One of my favorite digital products are stamps. They can be used as-is or can be altered to suit your page design. Let me show you some ways to alter a few stamps. I will be using these products:
Lynne-Marie – Artsy Bits 03 M3 Oct
Allision Pennington – Touches for Finishing
Paula Kesselring – Transfers Add-On M3 August 2016
Using a stamp from Artsy Bits 03 (labeled in the sample), I duplicated it twice, changing the blend mode, which changes the look of the stamp. Then I used the original stamp and the two duplicates, resizing, recoloring and rotating them, to create the four borders. Each of them looks very different from the others yet they have been created with the same stamp. The other two stamps in the middle of the sample are duplicates of the original stamp but with different blending modes chosen.
Now let me show you some ways to utilize a few stamps from Touches For Finishing (from April 2013 BYOC).
The squiggle stamp (shown in sample) was recolored with a color overlay and duplicated and warped (stretched out), then placed to create edging around the paper. A triangle stamp was chosen, duplicated numerous times and placed over background in a muted tone to add visual impact to the page but not distracting from the text.
For large stamps/overlays, I often select or remove parts of a stamp, choosing not to use it in its entirety. Often I need to rasterize the stamp layer first (make sure you have selected the stamp layer and then right click, choosing the rasterize layer option). My favorite way to alter/remove parts of a stamp is to use a content-aware fill. Using the lasso tool to make the stamp selection to be removed, in the menu, choose edit>fill, in content box make sure content-aware has been chosen and apply by clicking OK. This will try to blend the chosen selection with the pixels around the lassoed area. It is not always 100% accurate in blending so often times a few smaller selections will need to be made, followed the same steps, to further blend more accurately (seen in sample). Another often used technique is selecting (again with the lasso tool) a section of the stamp and moving it (Control-V key for move shortcut on PC), as seen in the sample below.
For this page, I lassoed and moved parts of 2 large stamps, erased some areas I didn’t need in the lined stamp and recolored one of the scalloped stamps.
Stamps are such a versatile digital product; use your imagination and experiment with them. Try some of my ideas and I bet you’ll become as enamored of stamps as I am, once you find out how easy it is to create so many different looks with them.
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