Stamp With Acrylic Paint on Kraft Tex or Textile. Alone or With a Whole Classroom

Recently I wanted to make a linocut but, as with many other things, there was no linoleum or carving block for sale on the island. Ordering abroad takes a lot of time, is expensive and with sea freight it quickly takes five weeks before it arrives, so that was not an option.

Years ago in the Netherlands, I bought a pack of rubber craft sheets for children, thinking that it always comes in hand, and it did. With these sheets you can make reasonably good stamps.

Making stamps with this material is also great fun to do with children and not as dangerous as using linoleum because everything can be cut with small scissors, as long as you keep the design simple.

Draw or copy a drawing. If you just starts making stamps don't make the drawing too small, the smaller it is the harder it is to cut. Do not design too many details with this material.

Once you like the drawing, transfer it to tracing paper. The drawing on tracing paper is used to put the image on the rubber sheet.

Place the tracing paper with the drawing down on the rubber sheet. Rub your thumb over the drawing, this will transfer it to the rubber. Don’t use a pencil for this because it will tier the tracing paper. Lift up the paper a little bit every now and then to see if the drawing is transferring properly, but be careful that the paper does not move. 

When the entire design is on the rubber, you can make the lines a bit clearer if necessary by tracing them again with a pencil. Do not press too hard on the pencil as this will damage the rubber sheets quite easily.

Cut a new rubber sheet to the same size as the plywood plate and then stick it on the plate. This will become the base of the stamp. This base ensures firmness of the final stamp, do not make the base much larger than the stamp itself.

Cut out the drawing and stick the cut out pieces on the base.

The main lines of the stamp are now fixed. To get more details in the drawing you can cut away some material, this can be done with an X-acto knife, omit this step with children. When the stamp is ready, I first make a test print, an adjustment can then be made easily without your actual workpiece becoming unusable.

I looked at what the simplest method is if you do not have lino tools and came to the following method.

On a dish I mixed a little bit of acrylic paint with fabric painting medium, ratio 2:1. I then applied the paint to the stamp with a brush. This way of working ensures that multiple colors can easily be applied to the stamp. It takes a while to try out how much paint you have to use, too little and the stamp is sparse, too much and the stamp silts up. Because the material is very soft and therefore makes some impression with stamping, too little paint is better than too much. Do not press the stamp too hard on the fabric. If necessary, the print can be touched up with a small brush. 

When stamping, it turned out that the design of flower was too complex for textiles and not clear, as you can see on the picture. The design of the hummingbird was good. I choose to print the octopus on Kraft Tex and the hummingbird on a tank top. After printing, I made a bag from the pieces of Kraft Tex that I had left. 

With children it is fun to stamp T-shirts so that they can all wear their own work. If you stamp on a T-shirt (or other piece of clothing), place a piece of cardboard under the fabric of the part you want to stamp, in that way you only stamp the part that you want to stamp.

Clean all your brushes and paint trays immediately after stamping.

Because the stamp is made on textile, the paint still has to be fixed so that the fabric can also be washed.

Once the paint is dry, the print can be fixed by heating the print for 30 seconds with an iron, as hot as your fabric can tolerate. I cover the print with a piece of kitchen paper when ironing, if there is still wet paint, it will not reach the iron.

After Ironing the stamp is almost solid, you have to wait two weeks before it can be washed. Wash preferably on a low temperature and a short program.

Happy stamping!