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Creating Shadow Stamps for Line Art Images

By Mary Ellen Harrison
Off-Road Inksters
Intermediate Scramping Team Designer

Do you have a lot of line art images that you don’t use much because the coloring takes so long?   I love to make borders and background papers for my scrapbook pages, but I don’t want to spend the time coloring each image.  As a direct result, I developed this technique to streamline the process and hope you find it beneficial in your art work.   In this tutorial, we will be making a custom shadow stamp for your line art image to simplify and speed up the coloring process.  Now that I have made a few of these, I am hooked!!  I really want to make more for my flower and leaf stamps. 

Supplies:

• Swirl Bloom stamp (Hero Arts)
• Large Shadow stamp (CTMH)
• Sketchy Caps (CTMH)
• Sunflower dye ink pad (CTMH)
• Goldrush, Autumn Terracotta, Sunflower markers (CTMH)
• Black StazOn Ink Pad (Tsukineko)
• Watercolor black ink (The Angel Company)
• Sheet of plain red rubber
• Sheet of EZ Mount Foam Cling (TAC)
• Acrylic block
• Water Spritzer
• Tag punches (McGill)
• Stipple brush
• Sponge
• 3” X 9” strip white CS
• 9” X 9” sheet Goldrush CS (CTMH)
• 1” X 9” strip sunflower CS (CTMH)
• 1” X 9” strip black CS
• 4¼” X 6¼” mat in black CS
• Mono Adhesive (TomBow)

Instructions:

1.  Place your block on the red rubber and cut the rubber to that size.   Adhere your piece of cut red rubber to the EZ mount cushion.  

2.  Stamp the swirl bloom stamp with the black StazOn on to the CTMH shadow stamp.  You will be stamping rubber to rubber so that you wind up with an exact image when you stamp instead of a mirror image.   Now place your plain red rubber face down on the inked shadow stamp and press hard.  You are transferring the image from the shadow stamp to the red rubber.   Allow the ink to completely dry. 

3.  Carefully cut the image out of the red rubber piece.  What you will have now is a custom made shadow stamp! 

4.  To make the border for the scrapbook page, stamp the image in black permanent ink randomly all the way down the strip of white card stock.  Place your custom shadow stamp, EZ mount side down on the acrylic block.  Ink up the entire stamp with Sunflower ink.  Now with your markers, go back in and color the center of the flower with Autumn Terracotta and the circle outside of that with the Goldrush marker.  Lightly spritz with water.  Line up the shadow stamp with the black outline image and stamp.  Repeat this process until you have filled in all of the stamped flowers outlines.  Stipple the white card stock around the flowers and then sponge the edges with Goldrush coloring.  To achieve this, scribble the marker on a foam plate or acrylic block.  Pick up color with a stipple brush and pounce the color onto the surface of the cardstock.  For a thinner, lighter color, spritz the scribbled color with a fine mist before dressing the stipple brush with color. 

5.  Stamp COUSINS in the upper left corner using the CTMH Sketchy Caps set and black ink.  Tear the sunflower strip and attach to the stamped piece.  Attach the black strip to this piece and adhere the entire thing to the 9 X 9 Sunflower cardstock.   

6.  Attach the picture to the black mat and adhere this to the page using Mono Adhesive.  

7.  Punch black and sunflower tags with the McGill punches.  Stamp the date with black ink.  Add an eyelet and string with jute.  Attach this to the lower right hand corner of the photograph using Mono Adhesive, and you are done!! 

You can make this even simpler by using a single color of ink on the custom shadow stamp. 

If you would like to print this technique including a near-full size image of the layout, click here.  Once you've saved or printed the technique sheet, use your browser's back button to return.

Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to obtain this file.  If you do not have Adobe Acrobat, click here to download and install.