2-Steem MINNOW SteemStamp • First Day of Issue • collect 'em all! 🎨

Below is the final scratchboard etched “engraving”. Before scanning I cleaned things up a bit by painting a few areas with India ink.. but I’ll still need to fix some of the noticeably damaged lines in Photoshop..

On the left is a very straight-up scan of the final etching.. on the right is an etched background pattern that I'll paste behind the minnow in Photoshop.

Below is the inverted image now Positive as printed ink would be in a real world intaglio print. You can tell that I doubled the background lines to make them appear finer. It’ll look ok when it’s reduced in size. The fish itself appears a little boney.. maybe the engraved lines shoulda been at a different angle.. oh well.

I'd like to present you with a First Day Cover featuring the two Blocks-of-Four.. complete with our very own Steemit cancellation for today!

A bit of the process..

I scatch away the black india ink layer that’s covering this smooth white plaster-covered panel. It’s actually a Fredrix Clayboard. Magnifying reading glasses allows me to get real deep into pushing the limits of my eye-hand-coordination. The 2"-high etching is just over twice the height of a real postage stamp...

Why not just draw the design with ink? Well there are two reasons:

Firstly the sharp steel tip of that stylus can create AMAZINGLY thin lines... way thinner than any pen that must deposit a liquid.

Secondly, the carving-away of negative space has a UNIQUE look when that spacial relationship becomes inverted visually when printed. Instead of “outling forms and filling in shapes” as in drawing in the positive with say a pencil... when one draws in the negative, one fleshes-out the form that he sees in much the way of a sculptor.. in that he/she must ALLOW the shape to form as opposed to DIRECTING it to appear.

I leave you with the very RARE, possibly unique, INVERTED (and slightly off-center) 2-Cent two-tone Minnow.. nicknamed the Sleeping Minnow stamp:

See the 1 Steem ORCA steemstamp here.

All content 100% original by John Deecken @orionsbeltbuckle