Most stamping techniques aren’t hard, but they can seem intimidating until you try them. This is one of those techniques. Let’s break this down into steps, so you can see just how easy this can be.

1. Start with the shadow stamp. (This is a stamp with a solid shape like a square or rectangle or circle on it.) Choose a pigment ink that’s very light. Do a test stamp first to make sure the ink is light enough to stamp over. This particular image was stamped three times, reversing top and bottom each time. If you have a bigger stamp, you won’t need to stamp it multiple times, but this was the effect I was looking for.

2. For the main image, choose a stamp with a solid surface, not an outline.

3. Choose dye inks for the main image stamp. If you have small ink pads, that will make it easier to keep the colors separate, but the normal sized ink pads will work as well. If you turn your stamp upside down, you’ll be able to see where you’ve inked, and where you haven’t more clearly.

4. After you’ve applied your dye ink to your stamp, very lightly stamp in onto a piece of scrap paper, and then stamp it firmly onto your shadow block image.

5. Finish up the image however you want. In this case, I trimmed the image, inked the edge, and mounted it onto a couple pieces of patterned paper, with a piece of ribbon and rhinestones to finish it off.

It really is that easy to do. Try it! You’ll like it!

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