Carving a Chinese Chop with a Dremel Tool
When you buy a Japanese/ Chinese calligraphy kit they nearly always come with an uncarved (blank) chop (stamp). That way you get to choose for yourself which symbol you use with which to sign your pieces.
The material the flat chop is made out of is quite soft. It's very easy to carve this into any design you wish. In this video we use a Dremel tool, which is a motorized carving device. You can also easily use any standard carving types of tools.
A Dremel tool is simply a hand-held motorized device with interchangeable heads which lets you drill, carve, sand, buff, etc. things that involve rotation. Here's an example on Amazon -
https://amzn.to/2PfBTAy
#calligraphy
Hello, this is Lisa Shea and these instructions are for carving a Chinese chop with a Dremel tool.
You can also carve a chop with a screwdriver or with chisels or many other things but a Dremel
tool makes it nice and easy and easy to control. When you buy your calligraphy kit it's going to
come with a flat ended chop. They're always going to expect you or pretty much always going to
expect you to carve it yourself. So a Dremel tool makes this fairly straightforward. The top of the
chop is soft and easy to carve into. When you draw the shape on it you always want to draw it
in reverse because this is a stamp that you're going to then stamp down into a stamp pad into,
you know, usually it's red ink and then stamp onto a piece of paper or onto the artwork that
you're working on or whatever it is that you want to sign with this symbol. So you want to carve it
in reverse. What I'll tend to do is make the symbol first in Photoshop or get an image on
the web in Photoshop if you're not good at drawing and then reverse it in Photoshop so it's flipped
the opposite way and then draw it onto the top of the chop from there in the reverse format.
If you're not good at drawing then you can use graphite paper and tracing paper to trace the
image and then use graphite paper to transfer that onto the top of the chop just like you would if
you're doing watercolors or acrylic paintings or anything like that. Or you can get a friend to
help you or if all of this is confusing then you can get someone to help you. There's lots of people
out there who will carve chops for you. But if you've got access to a Dremel tool or a chisel
or anything like that then you can do it yourself fairly straightforward. So you can see I drew it
on there in sharpie and all he's doing is tracing along my sharpie lines and blowing away the extra
dust that it's creating to make the shape and then you just stomp the chop into an ink pad
and stick it on the paper and you've got your symbol. Feel free to ask me with any questions.
Be sure to subscribe for more videos and I'll be doing more videos to show you how all of this works.
Thank you very much!