Make your own stamps out of foam rubber
It’s fun and creative to make your own stamps to print pictures. You can use self-adhesive foam rubber sheets to easily make your own stamps with any design you like. Paint the design with hobby paint and then print it onto a picture or on paper. Make big stamps or small ones. Make them flat or carve designs into the stamp itself. You can save the stamps and use them again and again.
Basically, all you need to do is go for it with your creative ideas!
You will need:
- Self-adhesive sheets of foam rubber
- Hobby paint
- A foam brush
- And last but not least, you need a picture to print on
Instructions:
- Decide the design you want on your stamp. Sketch it out on a piece of paper first.
- Draw the design on the foam and cut round the edges.
- Remove the protective paper on the reverse of the foam rubber and attach your design to something you can print with, like a piece of firm cardboard.
- If you press lines hard down into the foam, e.g. with a hard pencil, no paint will go into the depressed areas when you transfer the design to your picture. See our examples below.
- You can cut out a strip of foam to be a handle for your stamp. Fold it double and attach it to the back of the cardboard.
- Dot paint on the stamp and test printing on a piece of paper first before printing on your painting.
Make your own stamps to print pictures
Foam rubber, or hobby foam, is a classic craft material that’s great fun for children of all ages. You can use it to easily make your own stamps, as shown above.
Combined with the stamped design, you could also cut shapes out of the foam to decorate your picture. The result is even better than just printing with your stamps.
Here we have made a stamp of a sun and a flower. Then we used more foam to cut out leaves, stems and butterflies. And made a centre for each of our flowers.
When you print, the design will appear as a mirror image
Depending on your design, it’s important to remember that it will appear reversed on your picture. If you want to print words using your stamp, you need to write the letters the other way round on your foam stamp, as a mirror image, so they come out the right way round on your picture.
Funny clown with balloons
Here we’ve cut shapes out of different coloured foam and used them to make a funny clown. Then we printed some balloons for our clown using a stamp.
It’s great fun to make your own stamps to print pictures!
Here we’ve made a little picture of a cat. The cat and the clouds are printed with a stamp.
As well as printing designs with stamps, we’ve cut out foam shapes to make grass and a flower.
If you compare the cat stamp and the picture, you can see that the black lines on the stamp are the lines that are pressed down by the pencil and don’t absorb any paint when you transfer the image to the picture.
Make a fun picture with cars on
Here all you need to do is make one stamp with a picture of a car. But if you want the cars to drive in opposite directions, as in this picture, you will need to make two stamps. One stamp with the car facing one way and the other with it facing the other way. We finished off our picture with traffic lights made from foam.
A variety of crafts for kids of all ages
All the material you need to make your own stamps to print pictures is in our range of fun, creative children’s craft kits.
The contents of our kits are designed for different levels of difficulty. This means Club Creo is suitable for children of all ages.
All the kits also contain instructions showing what to do with the materials in the box. And the kits are delivered straight to your home. Sound like a great idea?
Try it for just £5.90!
So that you can try it out and see if you and your child like our idea, you can try your first kit for just £5.90! It doesn’t commit you to anything!
