Rubberstamp Art

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A young lady wondering what to wear for a date

Ever wake up in the morning and realize suddenly that it’s your honey’s birthday/anniversary/First Day of Something Really Important/Needing to Hear an I Love You Again Day/etc... and you have forgotten to get a card. You are such a stupid get. Your brain shuts down at the enormity of your error and you hopelessly collapse back into bed. You are in ‘Really Deep Trouble This Time’1.

Had you the dimmest clue about rubberstamping, you would not be afraid: you could have a nice hot cup of tea and simply pull out a few appropriate stamps and inkpads, maybe some miscellaneous color media, a blank card or two; and Voilà!: You Are Saved! Rubberstamp art is limited only by your imagination. The same medium that can produce cute little Kindergarten party invitations can also be used to create stunning examples of contemporary surrealism, Dadaism and even erotica. And no one will snicker at you or your accomplishments either: nowadays, people from all walks of life are making surprisingly ‘legitimate’ art with rubberstamps. It’s not just for large women living in trailerparks with their daughters anymore.

Nor is it all just teddy bears and precious little religious aphorisms, either. Of course, you may find it difficult to find the ‘swear-words-and-naked-people’ section of your local stamp store, but these and many other genres are indeed plentiful and easy to find if you know where to look. Something for everyone: a comedy tonight!2

Tools Not Found on This Old House. Ever.

Rubberstamps themselves have changed greatly over the past few years, and are no longer the clunky ‘time and date’ marking machines lying around on your father’s desk for you to play with when he’s not home. Usually you will find that they consist of three parts: the ‘die’ (the piece of rubber into which the image is etched - the redder the better); a ‘cushion’ to which the die is glued; and the ‘mount’ - a piece of wood (generally maple) or acrylic upon which the cushion/die is attached3. The image of the stamp printed on the mount is referred to as the index. Various companies offer mounted and/or unmounted stamps, with unmounted normally half the price of mounted; this savings comes in handy for the many ‘oops’ of the clumsy do-it-yourselfer.

The range of stamp designs out there to choose from is astonishing. You will find hundreds of styles of original drawings by an incredibly diverse and talented assortment of artists, thousands of period illustrations now in the public domain and word stamps expressing succinct, pithy thoughts/sayings on any imaginable subject. Many stampers also like to carve their own stamps, utilizing extremely sharp craft knives and blocks of an ‘eraser'-like rubber material, and luckily only a few of them wind up being referred to as “Ol’ Nine-finger”. The beauty of rubberstamping is that this staggering multiplicity of material can be and often is all mixed together in remarkable ways. (Get it? “Re-markable”? Ho-ho! Where do we come up with this stuff? We are killing ourselves!)

Once you have this gigantic box of incredible rubber images smack in the middle of your room, you might want to consider actually stamping them onto a card or something. You will enter the bewildering world of inkpads, markers and other color media. Inks come in two basic types: transparent and opaque. Transparent inks themselves are either water- or dye-based, and both have advantages in different applications. Water-based are easy to clean up after, dry very quickly and come in a wide range of brilliant colors; but can be fragile in their color-stability and may dissolve during subsequent processes in the completion of the piece. Some dye-based are considered archival and much preferred in work that is intended to be permanent. Depending on the porosity of the paper, dye inks may need to be force-dried before proceeding.

Opaque, or pigment inks will never dry until ‘heatset’, so neglecting this important step will cause all your art to stick together in a big clump in your portfolio. The most dense of these is known as craft ink and is similar to printers’ ink in its viscosity and permanence. It can be used to stamp onto fabric, and is washable4. It is this very quality of being opaque that makes these inks so useful, for the artist can mix various degrees of opaqueness and transparency in the same piece for highly dramatic results.

The surface of the paper you choose is something else you’ll need to make a decision about. Matte papers absorb ink quickly and allow you to work rapidly, but can have a tendency to dull out the colors. Glossy stock, on the other hand, maximizes the color intensity but must often be handled carefully because of the time needed to dry the inks thoroughly. Inky fingerprints all over the place can, unless intended, be distracting and toss you right back into ‘Really Deep Trouble This Time’.

Besides the ubiquitous hot-air dryer, stampers inevitably also acquire collections of different gizmos such as scissors, brayers, simple drafting equipment, various adhesives, and multiple painting tools. And this is in addition to the array of liquid and dry media available: acrylic glazes and binders, finishing varnishes, stains, and embossing powders and glitters in a mind-numbing variety of colors, weights and sheens. (It is a deservedly well-guarded secret that enough glitter can automatically fix any mistake.)

Technical Techniques (Caution: this gets technical)

Ok. You’ve got a stamp in one hand, an inkpad in the other and a blank piece of paper lying there on the table screaming at you to hurry up and stamp something, already. Gently put the stamp down and take the cover off the pad. Pick the stamp back up and tap it onto the now-open pad until it (the stamp) is evenly covered with ink5. Press the inked stamp onto your paper and apply even pressure over the entire mount. Allow the stamp to become one with the art. Let this be the one time in your life when you do not rock. Lift straight up and gasp at your cleverness and skill. Repeat as desired. Depth can be created by re-stamping without re-inking: the image will fade off into the background like the Lone Ranger. Clean the stamp with a very mild soap and water as soon as possible, for many of the dye inks will stain and so shorten the life of the rubber.

For the truly self-flagellating, it is a common technique to paint the individual colors onto the die with ink marker or acrylic paint. This will give you amazing stamped images, but you must clean the die even more immediately than when you use an inkpad.

In many cases, “separate but equal” impressions of individual stamps is sufficient for a project. Some artists, though, like it hard. If you would like to overlap images so that one appears to be sneaking up behind the other and saying “Boo!”, then you will need to make a mask. Stamp the image on a scrap piece of thin paper and cut it out, trimming all edges just slightly smaller than the outline. Then stamp the image again ‘for real’ and make sure it is dry. Stick the copy onto the ‘for real’ image with a little low-tack adhesive (Post-its™ work great if the image is small enough), making sure the edges line up correctly. Stamp the next image partially onto the mask, and remove the mask when dry. The second design will appear to be behind the first, and your friends will buy you a cheap dinner to celebrate. The forward-thinking stamper will file these masks away for future use; and you would be wise to emulate them. Some projects we have undertaken have utilized over 100 masks - be aware of how they accumulate, layer by layer, as you design more and more complex scenarios.

Two more techniques for the adventuresome stamp artist are: creating a reverse of the chosen design, and embossing. A reverse image is stunningly simple once you have a blank stamp, also known as a reversing block. This is a smooth, unetched die onto which you stamp your image as normal. Immediately stamp the reversing block onto your artwork to achieve the desired result. You may need to exhale lightly on the reversed image before stamping in order to keep the ink moist. Experiment on a separate piece of similar paper until you are comfortable with the process, and be sure to clean the blank between each impression.

Embossing is another simple technique with impressive rewards. While the ink is still damp on the paper, sprinkle it with the embossing powder[s]. Then heat evenly with your handy hot-air gun. The powder will melt and give your creation the same three-dimensional effect you’ve often admired on business cards. With all the available powder colors, the hardest thing will be to pick you want the most before you fuse it permanently to your art.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Having succumbed to the potential addiction, you’re gonna wanna know, Where do I get all this stuff? Money is burning a hole in my pocket so bad I feel like dancing! Ooo! Shake my bootie! Fear not: there are almost as many sources for rubberstamps as there are for dead-flesh burgers at McDonald’s™ with all the fixin’s. Well, ok: maybe not that many. But it wasn’t too long ago that it seemed like it in California. The rubberstamp phenomenon seized the West Coast of the US in a manner frighteningly similar to the stranglehold Wim Wenders fans have on the throat of the world.

As the market has diversified, it has changed. Many small local stores have sold their inventory and slipped off into the night in search of good food, snug lodgings and a steady income. But many remain, dedicated to an artform that is still attracting practitioners. Check your local listings for availability and showtimes. Contrariwise, stamps companies have sprung up all over the Internet at an amazing rate, and many now offer online-ordering as well as the more universal mail-order. Some of the (we think) coolest include but are not limited to:

You should check them out. Allow lots and lots of time for it.

You will also find a brisk trade going on in Internet auction sites such as eBay, and you should make a point of attending a Stamp Show at least once in your life. Similar to fan conventions for, say, Star Trek or The Beatles, stamp shows allow you - the consuming public - to mingle and hobnob with others of your dysfunction. Vendors display new wares and demonstrate new techniques; free classes in various stamping skills are offered; old and new friends congregate; money changes many hands and budgets are blown; and everyone comments on how absolutely wretched the choices at the snack bar are. Once you find yourself acquiring decorative clothing that you will wear only to stamp shows, you will know that you have arrived at the Big Time.

Finally, you should find a copy of one of the stamp journals available at more interesting bookshops and newsstands. These magazines are filled with useful information about new products and stamp companies, news related to the stamping community, and normally include artwork contributed by readers. The advertisements throughout are also a tremendous source of information and inspiration once you get over the ones you absolutely loathe. Three of the best include:Somerset Studio (covers a broad selection of the paper arts), Vamp Stamp News, and the grandparent of them all, Rubberstampmadness. Enjoy.

Outlets For Your Inspired Outputs

Flashes of Inspiration

And so there you are: piles of terrific art cluttering up the hallway and filling up the cupboards. Now what? Well, when you have no more wall space of your own, you could always fill up the walls and refrigerators at your parents' house. Or your children’s. Donate it to an organization for a fund-raiser. Give it away - you’ll soon fill up the empty portfolios with newer stuff you’ll like better anyway. Be extremely cautious about selling your work: most stamp companies retain the copyright on their inventory and maintain rigorous restrictions on the profiteering of their customers. Always check out their guidelines first.

Ask around at stamp shows, and you’ll almost certainly find an 'exchange' going on that you can get yourself invited to participate in. These are a random gathering of artists who create a single piece within a given theme (Tarot, I Ching, artist homage, etc.), send multiple copies of it to a central ‘hostess’6 for collating, and receive back a complete set of all the art created. It is a wonderful way to meet like-minded people and spread the art around, as well as keeping postal workers constructively occupied.

Most of the magazines listed in the ‘resources’ section above solicit contributions for their covers and/or internal articles. Best of luck: it is a memorable day when you telephone that ‘Someone Special’ to let them know your artwork is going to be on the cover of a magazine they’ve never heard of. And several of the Internet stamp companies above have online galleries specifically for guest artists to showcase the extraordinary work you can do with stamps from these self-same Internet stamp companies.

And in Retaliation, er, Summation:

So, in retaliation, er, summation, it would not be surprising to discover that no one ever finishes this article because they’ve had to dash out to the stamp store right this very minute; or kept surfing through the links above ‘till the power company shut off the electricity because the bills got all neglected and not paid. While the tentative initial investment can easily be kept under control, the collecting of really cool stamps plus the satisfaction of creating your own art is addictive enough to necessitate the following warning which can be handily posted on the refrigerator with a darling little magnet: No Stamps Until The Rent Is Paid! (if I can help it).

Embrace the compulsion. Make it your friend.

1While the resources referred to in this article relate to the US predominantly, ‘Really Deep Trouble This Time’ respects no international boundaries and applies to the UK as well. The sources are out there. Thank you for your attention to this detail.2A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim3A popular method of attaching dies to mounts uses Velcro so that a few mounts can accommodate many dies, a boon for the short-of-space art studio.4The same attention to cause-and-effect informs us that water can be wet.5An innovative variation on this is to tap the pad onto the stamp. Experiment.6Or ‘host’, as the case may rarely be.

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