I received a number of emails asking about the Vancouver Island Rubber Stamp 2010 Christmas card, so here is a brief tutorial on the creation of these cards.
Materials – three colours of paper, three custom rubber stamps, stamp pad, double sided tape, 3D tape squares, coloured pencils, tortillion, mineral spirits. The three stamps consist of one for the inside greeting, and two for the front of the card – the “ribbon” text and the reindeer. A tortillion is a tightly wound stick of paper which was used with the mineral spirits to blend the wax based coloured pencils.
After making the stamps, I headed to Scrapbook Parade where they kindly (and patiently) directed me through the bewildering variety of papers so I could select the perfect colours for the card. I couldn’t decide which I liked best, so ended up making two versions – brown background and red background. The red paper is silver (light grey) on the back, so when folded, provides a nice light background for the inside greeting.
The 12″ x 12″ beige card stock was cut to 4″ wide so it could be folded into a 4″ x 6″ card. The inside greeting was stamped using black regular stamp pad ink.
To ensure a perfectly straight image, I placed a border on the stamp that was used on the red “ribbon”. After stamping, the border was trimming off and the paper was affixed to the card using double sided tape.
The 3″ x 3″ green paper was applied using three 3D dots. This gave the card a dimensional look and produced a shadow under the green square.
After stamping the image of the reindeer with his garland of stamps, I was ready to get crafty. Four coloured pencils were used – red, green, brown and grey.
The grey was blended with brown on the antlers to give them a different shade than the body of the reindeer. A tortillion dipped in mineral spirits makes it easy to blend the single colours to create light and dark shading. As shown in this photo, after making an outline with the coloured pencil, the tortillion was used to pull the colour into the center of the image, creating a gentle fade and giving the appearance of highlight and shadows.
Making your own cards is easy to do and a ton of fun! The most time consuming part of the process was deciding what text and images I wanted on the card, and then designing the custom stamps. If you require rubber stamps to create unique cards, please contact me with your ideas.
