Ex Libris

A while ago I became interested in making myself an ex libris as a fun project, and as a way to mark the books in my personal library. To start, I did a lot of research into what other ex libris looked like. Below are some examples that I liked.

Inspiration struck in the form of a painting my friend James Young made me in college for a secret santa. I've long considered the moose as a kind of personal sigil. Having found an image, I converted it to black and white and added text in several different fonts until I found one I liked. This turned out to be unimportant since my carving wasn't accurate enough to match the fonts anyway.

I printed the image in several sizes, chose the size I wanted (about 2" x 3") and traced it onto a block of rubber. Then I carved out the white space using a knife set I had bought for whittling a few years ago. I had to make a few changes during the process as the lettering proved very difficult to do with the carving set, but in the end I'm very happy with the result.