Repetitive Variation or 'Just the scarf part, please'.

I carved a rubber stamp for our holiday cards last week. Off and on I have been sampling patterned papers to use for paper-piecing just the scarf part of the image but nothing really worked.
So-o-o, I decided to create my own.

Sharpie red and green colors say "holiday" to me.

I like this kind of thing; it is what I think of as repetitive variation and I don't find it to be boring. I go into a kind of zone and before I know it, voila, done!

A bird in the hand...

which in this case is a bird critter:

Rubber stamps, yummy :-D

He's a pretty big stamp:

As a rookie stamp carver, I'm still experimenting material removal.

With Copic colors - hmmm, guess he has a crown now:

Perhaps he's an extremely tall duck???

I use my Copics more like watercolor - very little blending..

And now for something completely different...

I took a quick break from my current Gelli plate printing to do something I've always wanted to do - carve a stamp. Remy was watching me - and since he's a sweet dog he didn't comment on my "process" or eat any of the pink carving detritus.
So of course I drew a little image of a dog, no surprises there! and burnished it onto the carving block. I had some idea of what to do from reading Geninne Zlatkis's book, "Making an Impression: Designing and Creating Artful Stamps" - a great book.
I grabbed my tools and started.
Et voici, le chien:

Freshly carved, yay!

Here he is with a couple of impressions:

Woof, woof and woof!

I had a bit of a problem with carving the paws due to carving-tool-driver-error; I wandered over the line ;-)
I had a lot of fun and I will be making more.