Hand Carved Stamp: Goldfish in a Bowl

The inked impressions of hand carved stamps are generally 2-dementional. Giving 3-dementional appearance to the stamped images is a challenge for stamp carvers, but developing inking technique to add gradations to the ink is one of the solutions.

This is how I do it.
Preparing wet paper towel, crumpled small Kleenex ball and a peace of Kleenex.
Making a pad with the Kleenex ball and a peace of Kleenex.
Appling ink to the stamp. Wetting the pad and taking some ink off the stamp by tapping motions. This is how the image looks like. Cleaning the stamp with wet paper towel. I tried with lighter ink to show more transparency of the glass bowl, but the impression was too weak. So, I added darker ink to the top and bottom of the stamp. Added a goldfish in the bowl.

Hand Carved Stamp: Goldfish and Water Plant

We planed to make goldfish stamp last summer, but hadn’t come up with a design we liked. We drew several designs and found out that the design should be kept small and simple. Larger size design loses the cuteness of the goldfish and adding details makes it look ugly to us. We also knew that just simple design would look too simple. So, we wanted to add transparency of the fin to the design. But, how? The solution was actually quite simple. This is how we achieved the transparency effect of the fin of the goldfish.
Putting ink on the stamp and taking some ink off the fin by tapping it on a Kleenex. Pretty simple!