Stamping 101

I took the Stamping 101 course at the Bizzy B store last night, as taught by Daniza Benic.

First we stamped a few tags like the one in the top left photo, after learning about the different types of stamps. For example, they can be mounted on wood or foam or they can be clear and unmounted and you peel them off and place them on a block of acrylic (which can be quite handy if you want to see where you are placing your stamp).

The stamp images themselves are also quite varied - they can be bold faced (i.e. if you had a picture of an apple and the body of the apple was solid) or reasonably detailed (perhaps a picture of a sliced apple slice showing the seeds inside) or just a few simple lines (only the outline of the apple). They can also be incredibly detailed so that they look almost like a photograph, which you can see in this example below. I did two very similar tags as I was copying the striking colour effect one of my classmates achieved with a combination of purple and fuchsia inks and a black permanent ink. The one with the turquoise ink was my first attempt and I used a stone gray ink. It turned out okay but I didn't put on enough ink or press hard enough and you can't see the word "Bella" in the image, so I added the word "dream" instead, as I thought that suited the mood of the softer image. In the second example, the colour is more purple and I used black ink so the image is much bolder.

We also learned about different types of ink- there are dye-based, pigment inks and permanent. The type of ink you choose depends on what type of effect you want to create and what type of material you will be stamping. Most ink pads are one solid colour but you can also get pads that has two or more stripes of various colours.

This next example of what is known as a watermark ink pad, the brand name we used was called Versamark. The ink is colourless and as it dries on your paper, it gives a tone on tone effect.

Then I made this card by stamping an image, tearing the edges around it, adding ink to the edges, gluing the image to a folded piece of cardstock and then adding the text with a second piece of paper treated the same way and mounted on little pieces of foam with glue on each side to raise it slightly above the card beneath. I even coloured in the fairy wings by hand, using markers and watercolour pencils.

Tomorrow I will show you a few more examples of what I made, including the tag that the teacher and all my classmates thought was the very best, which resulted from what I initially thought was a colour combination gone horribly wrong.