An October of tiny prints

The first week of my Inktober project

Oct 07, 2024

Hi friends,

If you’ve been here long, you may know of my fondness for miniature things and block prints, especially when those two things come together.

I’ve been making a lot of tiny prints (or stamps) lately, using bits and pieces of rubber carving block leftover from a larger project. Here are a few of those:

Most of these little creations are not planned in advance. I pick up an oddly shape bit of carving block and imagine what could be waiting to be revealed. The exception with those pictured above is the outhouse, which I was inspired to create after writing last week’s newsletter. I was having a lot of fun with them and may or may not have been neglecting other projects.

Then, suddenly, it was the end of September and I saw a post on social media about Inktober, a yearly challenge aimed at getting people to create with ink every day for the month of October. I love a creative challenge. I’ve done Inktober several times before. I was already in a groove of making tiny block prints.

So I jumped in, choosing to create a tiny block print every day during October. The prompts for this year (which are always announced in advance for those who like to plan ahead) all fit into a theme which I interpret as exploration. So my goal is to create a narrative with my series of prints. It will be good practice for me not only as an artist, but as an illustrator!

Here is the first week of stamps. Each one is printed on a 2 inch square of paper.

Day 1: Backpack. For this day I considered making a print of a backpack, but as I thought about it, I thought a character wearing a backpack would be better for a narrative. Because the design is so small, I decided a silhouette would be easiest. I had no idea at this point where my little guy was heading.

Day 2: Discover. It seemed natural for my tiny explorer to “discover” a view of a mountain range.

Day 3: Boots. A close-up of my explorer’s boots. Maybe he’s standing on top of one of those mountain peaks?

Day 4: Exotic. A hummingbird may not exactly be exotic (I see them every summer in my back yard), but he’d never seen one before. This stamp was a particular challenge because the of the dainty flower. My husband said I “ruined” the design by including the explorer in the background, but the idea was to show him capturing the bird on his phone. Did I succeed?

Day 5: Binoculars. This one was the easiest so far! I wonder what the tiny explorer is looking at.

Day 6: Trek. Continuing the hiking theme, I decided to show my explorer trekking up a rocky ridge. The details on the explorer are so tiny that I was afraid I would accidentally cut one of his arms off! He is so small that he could fit on my pinky nail.

Day 7: Passport. I designed a little passport stamp for my explorer because that just made sense. Those little letters were tricky!

When I started out, I was using leftover pieces of carving block, which is why some of them might seem to be oddly shaped. But for days 5 and 7 I had to cut into a new block. It will be interesting to see how many more leftover pieces I’ll be able to use for this project.

If you’d like to keep up with my daily progress, I’m sharing the prints every day on Instagram.

If you’d like to see some of my art in an actual book, check out my illustrated middle grade novel, Mari in the Margins, a story told in poems, doodles, and art journal pages!