How to Use Stamps in Scrapbooking

Rubber stamps are so versatile for the use of scrapbooking. They are fun and inexpensive.

Above all: stamps allow you to create many scrapbooking styles and vignets, in a flash. Plus they can be used with other media and techniques.

The more often you use them, it seems that the more versatile they become, as they stimulate your ever growing creative virtue.

Female Head with Stamps Andy Warhol

6 Basic Stamping Styles (or Functions of Stamps)

1. Stamping with Solids for Quick Stamp Results
   Solid stamps create a complete impression that requires no additional coloring.

2. Outline Stamp Designs for a Coloring Job
   In contrast to solids, outline stamps create a detiled or refined image that you can color with pencils, markers, or chalks.

3. Using Shadow Stamps to Define Areas
   These stamps look like plain color blocks. These are best to use in combination. Shadow stamps make an impression that defines an area on your page. Other outline stamps or solids can be overlaid. Or images can be layered on top.

4. Make a Fringe or Image Border with Stamps
   Fringe stamps are embellished shape outlines. They can be filled with outline or solid stamps, or a photo.

5. Creating Page Borders with Rolling Stamps
   Rolling stamps can be used for anything that require a repetitive design.

6. Creating Backgrounds with large Background Stamps
   Ideal to cover large surfaces, background stamps are used.

Buying Stamps

When building your collection of stamps, try to have create a mixture of compatible stamps that have different functions as per these 6 options.

Stamp Inks

There are two types of stamp inks. The first type of ink is dye ink. This type dries very fast on paper. These dyes do tend to bleed a bit on porous paper and other surfaces. The other type of ink is pigment ink. Pigment ink takes slightly longer to dry, however it does not bleed. Instead, it will leave clean, crisp lines. Wow.

Getting Started and Advancing with Scrapbooking

Now start with just 1 stamp and 1 dye ink. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Once you gain some beautiful designs with this basic set, you are ready to move on and add more stamps or more colors. You will find that if you build your scrapbooking skills up in this way, you’ll never get overwhelmed in options. You can have fun while you learn how to best use the stamps. And almost immediately, you’ll get better and more sophisticated results by keeping it simple.

Stamps ~ they are so easy, even Warhol use them !!

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