this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
57 points (96.7% liked)
Casual Conversation
1679 readers
90 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling
- Keep the conversation nice and light hearted
- Encourage conversation in your post
- Avoid controversial topics such as politics or societal debates
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
- Respect privacy: Don’t ask for or share any personal information
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That is pretty cool! What do you make them from?
There's some special stones used for most chops that are durable, yet paradoxically easy to carve. (Not entirely dissimilar to soapstone, but without the soapy feel.) I've got about a dozen practice stones, each of which is probably good for at least a dozen attempts to get a proper image on them. That'll last me for a while and when I reach the end that when I decide if I want to continue or not.
Are they expensive? I don’t think I’ve seen one irl
The kit I got was the most expensive of that particular vendor's starter kit family and it cost me about 105RMB (15USD). It comes with everything in this picture—original left, (bad) translation right. (Click through to see full size with readable translation.)
It's not a top-quality kit, obviously, at that price. A top-quality set of chisels alone would be more than five times the price of that whole set, but for beginners it's absolutely fine. The weird rubber stamps are basically a way of getting an image onto your stone for practice. Anything that's not red after you do your impression is to be carved down. I don't want to have to learn carving while I'm learning Chinese calligraphy, so that's a bonus. Loads of these kinds of rubber stamps are available for both direct use and for practising seal carving, and practice-grade stones are about 0.25USD each. (High quality chop stones can exceed $20 for the size range displayed here and can exceed $600 for the more esoteric stone types in larger sizes.)
And if I decide I enjoy the hobby, I'll upgrade the components over time.
Very cool! And definitely wise to build up before investing.