that glass doesn't grab paint like paper does and the paint didn't apply evenly to either the stamp or the glass.
So after the initial stamping, I went back over the lines a few times. I know that's cheating, but it wouldn't have looked very nice if I hadn't.
The goal was to make three coasters. A red one, a blue one and a turquoise one. I finished each of the coasters differently. I frosted the back of the turquoise coaster with my favorite spray. I painted the back of the red one yellow. I tried to get artsy with the blue one and painted the gaps. However, my color choices didn't work out. So I turned something that could have looked really nice and made it ugly. So that was a bummer.
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| So much potential! |
The Final Product:
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| See? Totally ugly. |
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| This is frosted, but on a white background, you can't tell. |
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