An Image for your Rubber Stamp

For me, the biggest challenge of carving a rubber stamp is coming up with a stamp design.  When you first start out, you're usually looking for something that looks easy to carve, but as you gain confidence in your carving prowess you look for images that provide more of a challenge.  Finally, you look for images that are really pretty; it doesn't matter how impressive the carving job is if the image is ugly.

If you are making a personal "signature" rubber stamp for letterboxing, remember that some of the logbooks you'll be stamping into will be pretty small.  If your signature stamp is large, sooner or later you'll have to stamp just one edge or corner of it into a small logbook.  You might think about your design, and consider how you would use your stamp to stamp into a small logbook.  For example, if you include your trail name in the design, you'll probably want that to appear in the logbook, and that'll be easier if your name appears towards one side or one corner rather than right in the center.

There are two ways to obtain images suitable for carving into rubber stamps: draw them yourself, or find existing artwork of someone else's and adapt it for use.


DRAWING YOUR OWN

If you have any modicum of artistic talent, you should definitely try your hand at drawing images.  For some reason, being rendered in rubber seems to make relatively simple designs look good.  Things that look like mediocre scribblings in pencil on notebook paper can actually end up looking quite impressive as rubber stamp images.  If you're carving rubber stamps for letterboxing, you can also draw unique images to fit each location for your letterboxes.


FINDING AN IMAGE

I personally have the artistic flair of a mechanical engineer.  Although I have drawn a few of my own designs for stamps, what I generally do is log on to the internet, go to www.google.com, select "image search", select "advanced image search", and tell it I want to look for GIF files only.  Type in whatever keywords you want and see what it comes up with.  Make sure you "click to see full-size image".  Try to avoid using images that will obviously bring on copyright or trademark concerns.

You're looking for a design that involves solid blocks of a single color.  Narrow straight lines are difficult to carve (you have to cut away both sides, leaving a constant width if you want it to look right) and curved lines are even harder.  Note that sometimes you can cheat and carve a "negative", leaving the background solid and cutting away the design instead of the other way around.  That makes lines a little easier, since you're just cutting a narrow groove.

It is tempting to specify "black and white" images only for that Google image search.  I've found it's better to let it search for color images, though, for three reasons:  1) you often find images with multiple colors that you can readily alter to make a black-and-white design;  2) you sometimes find images that are just one color, but it's not black; and 3) you'd be amazed how many black-and-white images on the web are actually saved as color image files.

In fact, you might choose not to specify GIF files only.  By including JPG and other filetypes in the search, you'll find more usable images.  The only problem is that you'll also get a lot of unusable photographs to wade through.

When you find an image you like, save it to your hard drive (right-click on the image itself, if you're using a PC).  You may then need to tweak the design some.  Using some sort of photo editing software, you may need to remove some features, draw stuff in, change several colors into one color (you only have one color to work with!), etc., etc.   You might also opt to modify designs enough that they will scarcely be recognizable as based on someone else's original image.

One quick modification is to mirror-image the original artwork.  However, note a couple of things to watch out for.  If there is any text in the image, obviously you don't want that mirror-imaged.  If you mirror-image a car, the steering wheel may end up on the wrong side, or it can end up driving on the wrong side of the road.  A person doing something with his hands may suddenly look like a lefty.

You can try finding an option to "Decrease Color Depth" and convert the image to a 2-color image.  Actually, what often works better is to reduce the color depth to 16 colors, and then open the image in MS Paint and use the "Fill With Color" feature to change the color of entire sections of the image at one time.  Besides allowing you to manually choose which areas will be black and which will be white, having 16 colors also allows you to use colors other than black and white as "placeholders".  For example, you can convert a white area to red, convert an adjacent black area to white, then convert the red area to black.

Another thing you can do with a GIF file is to edit the palette.  You can selectively change each color in the original image to either black or white until you end up with the image you're looking for.  It's a good idea to decrease the color depth to 16 colors before doing this, otherwise you'll be having to edit 256 colors on that palette.

Eventually you probably will want to open the image in MS Paint and manually white out some stray marks and otherwise clean it up.  Of course, you can forget about that and just ignore the stray marks when carving the rubber if you prefer.

Besides the Google search, there are several other methods of obtaining images that have worked for me.  If you have a flatbed scanner, you can scan anything you can find -- either around the house, in your junk mail, or at the public library.

Note that things you can scan on a flatbed scanner include a lot more than printed images on paper.  You can often successfully scan solid objects.  Lay a key on it, or your watch, or perhaps a Christmas ornament.  The pictures of the packages of Speedy-Stamp and MasterCarve on the materials page were made by laying them on a flatbed scanner.

Another idea is to carry around a digital camera, and when you see some artwork on a road sign or the side of a truck that would make a good rubber stamp, just take a picture of it.

Photo of crayfish on sign

Crayfish stamp image (US quarter for scale)
You can do this with a film camera if you have a scanner; just lay the print on the scanner.  Scanning a film print will result in a higher-quality digital picture than you will obtain directly from any but the very best digital cameras, but you have to pay for the film and the developing and there's the wait involved.


MAKING ARTWORK FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

It's also possible to convert an ordinary photograph into suitable art for making a rubber stamp.  The following are some ideas on how to do this.  Note that sometimes you have to open the file in one software package, do one step, then save and reopen it in a different software package to use some other feature.  If you start with a JPEG file, you might find that converting it into a GIF or a TIF is a good idea because it may be easier to manually edit with the software you have.

You can try increasing the contrast drastically, making everything either black or white.  If too much stuff is either black or white, start over and adjust the brightness first, then try boosting the contrast again.

Sometimes a software package gives you more options.  MicroSoft Photo Editor actually has a function called "stamp" which will automagically convert any photograph into something that might be carvable into a rubber stamp, but it may ends up unrecognizable.  Sometimes it helps to do some fiddling with the photo before applying the stamp function, such as trimming away all the background stuff.  The good news: if you get this method to actually work, you'll end up with a really unique design; the finished image is often reminiscent of really stylized artwork.

1939 Chevrolet Coupe Photograph

1939 Chevrolet Coupe photo after MS Photo Editor "stamp" function

1939 Chevrolet Coupe stamp image (US quarter for scale)


OUTLINES

One idea that's worth pondering is the notion that the image prepared doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the final image intended for the stamp.  It could merely be a guideline of sorts, something that tells you where to carve.  One example: you might consider generating an image on the computer that shows just the outline of the final image.  In other words, it shows where to cut.  This requires a bit more thought when carving, because you must mentally note which areas are supposed to end up inked (and therefore the rubber is to remain) and which areas are not (and therefore the rubber gets cut away).  Printing the image on paper first and coloring it in may help clarify which areas should be cut away.

Consider downloading Irfanview (free!).  Irfanview is a graphic viewing/editing package with a feature called "edge detection".  You start with a photograph, hit the button, and it shows you a black screen with all the edges of the objects in the photo shown in white.  Then hit "negative" and you end up with a neat little black-line drawing of whatever was in the photo.  If you begin with a really clear photo image, you can be ready to print in seconds!  In most cases you'll still want to clean it up a little first, but it works really well.

Spitfire Photograph

Spitfire Outline

Spitfire Stamp Image (US quarter for scale)

Using this method, you may find it helpful to edit a photograph before applying the edge detection.  Let's say there's a feature in the photo that you can make out, but the computer barely notices it when doing the edge detection and therefore leaves you with a blank area or a faint smudge.  Before doing the edge detection, you can edit the photo by simply manually drawing lines right where you want them, as though you're outlining or highlighting the features.  Sure, the photo looks silly -- but now when you do the edge detection step, it'll find bright, crisp edges -- the edges of the lines you drew.

Finally, there's the manual method of outlining.  Using MS Paint, open a photograph.  Looking over the photo, choose a color that doesn't appear in the photo as your color to draw with.  Then draw lines over top of the photo.  Save periodically, making sure to save as a BMP file; if you save as a JPG, you'll lose image quality with each save.

When you're done drawing lines all over the photo, save the BMP file and reopen it in Irfanview.  Select Image/Decrease Color Depth and tell it to decrease the number of colors to 16.  Then select Image/Palette/Edit Palette and double-click on each color and change it to white, except for your selected color; change that one to black.  Save that resulting image as a TIF file.

This is a very time-consuming process; you're basically tracing the image digitally.  But it allows you to ignore what you want to ignore and add stuff in if you want.  If you left some lines out, it's easy enough to go back to the BMP file, add them in, and do the palette editing over again.


IMAGE SIZE

As long as the image is on the computer, you can choose to make your rubber stamp any size you'd like -- or whatever size fits the piece of rubber you have on hand.  I recommend starting with big designs, like 2" square or larger.  It's easier to make a big design look good.  It takes skill to make a 1" x 2" (eraser size) rubber stamp look impressive, and more skill yet with something really tiny.

Regardless of your carving skills, you'll always find that some images are too intricate and too detailed to be carved too small.  What may be less obvious is that some images can be made too large; some things that look really cute when they're tiny just don't look as good when they're made bigger.  It may be helpful to print the image out on paper in a few different sizes so you can look them over before you decide how large to make your rubber stamp.





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