Beautiful DIY digital stamps


I recently purchased a lovely stamp of a young woman on the move.  She was vintage image circa 1920’s and I fell in love with her.  There were several others, which I would have like to have purchased but at 14.00 a stamp it was only one to be bought that day. 

Here is a picture and a card! 
 

 

Then I happened to come across a whole book of these great images…
 
 

To make a long story short This book contained 300+ similar images to the one I had just purchased and it was 9.99 including shipping!  Permission free designs!
This stamp and book prompted me to write this blog post.
I've been using Dover art  (public domain images) since I was in high school in the 70's.  I used it  in the 90's for art submission to a company in Texas, and they made many of there stamps from there.  Companies are still using public domain art work for rubber stamp production.  Magenta has been using it (public domain images) for years and the new LaBlanche stamps uses public domain art work for their beautiful art stamps.

pub·lic do·main  

Noun
  1. The state of belonging or being available to the public as a whole.
  2. Not subject to copyright.
 
There are many Dover books with CD's, I have the one above, one of flower illustrations (this one makes great digital stamps, it is like a fancy coloring book!), Tress and leaves, Japanese stencils, Chinese lattice,  and Victorian frames and borders.
They were all under 25.00  and there is at least 1800 images.
 
here is an example:
The stamp and the digital.  Now with the digital I can also change the size and flip the image.  I did notice after I took this picture, my stamp girl is holding a purse, and my digital is holding a jump rope.  easy enough to fix:
 
I used Paint in my pc and removed the rope, I can stamp in a purse of flowers or basket  or whatever suits me at the time.  She prints up great.
 
There is a trick to that too, and that is the file type!  Here is an excerpt on files:

 

FILE FORMATS
TIF files are compatible with most operating systems and are widely used in commercial and professional applications. Although TIF files tend to be large, they are a good choice if you want to use the images for cards, brochures, letters, or other print work.
JPEG and GIF files are the formats most often used on the Internet.
EPS is a file format used by PostScript printers. Although many EPS file are vector-based, bit-mapped images, such as these, can also be saved as EPS files.
PICT and BMP files are useful if you have older software. BMP is a Windows format; PICT, a Macintosh format.
I thought that was interesting and now I am sure to use tif files, because it really does make a difference!
Another thing to remember with these images, often you must lighten them up  - that depends on your printer.  Mine loves go heavy on the ink, so I adjust the "light"  making the image brighter and with more contrast.  This isn't every image. but many of them.  It is a simple step it only takes an extra minute.
 
Can you tell which is digital and which is rubber?  I know bad photo, the lighting is tough in here at night.


Here I have colored an image with alcohol markers!

I highly suggest you try adding a few public domain images to your stamp collection.  Whether purchasing them from dove or find them on the Internet, you'll never be caught with out the right image again!!
Thanks for stopping by!
Ginny M

Comments

lylacamaya said…
Great post! I love Dover books. I have quite a few in my collection. I use the images for digi stamping too.

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