Carving a Stamp (Meaning of a Handmade Stamp)
A stamp represents identification. Every Taiwanese person has at least one stamp (Chinese seal) with their own Chinese name carved on it.
Back in ancient times, stamps are used for sealing letters and proving one’s authority. In modern times, stamps stand for a person or a company. Although most people just see the practical function of it, few people see its artistic value.
A stamp is much more than a stamp, it is an art.
My sister, Yichin, is an authentic art enthusiast. She is attracted to the beauty of stamps and has learned to carve Chinese seals and rubber stamps for 3 years. She said she started carving stamps because of one of her calligraphy teachers. At first, she didn’t take it seriously, but in time, she has found it invigorating when she is carving a stamp.
How do you carve a stamp?
She was going to carve a rubber stamp on that day so she shared how to make a rubber stamp with me. Let’s see how she does it.
Step 0. Prepare the following materials and tools: rubber pads, hobby knives, a cutting mat, and ink pads.
Step 1. Get an image.
In this step, my sister asked me to pick an image but I decided to draw an animal by myself.
However, she doesn’t draw by herself very often, so sometimes she just picks a pattern from books or the internet, and then puts them on pieces of A4 paper.
Step 2. Trace the image onto a rubber pad.
She traced the selected image on a piece of transparent tracing paper first. Then the image could be easily traced onto a rubber pad. After tracing an image on the rubber pad, she used a pencil to draw directly on it to make the image clearer.
Step 3. Carve and carve and carve
She started carving from the edge of the image, and then she carved inside. Finally, she cut the rest out.
Step 4. Try the result
Before she put the ink onto the rubber stamp, in order to perfect it, she used tape to remove the pencil trace on it. Then she stamped the image beside my sketch. Finished!
While she was carving, nothing could bother her because she needed to put all of her attention on it.
“It looks like a tough task to carve a stamp, doesn’t it?” I asked.
She answered that it definitely wasn’t easy work but she enjoyed doing it, and it was very stress-relieving while closely concentrating on one thing. Carving a stamp really saves her from her stressful life.
Carving a stamp is really stress-relieving.
After she finished carving, she told me that these kinds of rubber stamps or Chinese seals can also be made by machines, and they are more competitive than handmade stamps because of their relatively lower price. Moreover, these machine-made stamps have better consistency.
“Why do people want to buy a handmade stamp if it’s more expensive and difficult to make?” I asked.
“溫度” she said. Handmade stamps are not products that people can mass-produce, and it’s one of the handmade stamps’ cons but also one of its pros. Every handmade stamp is unique. Even if a person carves two stamps refer to the same pattern, the two stamps will be slightly different.
“溫度” is the reason why people love handmade stamps.
Carving a stamp is time-consuming, and impossible to produce two exactly the same stamps. I think the reason that my sister loves doing it is that there are different defects in different stamps. There is no perfect handmade stamp in the world. So when carving a stamp, she pursues the 溫度 in a stamp instead of making it perfect.
A handmade stamp is just like a human. No one is perfect, but that is also why everyone is unique, valuable and interesting.
Every handmade stamp is not perfect, but unique.
