So if you're going with the more traditional inking method for really printmaking, it's super fun, it's super inky. It's super energized. I really love it. It is a little more complex than just the stamp pad method. So it's really your call, but it's fun to play with both. For this inking process, you'll need an acrylic sheet or an inking plate.

I have this really trusting one that I've had for quite some time. It's all inked up. Kind of broken a little bit, but I love it still works. And it's huge, which I really like it's really nice and big. So I can get ink in a lot of different spaces as opposed to something that's smaller like this, which can be really good for a small stamp. But for this case, it's a little too small for what we're going to be doing.

So having your inking plate ready to go. A foam Breyer This is really important because breyers are used across printmaking, but different breyers are used for different things and the foam Breyer is used for fabric printing, it transfers the ink better to the block and interacts with the fabric. In a better way I found, so make sure you got the phone, some kind of spreading tool, I just had this plastic knife lying around, you can also use a little paint palette knife, or you could use a spoon from your kitchen, whatever you'd like. I'm just going to use this today. And then the speedball fabric ink non toxic water based and I use this just primary blue color for the example today, I want something that pops and that's really vibrant with this design. With this design, I'm going to play with repeating it all over.

So it's still a four by six stamp, but it's just shapes in a certain pattern. So I'm going to play with just stamping it multiple times across the digital just to see what happens. So to start this process, you want to get a glob of your ink from this blue or whatever color you may be using canister, use, get that glob onto your trusty inking plate, just a little bit. I mean, a significant amount like you know, good glob like that and drag it across into what we call a ribbon of ink. So you drag from the glob across, so kind of like icing the cake. And then you'll take your foam roller, and just drag the ink down from that ribbon onto your acrylic sheet.

So you're just going in one direction instead of back and forth. You're pulling the ink down towards you over and over again just to get a really consistent level of ink on the Brayer and on the acrylic sheet. So you'll pull that ink down and you're looking for a really specific sound. It's like a hissing noise. And also just a slight attachment feeling between the ink and the foam roller, just a little bit nothing that's like making this whole acrylic sheets stick to your foam roller. Just a slight stick, nothing really intense, but it's more about this noise that we're looking for.

And once you've pulled some of that down from the river Then you don't need to keep pulling it down. that'll cause too much ink on your Brayer and on your block. So if you do get too much ink on here, you can actually just use a separate white sheet of paper and roll some of it off. And keep doing that until you get to a better level of ink, but you're just looking for a thin enough layer to get an even coating on your brayer. I'll come across this way now. And now we'll come across but I'm not coming back and forth, because you really want to pull it across the entire foam roller.

Can you hear that kissing. That's what you're looking for. And you can even start to see it. It's just like a little speckled texture in the ink. So now I have my cart block a blank sheet of paper and my inked roller because I wanted to test print on paper before I go to my fabric. I want to see if there's any parts I want to edit away or carve.

So I'm just going to one pass at a time. I go in different directions on my block. So first I'll start by going from the top towards me. And you can already see that all the shapes that are raised have been covered in ink, and everything I carved is not getting any ink. There's some of those carving lines we mentioned in the background that are getting inked, but mostly it's not getting that color. And then I'm going to charge the brayer which means to get more ink on it, and then I'm going to come back across my block in a different direction, so maybe horizontally, and then I'll charge again and come diagonally so that you're really coming from every angle, and you're rolling once on your block each time that you charge it up with ink.

So charged with ink roll on your block. So I'm going to charge this up. And now I'm going to come at a diagonal charge it up. I've heard nothing Horizontal, hard horizontal and always when you're using a brayer always rested on the back neck handle and never on the roller because if you rested on the roller in your ink, it'll create a line that can transfer to your block and that can interfere with the inking process. So always rested on the back