Signing Watercolor Paintings

 Vail, AZ

Mar 4, 2022

How to sign (or whether or not to sign) a painting.

There's a lot of confusion around signing paintings; some artists do and some don't.  Some watercolorists will sign the front with pencil or watercolor and put other details on the back.  I am horrible with a brush, but some watercolor shows are very strict about using anything other than watercolor in a painting being shown as watercolor.  

So, I sometimes fill a dip pen with watercolor (some color or variant that I've used in the painting) and sign with the dip pen.  

Loading a dip pen with watercolor

I don't usually date paintings, but, well, apparently I'm inconsistent.

Before signing

I don't like to date paintings on the front - I'm not terribly prolific and I don't like paintings to seem stale.  I will put more detail in pencil on the back: my full name, date painted, size and materials used.

Another signature option I find intriguing - so here goes!

I recently saw an article about creating and using your own custom 'chop' (like you often see in Asian art) or stamp to sign your art.

First, you mess around and come up with a couple designs.

Transfer the designs to your stamp material, remembering that it has to be backwards in order to stamp correctly (like looking in a mirror).  I went over the selected designs with soft graphite, then transferred the design to the block by rubbing the back of the paper design to transfer the graphite design.

Then, you carve the designs into some stamp material (lino block, a plastic eraser, I'm going to use a speedball easy-carve pad).

The material is very soft so an exacto knife or lino block cutters work fine.

Unfortunately, in the size that I wanted (pretty small; less than an inch square) carving with any accuracy was difficult.  Maybe I would get better with practice.  I'm not sure I would actually use these but it was a fun experiment.

First tests, clearly some edges to clean up.