A Simple Guide to Rubber Stamping

You can become an artist with a stamp, ink, and a little color from chalks, pastels, watercolors, markers, or colored pencils! Rubberstamping is a technique used to create greeting cards, home décor items, collage, apparel embellishment and so much more.

1. You’ll need a rubber stamp or two. There are traditional wood mount rubber stamps and the next generation of stamping, the clear stamp. Clear stamps are unmounted meaning that you will need an acrylic mount to place the clear stamp image upon to stamp with it. You can also buy rubber stamp images that are unmounted. Experiment with mounted and unmounted stamps. Paper artists tend to prefer the clear unmounted since this type of stamp makes image placement very easy (you can see where you are going to stamp the image through the acrylic mounts) and storage takes up less space than the traditional wood mounted stamps.

2. Next you’ll need some ink. There are two types of basic ink. The first is pigment, which is a slow drying ink and the second is dye ink, which is fast drying. Dye inks are more colorful than pigment inks, but only pigment inks are opaque. You’ll also need pigment ink if you decide that you want to emboss an image. There are a rainbow of colors available in both kinds of inks, but black, gold, silver, red, and blue are the most popular of ink colors.

3. Ink rubberstamp by tapping the ink pad to the image making sure the entire image is inked. Stamp directly down to your surface (paper, wood, acetate, and more). Do not rock or shake the stamp, but lift directly up. You’ll have a crisp, clean image with no smudges. Practice several times when stamping on a new surface to determine the pressure needed to get that crisp image. Note that rubber stamps do give a better detailed image than clear stamps. This is because the rubber is slightly harder than the material used to create the clear stamps.

4. Once an image is stamped you can color it with a huge variety of coloring tools. You can use chalks and pastels by brushing or rubbing the color onto the image. You can watercolor with watercolor pencils or paint, again brushing on the color. You can also use colored pencils and markers.

Rubber stamping can easily become a passion since it is so easy to do and you’ll have wonderful projects completed in less than an hour. Check out these fun rubber stamping projects:

Papercraft Butterfly Card– This is a great card to send to a friend; it’s easy to make.
Recycled Jewelry– Save the environment by recycling and reusing jewelry.
Decorative Clay Pot Patterns– Decorate your clay pots any way you wish.