Card Making Using Ink With Rubber Stamps

Series Summary

Tired of spending too much money on impersonal store-bought greeting cards? Making your own homemade greeting cards is about more than just saving money. Giving someone a personalized birthday, graduation, anniversary or holiday card makes the occasion that much more special. They make excellent thank-you cards, Christmas cards, and great invitations for your wedding, shower or party.

In this series of free video clips you’ll learn tips and techniques for using rubber stamps to make homemade holiday and greeting cards. Expert card maker Fran Bricken demonstrates several methods of using stamps with ink, colored pencils, markers, watercolors and paints. She explains how to mist the surface to add backgrounds, and shows how to use mini beads, glitter glue, ribbon and even bleach to enhance to look of the cards, as well as how to add embossing to give a three dimensional feel to the surface of the cards. Try these techniques and make a hand crafted greeting card for that special someone on their next birthday or holiday.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Fran Bricken and I’m here today to talk about rubber stamping techniques. The first technique is just your basic rubber stamping with one image, you want to get a rubber stamp which is a wooden block mounted with rubber stamp on the back and get some ink, there are several different kinds of inks, there is a permanent ink and a pigment ink. The permanent ink is going to stamp a real sharp line and dry very quickly, the pigment ink is going to be a little bit of a richer stamp but it does take a while to dry. The first thing you need to do is get your rubber stamp, you want to place it over your pad, make sure you cover the entire stamp, you’ll have to press real hard, you want to look at it and make sure it looks like everything’s covered, you want to place it on your piece of paper, just place it down you don’t want to move it or rock it but just push kind of gently over the edges to make sure you get the whole image on there, take it up carefully and you’ll have a rubber stamped image, it’s just plain it’ll look like that. There’s many different kinds of techniques you can do with that but just a plain rubber stamp will make a very nice card and end up looking like that. You can also do multiple stamps with just one image where you take let’s say two just flower stamps, press them on your pad, this pad actually has several colors on it so it’ll give you a couple of different colors on there so again press, make sure that your image is covered and that’s going to give you a couple of different looks so that you can end up covering your whole page and you can make a card or a image that would end up looking like that. Also with one stamp you can do what is called masking and that is taking a stamp like this that has three images on it, maybe you needed five on your card so you want to stamp your image on here, take it off, stamp another card, cut it out around the actual image, place it over what you just stamped and then stamp it again, take it off and that’ll give you multiple images going across that’s called masking. These are just a few of basic techniques on rubber stamping. "