With a little bit of help from my son, I did a quick tutorial on how I carve stamps. There are tons of videos on how to carve stamps (plus I had no more room on my phone!), so I whizzed through this tutorial. I used a very simple die cut shape in this tutorial, for speed purposes, but the same concepts apply to a more intricate design, as well. In that case, you would want to use the smaller carving blades. Even with the smaller blades tho, it will still have that “carved” look. That is, curved edges aren’t quite as smooth as manufactured stamps, straight lines tend to be a bit wobbly, and there are usually stray pieces of carved rubber sticking up so you get additional, ghost lines in your image. I tend to like all of that, so I loved carved stamps!
I have been experimenting with adding texture to my carved stamps, so I wanted to show how I make polka dot texture on my carved stamp in this tutorial.
Also, I don’t think I mentioned it in the video, but when I am fiddling around trying out textures, I used a little piece of the block to test it out first, before trying it on my carved stamp.
Here is my finished stamp with texture next to my tester piece:
