Stamp Nos. 13 & 14: Of Squares and Triangles and the Arashi Japonism Shape

When the Arashi Japonism goods came out, the first thing on my mind was "Oh! I'm gonna carve this thing!"

So I copied the design on a piece of sticky note (which is so old that it's no longer sticky the moment I tear it off the pad)... and did just that. Well. Typing is way simpler than it actually was. This one took me a LONG time to carve. I'll explain why in a bit.

My 'copy' of the logo. Yes, 100% messy handwriting.

Anyway. I tried to draw the design on the eraser. Just some straight lines, easy right?

Well...

Well....

Ok, maybe I just suck!

My first attempt ended up being a TOTAL failure. And my second too...

That's my first two attempts, first one on the left, second one on the right. On the first try, the diagonal lines were not evenly spaced. On the second, the diagonal lines were properly spaced, but it was way too big! There's not enough space on the puny eraser for the design! I can 'reuse' the eraser by drawing over in pen (and I can even 'erase' the pen marks, more on that in another post), but since the drawing is all full of lines and I didn't want to mess myself up, I reached for a new eraser each time. It's a box of 48 anyway! And I could always draw something else over these when I had inspiration.

It took my a long time to get this stamp done. Between my tries there was probably a whole week break; it was pretty frustrating because I couldn't get such a simple thing right.

My 4th, 3rd, and 2nd try, shown in that order. 

You already saw the second try in an earlier photo. For the 3rd try, I thought I got wiser and drew in the vertical and horizontal lines first instead of diagonal. (Stupid right? I know.) BUT. Just as I finished drawing the last of the horizontal lines, and counted the number of squares I needed... I realised that my boxes were too big once more. I couldn't fit the design in! Gosh! That shows just how small the eraser is! I was using 0.5 cm squares and it didn't work. A little mental calculation later... I realised that I had to decrease the length of the squares to 0.4 cm. And that lead to my 4th try. Finally, everything was in order. I didn't let the erasers go to waste though, and filled out that pattern on the 3rd try as you can see above. 

Here's the two erasers carved out. 

And the test inking results. Pretty decent if you ask me. well, since it's all straight lines, the carving part was easy peasy. The drawing though... hahaha.

In hindsight... I could have just rotated the Japonism logo so I can make it bigger. Yes. Silly me. I'll do it again and bigger next time. I'll update the blog when I do!