Feel free to send email to W.F. (Bill) Judt ...with your comments.

A stamping tool is an inexpensive, home-made tool that you can use to texture the background in a relief woodcarving. I like to tell people that "stamping" the background of a carving is the best way to cover one's carving "sins"... you know,... the little cuts and scrapes that are hard to clean up and which hide in the lowest places in the relief. But of course, stamping is also an excellent way to control the appearance of the background so that it stands in contrast to the carving above it.

Stamping is simply the texturing of wood using a tool that has sharp points filed into its end. When the stamping tool is placed onto the wood and hit with a mallet or hammer, the sharp points puncture the surface of the wood, leaving a textured surface which will appear darker and less reflective than the wood above it which is not stamped.

Stamping is usually the last thing you do to your relief carving before applying the finish to it. There are a few tricks to stamping, but it is generally simple to do. I have 5 stamping tools of different sizes to either get into tight areas or cover more ground quickly. I even have a stamping tool that has an angled contact surface, which allows me to stamp in the areas of the carving background where undercutting has been used.

The illustrations above show what the end of a stamping tool should look like. I use a 1/4" triangle file to cut little grooves into the end of a 6" or 8" spike, or a machine bolt. The grooves should be spaced evenly on the end of the tool, one series of grooves at right angles to another series of grooves. The grooves should form sharp little piramids on the end of the tool. If the piramids are blunt, the wood is crushed rather than punctured during the stamping process.

When you stamp, rotate the tool 10 to 15 degrees each way in your fingertips. This way you will apply a random pattern of punctures onto the surface of the wood. Try to saturate the background with stamping marks, leaving no areas untouched. This is to achieve a consistent appearance and low reflective values. Be sure not to stamp so much that the wood is pulverized. Take time, as well, to "stamp out" cuts and blemishes on the background.

Take a look at the carvings in my home pages, and you will see that the majority of them have stamped backgrounds. Strangely, when people first see my woodcarvings, it is the stamped background that first catches their eyes. Almost always they say "Oooh, look at that!" and then they ask "How did you do that?" I call this "Oooh! power". Stamping puts "Oooh power" into your carvings. Enjoy!