ideas and trials

I showed you some Amharic lettering yesterday. Before I got to that stage, I trialled some ideas. I thought I could use letters cut out and placed on the surface with stamping over top...the letters being a resist allowing the void to become the letter.

So, some ideas:

patterns didn't seem to work, but the 'blank' stamp did.

However, when I tried this for real over some foot prints using a larger blank stamp, I ran in to all sorts of problems.

the cut outs were not within the space of the stamped square and then the cut out foot prints stuck to the block so well that I had to scrub them off and recut more foot prints.

So, plan B.
Paint the letters. However, I really wanted to use the font for the Amharic. I had tried to draw letters with limited success, so I really needed the font.
Okay, I could have got out the light box, but surface space is at a premium at present and I didn't feel I had time to mess about with it. I usually use the ironing board for it, as it is a good height. But that was serving as my printing table.

So, I cut round each word, leaving connections between letters.

Like this year date. These numbers were large, so worked really well.

Then I tried colouring in with a permanent marker...a small nib because I knew most of the words I wanted were quite small.

I didn't like the result, so the next step was painting in the letters. Slow, but the cricket was gripping, so that was alright.

The cutting on the Amharic words was a bit more fiddly. Especially some of the smaller sized words.

But I got a result I liked.

And from there I proceeded with the plan.