Working With Clear and Rubber Stamps

With clear stamps becoming all the more popular, you may be asking “So what’s the big deal?”  Well clear stamps take up less room to store.  They cost less and because they are clear you can position them exactly where you want them.

Step by step guide to working with clear stamps

1. Use a clear ink like Versamark as a base before you add coloured ink this will help prevent the ink from staining the stamps.
2. Use a border stamp to create a frame. You can use strips of paper to mask the parts you’ve already stamped to prevent over stamping.
3. Stamp your main image in the space left in the middle of your border.
   

   Stamp your main image

4. Colour your stamped image.
5. Adhere finished piece to your card.

Adhere finished piece

Creating a faux water coloured effect from your rubber stamp

To create a faux water coloured image:

1. Colour your stamp with die inks.
   

   Ink-up your stamp

2. When your stamp is all inked up, spritz it with water, then stamp.
   

   Spritz your stamp

   

   Stamp your image

3. Stamp again, spritz with water and stamp again.
4. Then heat dry with a heat gun to prevent the ink running too much. This effect works best with flower stamps.
   

   Dry with a heat gun

   

   Stamp again

   

   and stamp again

Here are some helpful hints and tips when working with clear and rubber stamps

• Before using any stamp for the first time, go over the surface with a piece of sticky tape to lift off any fluff or surface coating there may be on it.

• Use a clear ink like Versamark as a base before you add colour to your stamps this will help prevent the ink from staining your stamps.

• If you have a stamp that doesn’t print evenly and misses parts of the image, try putting your card on top of a stamping mat or the back of a mouse mat and then stamping onto it. The softer surface helps uneven stamps to print better.

• When using clear stamps be careful not to press too hard as you can smudge the image. If you are unsure how much pressure to use, practice on some cut off scraps of paper first before stamping on your good paper/card.

• If you are going to colour your image with Watercolours or Twinkling H2O’s then it is best to print on to watercolour paper or a good quality paper using a dye based ink that won’t run when you start to add water. Some inks that are good for this are StazOn, Versafine, Adirondack Dye Ink etc.

• Another method is to emboss your image after stamping with embossing powders and a heat gun. This will give you a nice raised outline to your image to work with which won’t bleed when you add water colour.

• When cleaning your stamps you can use baby wipes but check to make sure they don’t contain alcohol as this can affect the rubber of the stamps. I find it better to use an old pillow case or sheet ripped into small squares and a good stamp cleaner but if you want a really deep clean then there are special stamp cleaner pads available which work even better.

Tags | Adirondak, clear stamps, Fe-Fe, Fiona Haigh-Gannon, mask, stamp, stamping, StazOn, Twinkling H2Os, Versafine, versamark, watercolour, wooden stamps