REVEALED: Secrets of Building a Rubber-Stamped Collage

Hello stamplings! Today I have a tutorial for you on how I made this zany collaged doll for the Black & White challenge over at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity. You can use these same principles to help you plan and execute any sort of rubber-stamped collage.

1. Plan out the composition. 

(As this piece was always intended to be in black & white only--no color--I chose images in various degrees of texture and blackness, striving for a variety of line and pattern.) 

Gather the stamp images you'd like to use and start playing with them. You can stamp them and roughly cut them out to position them relative to each other...or sketch them on a piece of paper to approximate size...or use software such as Photoshop or InDesign to make a sketch. 

I used InDesign, layering the images on top of each other very coarsely (not removing the opaque white backgrounds from each image) just to get an idea of what I wanted to do. My sketch looked like this:

Crude, right? But that's all you need to get the job done in the planning stages.

2) Decide on your focal point. 

In all likelihood, this will be the image you stamp first--the one that appears on top of all the other layers in the collage, in the foreground. In my composition, it was the eyeglasses image.

3) Determine the order of operations.

If you have a fairly complex collage to build like this one (using more than say, three stamps), now you have to figure out the order in which you are going to stamp. The things that go behind, in the background, get stamped last. Determine what is "foreground" and what is "background," and proceed in a logical order. 

4) Using your sketch as a blueprint...start stamping! 

I recommend the use of a stamp positioner or stamp press tool such as the MISTI or the We R Memory Keepers press (which is what I used). This allows you to re-ink the stamp and get perfect coverage with subsequent impressions in case an image prints a little unevenly the first time. (When you are working on building a multi-step collage like this one, you don't want to wreck it with a faded-looking or partial print of one of the images!) These tools also allow you to place each stamp exactly where you want it to print--handy! You'll see what I mean below.

5) Cut a mask for each image as you work. 

After you stamp each image on the "real" paper, stamp off onto some scrap paper, and cut that print out to use as a mask. I used repositionable adhesive to stick down my masks precisely over each image before stamping the next layer atop it. 

TIP: Cut the masks juuuuust inside the image's outline--this avoids leaving a dreaded white halo around the masked image as you stamp over it, allowing you to get right up nice and close to abut the masked image with the image you are layering over (which will actually appear "under") it.

So! In the photo below, you can see that I stamped the eyeglasses first, then masked them off...followed by the face with hat, whose mask I placed over both the eyeglasses mask and the stamped image of the face/hat...then the viney flourish (which didn't get masked, because nothing appears behind it). Here's how the collage looked at this stage:

Leave all the masks in place as you work. It will help keep everything nice and clean in the event of a dropped ink pad or inky finger smudges. Don't ask me how I know this.

In the next pic, you can see how I placed the (uninked) body stamp right on the paper where I wanted it to print. (When you close the lid on the stamp press, the stamp clings to the lid...you ink the stamp up, the close the lid again, allowing you a precision print of your image. See the second pic below.)

I printed the doll's body (not inking the legs all the way down, since I knew I was gonna add cool stripey socks)...stamped, cut, and adhered a body mask...and continued to build the collage.

Next came the wings...here you can see them in position with the lid of the press closed, ready to make a perfect impression. (SO MY STAMP PRESS IS DIRTY DON'T JUDGE)

After this came the socks (and sock masks), then two fun borders for the doll to stand on--all of which in turn was masked off by a couple of Post-It notes, because they were easier and quicker than cutting and adhering precise custom masks (see pic below).

After the feet and borders were masked off, the area between them and the masked wings was stamped with the final background layer of loopy script.

6) Remove the masks; oooh and aaaah.

MASK REMOVAL TIME...yeah baby! The fun begins! I called my trusty 12-year-old son to help film The Big Reveal and to peel away a few masks with me. This was rather fun, seeing the composition slowly unveiled. 

Click the video here to see the final stamp collage REVEALED!

And that's it!

This technique would work great for limited edition pieces or cards...I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of planning an elaborate collage and cutting out a crap-ton of masks, you might as well have several "prints" to show for it...amirite?

If you have any questions whatsoever about this process, please ask me in the comments below. I will either answer there or revise this blog post if it turns out I missed some major point that you guys want to know.

Thanks as always for visiting!  💗

Black and White Challenge at Lost Coast Portal to Creativity

Hiya stamplings! There is a cool art challenge over at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity running right now--just enter your art in black and white that uses rubber stamping in it for your chance to win cool prizes! Details here.

Here's my piece to inspire you to get out your trusty black inkpad and get stamping. It's a collage made from several whimsical (or downright strange) images from the Lost Coast Designs library:

I'll have a post up soon showing you the masking technique I used to build this image--plus a fun "reveal" video where the masks are removed to show the finished piece--so stay tuned.  :)

Go enter!!

Love,

Two Looks, One Stamp: The Stampsmith's Ophelia

My friends! You might know from already having read this post how sad I am that the great Stampsmith is closing its doors and liquidating all stock in its Etsy store. The Stampsmith is known for incredibly detailed photostamps (many of which are difficult to tell apart from actual photographs) and very intelligent and quirky images, most of which are vintage or historical. If you care about such things at all (and of course you do!), you might want to visit their Etsy shop ASAP to grab a few of whatever images are left before they are gone forever.

[blows nose loudly into lace-trimmed hanky]

Despite my grief, I thought it might be fun to feature one of The Stampsmith's all-time best-selling stamps in a couple of different projects, not only to whet your appetite for this lovely image (which is still available as of this writing), but because it's cool any old time to see the various looks you can get out of the same stamp. At least, I always dig that kind of thing.

The image under discussion is one of a series of illustrations of Shakespeare's heroines taken out of a 19th-century edition of the Bard's work.

--But soft! What beholdest thou below with thine eye agleam? 'Tis she, Ophelia, languid, nubile, not having gotten herself to a nunnery...

This image above is how the full stamp looks. (Yes, it comes with the text, which you can choose to ink up or not, or even to snip off the unmounted rubber to save for a separate stamp, which is what I did.)

The first project I have for you featuring Ophelia experiments with only partially inking the stamp. You can see that I inked only her face, so that she appears to float in the surrounding textures (which were made with dye inks, matte chalk inks, and metallic inks, which impart quite a bit more liveliness  to the background than the photo shows). The soft edges to the partial inking were meant to evoke a sort of ghostly or apparition-like effect.

The second piece is an ATC whose specifications were that it be made in a Gothic arch shape and in black and white. Here a bit more of Ophelia is showing than in the project above, but I still didn't want to use all her dark hair and garment, so she was again partially inked, and then cut out and covered in layers of B&W collage.

Unlike in the first ATC, where Ophelia is the darkest thing in the composition, in the B&W ATC she is the palest thing. (Unless you count the stars...but aren't stars uncountable anyway?)

The materials on this one were dye and chalk inks, enamel paint, glitter, transfers, and collage, including a black faceted rhinestone in the "firmament" of glitter at the top of the card (which I also thought could suggest a rose window in a cathedral). Because this piece was all black and white, I tried to maximize its dimensional and textural qualities, attempting to include matte and shiny, velvety and rough, hard and soft. Not sure how much of that translates via photograph!--but at least you know what I was thinking.

Anyway, back to the Ophelia stamp. You can see that this is a very romantic and versatile image. FURTHERMORE, The Stampsmith still has it available in a couple of sizes! If you end up getting this stamp, I would absolutely LOVE to see what you make with it. It's very gorgeous. 

But you KNOW I am a sucker for anything Elizabethan (even when reinterpreted with a Romantic-era Roman nose).

Talk to me below! xo

It's "Hip 2 B Square": Oomphing Up a B&W Project with...GLITTER (yeah, baby)

Greetings, crafters and craftresses!

September 4th is the FINAL DAY over at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity's challenge contest event "Hip 2 Be Square"...which means you gotta hurry and enter your own squarey art project to win prizes like gift certificates for a shopping spree at Lost Coast Designs (purveyors of the most deliciously quirky stamps out there)!

As a member of the Lost Coast Design Team, I have a featured project over at the Portal today: a glitter squares tile. Here it is...BEHOLD! (But, darlings, what makes this look so cool IRL doesn't photograph well. What would that X-factor be, you ask? Why, GLITTER! Opalescent light-refracting eye-catching GLITTRAGE. You know I love me some sparkle and shine...)

How did I get the glitter factor going on this tile of squares within a square? Why, dear reader...'twas glittered embossing powder.

I stamped the Bird Square from Carmen's Veranda in black ink on two pieces of white cardstock, then embossed the images with Black Sparkle EP...

...then cut out the white squares and mounted them on squares of black cardstock.

(Here's a closeup of the black embossing, showing a little of the glittering going on!)

Next, I stamped the nicely coordinating Calligraphy Square (also from Carmen's Veranda) (you may note that there are quite a few of these square tile stamps over there that harmonize nicely together) in white ink onto two pieces of black cardstock. I covered the ink with a homemade mixture of opaque white and clear glitter EPs, and melted it with my trusty heat tool. Then I cut out the black squares and mounted them on squares of white cardstock.

Here's how the white looks all a-glitter:

I then mounted all four glittery squares onto a larger square of black board, and topped it off with a square faceted black rhinestone. You know, for shine and all.

Easy-peasy, but with a little sparkle to make it speshul.

You see that comment box below right there? It's for you! (It's much more fun when I have you to talk to.)