Seal Imprints

So i've been doing some Seals work with Bu A7med like i've mentioned before.

This time i've come with pictures to explain..



















Here's the box of English clay that Bu a7med favors.


You basically take out a bit,


flatten it out to a certain thickness,
and proceed..














I then make squares out of the the clay so that i can imprint the seal on it (usually one-sided with two copies each).











So this seal, for example (and all of them were returned from the Iraqi stolen loot), would be studied so that you can know your seal-imprint placement.

I usually leave clay so that i can imprint to see what it comes out as..

Usually, you have the sun (most likely in a cresent shape) to the top and the animal (and almost all of them have animals) are below that.










And so you depress the seal in and hope that it gives you a nice clean imprint. Most of the time it needs to sort-ve ''sink in'' and so you leave it for a few seconds and use a wire to lift it up (by slinking it in those holes)



Then you write down the KM number (Kuwait Museum cataloge number) on the back.



There are two copies of each.






















Once your done with that step you leave them out to 'dry' until Bu A7med takes them to get furnace-blasted.


To avoid bubbles or drying too fast or whatever, we put them under these clothes and under the weight of these plexi-glass squares.


Once they dry we sand-paper the edges so that they're nice and square.





The back pain associated with flattening the clay and the sensitivity of the sand-paper at the end of my volunteer-time is totally worth it if only to lessen the amount of time spent at my self-imposed Arabic-typing database Excel sheet.