Then I procrastinated forever because I was really scared of this process. Finally I started with the first color which was Kwan Yin's skin color. I cut away anything that I wanted to be white (the dharma wheel design and the white's of her eyes) and printed. Didn't look like much:
But I printed something on the order of 70 of these because you have to start off with as many as you'll want plus room for goofs. Then I had to cut away anything that I wanted to stay skin colored before I printed the next color. This took me a while to wrap my brain around-- cutting away what you wanted to stay. Finally started sinking in at the end, but there were a couple near goofs and outright oopses.
In all, I ended up doing 7 colors for this series. I learned several things. One, if you're working with stamp pads as I was, you will need re-inkers or multiple wet pads. My pads started dying out after just a few prints. Unfortunately that meant that my best, most vibrant colored prints were my test prints. Finally wised up to this and started re-inking or using similar colored pads, but the prints I was hoping to give away or sell are pretty faint.
Two, even with the jig I set up to register the prints, things still got messed up. Thank goodness I did make so many extras.
Three, make sure to test how inks will interact before hand. This I did do and was grateful.
Four, if the inks don't interact well, it's okay to mask part of the stamp when doing a layer of color. I did this for a few different colors (mostly for the globe). I wish I'd been a bit more precise with this however, as it did effect the later design a bit.
Five, be flexible. I had originally thought for example, that everything would have a black outline. Then I decided that was too much so just used black for Kwan Yin.