Creating Acrylic Stamps

Having a great day with my good friend Jeni. We are making acrylic stamps from our own artwork. So much fun!

We found that when printing the negative images out on the computer printer the black negative space was not dark enough for the stamps to work correctly. Jeni had the ingenious idea of placing two negatives together and then tape the edges so that they do not slide apart while processing. This succeeded in making the black negative space much more saturated…. and SUCCESS! It worked!
We did however unfortunately waste a few stamp gel packs working out the kinks, but are now quite happy with the results. We just wish that the stamps themselves were thicker, as the areas on my girls faces that are not raised for stamping (i.e. the skin) was so thin that it ripped on my curly haired girl.    🙁
With my second stamp, the girl’s face with no hair, the lines are great, however in her flesh area, there is absolutely no acrylic left. If it was not for the plastic backing that was supposed to be peeled off upon completion, I would just have a bunch of separated facial features… which could also be fun in their own way. Therefore we glued the stamp with its plastic backing still in place to an acrylic block. Not the cheapest solution, but our tool handy men are out for the day and not here cutting wood blocks upon our whimsical  requests … lol.
The Stampmaker is from Teresa Collins creative line of products.  If you are looking to make some stamps of your own, you can currently purchase a supply kit off of Amazon.
Keep in mind that acrylic stamps do not have a long life span, but you can still have a great deal of fun with them. For me, this is a fabulous way to test out a few of my art designs and see which ones I will have made into wood mounted rubber stamps this Fall.
So far, I love the idea of creating girls heads and faces, which then you can design the hair, bodies etc or even use them in college images from magazines. Imagine taking a class from great Artists,  such as Christy Tomlinson (http://www.christytomlinson.typepad.com/), and using one of my stamps for the face!   So many ideas!!!   Leave a comment and let me know what you think.