Pigment ink pad makeover

Hello Friends,

Today, I am here with one of my experiment. For years, I am using Clearsnap Color Box Pigment inks. I love their inks...very creamy and awesome colors. My first purchase was Petal point Optional pad and after that I bought many Mini pads, CAt's eye and reinkers. I was a loyal and happy stamper for many years. But in last 3 years I replaced many of the pads as they started deflating turning into a mushy lump of ink and foam.  I wrote to them too about my problem and they replaced some of the pads too. But with in a year they all went flat again. As I have many reinkers, I started looking for empty pads but could't find any. At that time I came across this Cut-n-Dry foam by Ranger. 

See How they are turning flat.

Soak all the pads in water overnight & remove the foam. What ever you see is the adhesive and ink stuck on it which cant be removed but it is not going to stain the new foam as it is dry .

The foam comes in a big sheet .

Cut the foam in 1" wide strips. See how it is made of two types of foam. We need the white layer.

Peel the white foam carefully. The density of white layer is perfect for pigment inks & thickness of it is exact same as my original Colorbox Mini Pad.  

                                       

Cut it into appropriate size and adhere them on the base with strong adhesive. Leave them overnight to dry.

Add ink from reinker till they are soaked properly and your brand new pads are ready to go.

Hope this will help you.

Altenew - Vintage Roses - Stamp Talk

Hi friends,

Some time back, I took part in Altenew challenge & won $20 from them ( isn't that cool!). I bought this Vintage Roses set. Finally, I got chance to experiment with it.

I love pigment inks & i have many shades of colorbox inks. But unfortunately, the pads are de-flatting  so fast lately. So it was time to switch inks for me. I gave try to Wplus9 dye inks and  fell in love with them. 

So coming to the point.... i tried stamping these roses in pigment, dye & archival inks. I got best results with dye inks. I like pigment inks too but layering images were little difficult as these inks are opaque. Somehow, don't like working with archival inks.

My take away from this experiment:

  * Stamp quality is excellent & the way they have designed layers for Roses is just awesome. I was little disappointed with leaves though. It takes 11 images to make a cluster of five leaves. That was tedious & the grouping for leaves is confusing too (at least for me).

 * Build your layers from darker to lighter as Tasnim showed it here & use this reference sheet to align your stamps.

 * Dye ink works best for this set but you need various shades of same colour. 

 * Build all the layers with similar ink only. I tried stamping 2 layers with dye and one with archival which didn't work (2 yellow roses in bottom right corner).

 * I tried stamping with pigment inks too. I like that too but you have to build your layers from light to dark for sharper contrast as these are opaque inks. (In below image - two pink roses in bottom left corner...they are stamped with same inks but first one was dark to light while second one light to dark)

* You can build layers with only one ink & second and third generation stamping. The one at the bottom with mama elephant pigment ink - lollipop. For this method, pigment inks work better than dye inks because they dry slower and you have enough pigments left on stamp for second and third generation stamping.

All in all I LOVE this set. With little practice, roses were easy to align and final result is breathtakingly beautiful!