Three Colors

Making my robot stamp awhile back has gotten me motivated to make more. I even have ideas of trying to do a whole comic in stamps. I have no idea what the comic would be about, but it would definitely have to be short, eight pages max probably.

But the robot stamp made me see some of the possibilities with layered stamps that I hadn't really thought of or taken advantage of, so I wanted to try and get more complex coloring on my next.

I started with a pencil drawing that I thought would make a good stamp. Then I flipped it over onto the rubber stamps and rubbed the back to transfer to the lead to the rubber. I find rubber stamping material really difficult to draw on, so this is much easier. Also, using the same image as a base should make registering easier.

Then a bunch of cutting into the rubber.

My first pass ended up a little muddy, so I added some empty spaces to bring out more depth.

I use these pads from Distress Ink, which is a really stupid name, which is in turn written in a really stupid font that looks like it could have been used for the titles of the first season of The Real World on MTV. On the upside, and much less superficially, they come in a pretty wide variety of colors, and can be bought in these little sampler four packs for cheap. They don't lay down ink super smoothly, which means you won't get a super solid color, but it also means that you can mix and potentially get fades on a layer.

The final result, which didn't come out exactly as I would have liked it, did succeed in taking the three ink colors and with overlays turning them into roughly seven colors.