What can you do if you don’t have the stamp you want? Carve one yourself. I’m sharing the process I use to make big bold stamps for gel printing and art journaling.

You also get to see how I deal with a carving O.O.P.S., one of those Outstanding Opportunities Presenting Suddenly. At the end of the video, you’ll also see how easy it is to use paint with a stamp and get the most out of your gel plate.

Watch Stamp Carving for Beginners on YouTube.

Details about the Gel Printing FUNdamentals workshop mentioned in the video are  here.

Step 1. Choose what you are going to carve and reverse it.  I chose a Greek temple that I drew on heavy chipboard.  That’s too heavy to trace, so I needed it to be something thinner like copy paper.

That worked out nicely because the copier also had a setting to mirror the image, creating a reverse image.  If you are doing words or text, just remember to do the mirror image so that when you stamp, or else the words will stamp in reverse.

Step 2. Tape one side of the image to the pink rubber and put a piece of tracing paper between the paper and the rubber.  It will act just like the old carbon papers. Then use an embossing tool, a bamboo skewer, a pencil, a ball point pen, anything you have to trace over the design and transfer the image.

What if you don’t have tracing paper?  Simply rub a pencil, a lot, on the backside of the image to create a layer of graphite.  Then trace and transfer just like if you had the tracing paper.

Step 3.  Using a Sharpie, go over the outline.  The dark lines are the areas that will become the stamped image.

Step 4. Carve away the pink rubber around the black lines using a carving tool. Bigger tools have less precision than smaller tools so I start with the big tool first, then go in and do the finer details with the smaller one.

Step 5. When you have the stamp mostly carved, ink it up and stamp it.  This will make any areas that need to be cleaned up stand out. Notice the little black lines and ridges that are out of place?  Now that they have black ink on them, I can see where they are and carve them out.

You’ll probably need to ink it up and test it multiple times to get all the details the way you want them.  But stamping a large image like this can be tricky to get a strong clear image, unless you use paint. Want an easy way to do that?

Stamping large images with an ink pad often gives less than ideal images. To create dark strong lines, try using paint instead.

Put black paint on a gel plate and use that to “ink up” the stamp.  You can also brayer paint directly onto the stamp.  When using a gel plate as the palette where the brayer is loaded with paint or simply as a the big “stamp pad”, not a drop of paint is wasted.

What is on the plate has the image of the stamp in it, creating a completely different look than stamping the image traditionally directly on to paper.

Ready for more ways to use your gel plate? Then check out Gel Printing FUNdamentals self paced workshop. It’s filled with ways to get the most out of your plate.

Here are the supplies used. Some of these links are affiliate links which means I get a small percentage. It doesn’t cost you anything extra and it helps keep the free tutorials coming!

There are many size options of the stamp carving blocks, the one I used was the 6″ by 12″ one.

Ever have a background that you love and when it comes time to cover some of it up, you don’t want to?  That’s what happened to me but I found a way around it by using a butterfly stencil-mask and some white paint.

You’ll also see a new gizmo that I used to stencil the words with little letters. Yes, the letters are filled in with little letters!

Watch How I dealt with a background I loved and didn’t want to cover up on YouTube.

This is the background at the start of today’s play. You can see how this was created here.  This background was a blast to create with the paint splatters and I didn’t want to cover it up.  But I had an idea for this page that would involving covering up at least part of it.

Using a mask and white paint isolated parts of  the background creating the color and pattern in the butterflies.  When stenciling with a mask, if you pull the paint away from the mask as you apply it, you are less likely to get any paint under it.  That will give you a crisper image.  You can see it in action in the video.

The butterfly masks come as a part of my Butterfly Journeys stencil set.

There was a part of my brain that was a bit freaked out by the white paint covering up the background.  After all, what if I don’t like it? I can never ever ever get that white paint off and go back to the background I loved.

A bit of high drama happening in my head.  But if I don’t like it, you know what I’ll say. OOPS.  And the absolute worst case scenario is that I have to splatter more paint and make another.  Twist my arm!

As much as I loved this background, it needed to be covered up.

The layers underneath began still peeked through a touch, a compromise to the voice in my head. That voice also would not agree that the white turned the butterflies into magic.

To create the title, the stenciling was done with a non-traditional tool, an identity protection roller stamp and the Jumbo Vintage Typewriter stencil.  I just love that was pre inks and rolled little letters and gibberish text. There’s a link at the bottom of the post if you’d like to more about this gizmo.

Since it rolled and was little it was a snap to get into the stenciled areas of the letters. When you try this, just be aware that you do need a more open stencil or a large pattern so that the stamp can get in there to make contact with the paper.

Outlining the letters and butterflies gave the page the finishing touch it needed.

Here are the supplies used. Some of these links are affiliate links which means I get a small percentage. It doesn’t cost you anything extra and it helps keep the free tutorials coming!