Digital Stamps

That is what I said to myself when I first came across them. I have been crafting for many years and would consider myself to be a ‘traditional stamper’. I have drawers full of the things to prove it, and boxes full of acrylic ones too!

To me these digital stamps all looked very nice, but what was I supposed to do to get them onto my cards? The obvious answer is to print it onto paper, maybe colour it in, cut it out and stick it on...mmmm, ok, but a bit boring maybe.

Well I have discovered along the way that they are so much more than that, and the really good news is that you don’t need special software to be able to use them in a much more interesting way.

Try Various Printing Materials
Firstly you can vary the material you print onto. These days you can buy acetate and shrink plastic that can go through an inkjet printer. Using the stamps on acetate can give a lovely effect, especially for wedding cards and printing onto the printable shrink plastic, colouring, cutting out and then shrinking the image can be fun. Brilliant for kids cards, making flower embellishments, making keyrings, making jewellery.....the list goes on and on.

Fix a piece of fine tissue paper to a sheet of copypaper using repositionable adhesive, print your image, colour and cut it out and apply to candles using your heat gun...great fun and perfect for a Christmas gift.

Edit the Image
Once you have had a play with materials, think about how you can change the image. If you have Word, Paint or a nice fancy graphics program like PaintShop Pro you can open the .jpeg or.png stamp images in it. Then your imagination and software are your only limits. Make it larger, so large that instead of being the image on a card, it becomes the shape of the card itself. Make it smaller and duplicate it all over the page. Print it out and you will have a matching backing paper to your original image. Change the colour of the outline to match the backing paper you want to use. Print it onto patterned paper and then cut out pieces to put together, that way you could create, for example, a girl wearing a pretty patterned dress. All of that is possible just using Word or Paint, or any other word processing program. Some graphics programs will let you warp the image and stretch it to change the shape. Colour it on screen, flip it to face the other way, mirror it to make a shaped card, apply special effects to it, like metallic effect or stitching.....the list goes on and on.

Traditional Rubber Stamping Techniques
There are more ‘traditional’ stamping techniques that you might think you can’t do. Embossing the image, for example, using a clear pad and embossing powder and heat gun? Well think again.....you can buy the clear ink used when embossing in this manner in a pen form. Print your image, trace with the pen, apply the powder, heat and there you go. You can also buy special paper to print onto which, when used with Melt Dust powder, will allow you to heat emboss a printed image.

Taking all this into consideration, digital stamps are very versatile and have advantages over traditional rubber stamps. They are certainly easier to store, and some people really struggle to get a good clean image from them too. I don’t think that digital stamps will ever completely replace the more traditional ones in my stash, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be without them either!

I hope this will encourage you to give them a try and maybe I have sparked off an idea or two?

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