The first step to designing your apple stamp is to draw an apple (or your subject).
Put on a timer if you like for 10 minutes, grab a piece of sketching paper and the drawing implement of your choice and draw your apple from front on as well as from different angles, you can even cut it in half.
Enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about wonky drawings. Wonky drawings can be “fixed” later on and are often more expressive than perfect drawings.
Get to know your apple.
As we are drawing for block-printing, it is the outline that is most important. Concentrate on the outline of your apple and just draw a few lines inside the shape to indicate texture.
Now take some photos of your apple, hold it at the angle that you would like to use to make a stamp.
It is important not to skip the step of drawing your apple. You learn so much about it that is not obvious from a photo; however, it is absolutely not against the rules to use a photo as your reference.
You can draw from your photo, or you can even trace it, with tracing paper on your phone, or a printed photo, or with the Procreate app.
It is always best to get your own references, but this is not always possible. At the moment it is not possible (for me) to find apples with leaves or apple blossom, so we can then use photos we find on the internet as our reference, from Pinterest or Google Image, for example.
Leaves are a graphic resource. They are very good for filling spaces or connecting and framing other elements. So look for photos of apple leaves and try and find their characteristic shape. Fill a page in your sketch book with apple leaves, these will be very useful later when we are making compositions with our stamps.
Tomorrow we will take these drawings of apples and leaves and design a stamp. We will also transfer our design to our carving block.