Making Your Own Rubber Stamps

A couple of years ago I went to a UK ATCsforall gathering and we learned above carving your own rubber stamps.


All you need is a cheap set of lino cutting tools and material to carve.


There are three materials that can be used
1. - lino
2. Speedycarve - this is sold in a set with some cutting tools
3. Really cheap pencil erasers ( I got mine from our local Tesco supermarket, about 40p for a pack of two).

So I decided it was time to try this out.

I wanted a set of stamps that I could use in art journalling - simple words that could be a jumping off point.

First I drew up my letters in a ruled rectangle the size of the finished stamp and then traced it.

Then I turned the tracing over and used the reverse as the template traced onto the carving material I was using for carving the stamps. (You have to reverse the letters so they read the correct way round!)

The first material was traditional lino; I cut the stamp with a variety of tools and left some of the background for a grungy look.

I just used an ordinary stamp pad (a Tim Holtz Distress Ink Pad in Antique Linen) to test the stamp.


Then I used some rectangular erasers and transferred the words from the original drawings in the same way and carved out the stamps, again using the lino cutting tools.

The erasers are really easy to carve as they are very soft, but it is a bit fiddly working on such a small scale.

Finally I tried to make a logo out of my user name intitals - redplantlady-  so I carved RPL in Speedy Carve.

I used all the stamps as a page in  my Art Journal Prompts Journal, using  a Tim Holtz's Distress Ink Pad again  - Vintage Photo this time -  and I can then go on to use the stamps in my journals.