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[Music] quite often Potter's will create a makers mark stamp it could perhaps be initials or just a design or symbol that they want to use to press on the side or the bottom of their pieces to help identify their piece it is their makers mark it's their Potter stamp this video I want to show you a little bit about how I would go about carving a stamp such as one of these and some of the things to watch out for and some of the tools that we're going to use is to try to keep your stamps small approximately dime or a penny size you can see that these over here are a little bit smaller they print a little bit better this particular one is a little bit larger than the penny it's a little bit more difficult to stamp it's so a great stamp but it's not so effective as a signature stamp so for my students when you are designing yours keep your stamps small penny or dime size these two cups show the same or similar stamp that is used in a way to stamp my maker's mark just a simple W here in this one I stamped the cup itself this one I stamped basically a flattened P that I slipped and scored to the cup and then I stamped the soft P sometimes I do that if I have neglected to stamp the cup before it gets past the leather hard State beginning a stamp is fairly easy for my students we are using the earthenware clay that has no grog in it so it's the standard one 103 clay and I'm going to start off by pinching a little hunk about the size of a cherry tomato now one end I'm going to smooth because that's going to be the stamp surface and I'm going to squeeze the side then to become the handle and then I'm going to take that surface and then tap it on the table so as you tap it it becomes flattened and at this point as you flatten it you can begin to shape it so hypothetically if I wanted to have a square stamp I can begin to pinch it a little bit square and then progressively tap it and pinch tap and pinch now if you squeeze it in like what I'm doing right here I don't know if you can see this but there's a dent that's occurring there you want to make sure that you always end up with a flat stamp face if you can't get it flat by tapping you can eventually just take a knife and you can trim it off so this is how you start off by making the basic stamp blank I will make another video that demonstrates the technique for making a small little roller I'm just gonna skip over it in this one but the small rollers are really quite nice to add some rolling textures now once you have the stamp face made you have the stamp blank you need to get it to the leather hard State once it's leather hard then you're ready to do your cleaning and your carving so the first thing that I'm going to do on this is if it's not completely flat as I had mentioned before you can easily just shave it all flat okay if your edges need to be say a slightly different edge like it a slightly different shape there like you wanted it's more square you can easily take and just kind of shave that for greater precision and then once you you get the the top of it and the outside of it tidy looking really the way that you want it to then let's talk about your design so my students I've given you a little sketch sheet where you've thought about your design but remember that first of all if you have anything that could pretend we print backwards you need to actually carve it backward so like the letter R would have to be carved as such if you wanted to do initials like RPG you would have to draw them completely mirror image and the other thing is you want to think about what do you want do you want a an image where the background is carved away or do you want to image where the the lines of the image are carved away so in the case of mine I'm going to do this I'm going to do a W with a square around it now to begin I will start by drawing a square and then I will put the W inside of it now since I'm gonna carve away some of the background and I do keep a little dry brush on him so I can just kind of knock away the debris so since I'm going to carve away the background I'm going to draw this as a block W a block letter instead of a single line so I'm going to just outline it and let's dust this off and hopefully you can kind of see the outline so far now depending on how big of an area you're cutting away it might depend on what you want to use to cut a needletool is great if you want to dig something out but if you want to go a little bit faster you can use some of these ribbon tools these are Kemper miniature ribbon tools I will put links to these in the video description these are really great tools for carving away small clean areas so this is the triangle tip I like the triangle tip because I'm going to use this flat the straight edge and I'm going to go straight down along that straight edge of where the square is okay and I'm gonna take another flat edge right up against the W okay I'm gonna do this one same way I'll go ahead and carve this and then I'll show you how to clean all right so I've carved away some of the back background area but now what I would like to do is give it more precision because this is kind of ambiguous I've lost the sharpness of detail that I would like so now I'm going to take the needle tool and I'm going to re outline that background carving and then I'm gonna re outline the side of the W so hopefully you can see the difference between the the left side that I just carved a little bit more sharply in the right side it doesn't have to be super deep but it has to be deep enough that it's gonna print well okay now I'm gonna go ahead and do the other I'm gonna again I'm gonna outline the rectangle and then I'm going to outline the W [Music] alright so I've done the outside and the bottom and I'm gonna do the inside and upper part now one thing did just happen that I was afraid might happen the tiny little tip of the W just broke off so in a case like this I have a water dish and a small brush I'm gonna add a little drop of water right onto that craft area that's gonna help glue it back on all right that's looking a little bit better now I'm gonna take that tiny paintbrush that I used to anchor the that broken tip back on and I'm just gonna go in there I'm going to clean up really those the the edges so if I have any little slightly bumpy area this will clean it up your your goal with this is to have a crispness of detail that's going to print nicely so when you go to print it on leather hard or soft clay you will get that nice crisp crisp detail of your design showing up [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right I think I'm pretty pleased with that so I really was going for crispness of the edges I wanted the background to look fairly uniform arrant little bumps or pieces that have broken off I feel like I have corrected that and lastly you as my students you will need to put your name or initials on it so I'm going to put W W and then you would put your bell that way if it gets separated we can get it back in your class cabinet and if you did make a second and you could certainly do a stamp on the second end I was just going to carve like a little kind of a pyramid looking pattern in this so I'd make it like a nice little texture if you wanted to do something like that you certainly could use it not necessarily as a stamp but as a that'll make a great little texture when it fires and that is how you carve a little signature stamp or a makers mark stamp and try to make something exciting and fun that will represent you [Music]