Make Your Own Stamps

Last week's Creative Art Journal class involved making our own stamps out of the flat styrofoam trays that you find under your pork chops or chicken breasts - cleaned, of course! We cut the styrofoam into various shapes and glued them onto other, square pieces of styrofoam, painted them and played around with the results of stamping them on paper. We often found that the second or third use of the stamp was the best one, the first effort usually had too much paint loaded on - the images seem to work much better with less paint. We were using acrylic paint, watered down slightly.

Here's a picture of what the finished stamps look like:


and a design that one of my fellow students, Katherine, made with hers. She had the very clever idea to mark the pieces of styrofoam with squiggly lines by drawing on them with a pencil, to add texture to the stamp. I was so impressed, I immediately copied this idea!!




Then we took thicker pieces of styrofoam and carved designs into them, again with a pencil. We painted those pieces and pressed them onto paper. The results were equally intriguing - here's a picture of one of my designs:


This next photo shows our teacher, Toni, demonstrating the process, followed by a shot showing the different looks achieved from stamping the same design over and over without adding any more paint - you can see what I mean about the 2nd and 3rd images being the best, depending on the result you are looking for. The 4th image is very light but would also be good to use on an art journal page, as the design is very faint and could easily be embellished by adding layers over top of it.