Eraser Stamp No. 23: Arashi kanji

So... I thought I'll try my hand at a pretty, calligraphy like Arashi kanji.

The result was a kanji that looked nothing like calligraphy...

But hey, I drew that free hand with not draft, no printing of a mirror image kanji to look at... Oh wells. I need to figure out how to transfer a print to the eraser...

Halfway through the carving process...

The finished product. I had to do quite a bit of refinement with this one, the lines were way too thick initially and ended up looking all stuck together when printing. Compare the top red kanji and the bottom one. The bottom one has better defined strokes.

Also... I was way too enthusiastic with stamping on the sponge type of ink pad, and sunk the eraser all the way in. Even the deepest grooves were filled with ink and I had trouble wiping off the ink in the grooves! Here in this picture, you see less of the inked grooves because I'd already widened some of the grooves.

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!

Stamp No. 8: Arashi BLAST in Hawaii logo

Now this was a tough one! The Hawaii BLAST logo had flowers, and loads of intricate details that was difficult to draw on rubber, let alone carve. If you still remember, eraser no. 3 was modelled after the Hawaii BLAST logo, but without all that troublesome flowers. I couldn't get the necklace flower identical to the logo...

If you count, the necklace thing is made up of 7 flowers in their logo. But due to space constrains on the eraser... I only managed 5. (Even then I had a hard time drawing them!)

My drawing of the logo... Yeah yeah. The flowers are NOT of equal size. Or shape. 

Halfway through the carving process. I nearly died doing the flowers.

All carved out! Time for a test ink!

First test ink!

My friend, J, told me that the smile looks more like a smirk... so I tried 'editing' the smile. I think the end result isn't too much better but... Oh wells. Look at how thin it already is! There's nothing much else that I can do! Better luck next time? :P

Stamp Nos. 3 &4: Arafes logo stamp

So, for my 3rd stamp, I got my sis to copy a logo for me (cos she draws way better). She copied the Hawai BLAST logo, but then modified it so there's no difficult to carve necklace/flowers bit.

Nice and proportionate eh? That's the difference between someone who can and can't draw ><

Also tried to carve the Arafes logo. Now that was hard! With the letters in the sunglasses. 

And the completed products! 

Stamp No. 2! Arashi Pin Badge logo

Guess what this logo is?

Any guesses?

Well... it's the Saturday Arashi Pin badge logo! 

The completed drawing on the eraser... I drew it free hand this time, while looking at the logo.

After the drawing is done, it's carving time...

And then test inking! 

The "X" on the brim of the pirate hat doesn't show up properly sadly. Too small to be seen clearly when stamped. I tried enlarging the "X", but there's not much room for maneuver on the small eraser... :(

Stamp No. 1: Eraser Stamps - The Digitalian

After hearing about eraser stamp crafting from Arashi ni Shiyagare, I got interested to make my own eraser stamps as well. I headed out to the bookstore to buy the largest erasers I could find the very next day, and got some craft knifes to carve out my designs.

I've done about a dozen or so designs now... and I'll be sharing them all (starting from the very first one!) on this blog.

Since it was an Arashi inspired art project, naturally, I started off with Arashi related designs.

For my very first attempt, I downloaded Arashi logos, flipped them over, resized them to fit my erasers (which are really small), and then printed and cut the pattern out. I sort of traced the outline over the eraser, but ending up drawing much of it free hand.

Here's the erasers I got from Popular bookstore. There's no big erasers around... this is like... one of the biggest, and it's cheap too.

Flag erasers! Nostalgic huh? We used to play with these a lot as a kid. Well in Singapore that is. We'd use this as some sort of token. Each player has one eraser, the eraser is placed on a table/flat surface. Each player then takes turn pushing the eraser with just one finger. The goal is to stack your eraser on top of the other player's. The person whose eraser is on top wins (sometimes we bet erasers). Guess this isn't played elsewhere huh? This is the closest I could find on Amazon. 

Just that these ones are worst in quality... esp the print quality... red is actually pink color -.-

But well, at 48 erasers in a box for just over 3 SGD, it's the cheapest erasers I could find. It's not at all that big too. 2.5 cm by 3 cm. As such, I've had a little problem with the small size. Then again, I probably can't draw well if it's too big too. Problem with craving stamps though, is that you can't make the designs too small/intricate because it won't show up on the stamped design. Coupled with the fact that these erasers are pretty soft... Yeah. It's not that easy....

Anyway. I felt kinda cheated after I opened the box of erasers.... Because...

There are so many repeats!!! I thought I'd get 48 different erasers... Well ok, at least not so many Singapore flags! 

I wasn't kidding when I said there was a lot.  (And see how pink the printing is? After staring at these for so long, I'm starting to think that the Singapore flag is PINK and white already....)

Fun fact about that particular box of erasers I got. There's no Malaysia flag in it. When it's made in Malaysia. (Yet there's a ton of Singapore flags.) Hmm....

Anyway, here's my very first carving!

My flipped logos print out.

I literally cut out the printed logo to use as a guide.

The *more of less* completed product.

Test inking! One inking, one stamp. Since it's rubber and doesn't absorb the ink, the eraser is pretty much dry after one stamp.

More stamping. I tried to fine tune some parts after the test inking - like carving away more of the sides. 

Also tried to stamp a colorful logo, by coloring parts of the eraser with markers, to no avail. The ink dried out too fast. 

And that's all for my very first post here! More eraser stamps to come!