Inking

I'm going to respond to a comment I received from Jenn on my Stamps post from a few days ago. I'm no expert stamper, but I do love to experiment, play and use stamps and I do have quite the collection of stamps.

Jenn Said: Oooh... good post. I love stamps too. My favorite cling stamp brand so far is HeroArts. I find their impressions are the most like rubber stamps. Sometimes other brands do not seem to work well with any inks I use. The ink beads up and changes the stamped image. Thoughts? Am I doing something wrong? I am dying to get some Unity stamps.

I have found when I use my Distress Inks the ink sometimes beads up or will give the look of water color (not crisp lines, rather bleeds into the page). I think the bleeding / sinking into the paper could be partly the paper thought sometimes.

I personally use Ranger Distress Inks or ColorBox Fluid Chalk inkpads. I sometimes use StazOn but personally wasn't a huge fan (maybe I need to use it more). As I was creating my demo stamp sheet, I realized my StazOn was dried out - so I didn't use this inkpad in my experiment.

Usually when I buy new stamps and before I use them, I clean them off with a wet / damp rag. I don't know why I do this, maybe to clean anything that could possibly get on them during the production process.

Also, sometimes I find that sometimes stamps have an almost oily feel to them sometimes, I feel that this contributes to the beading of the ink.

Here are some examples of stamping I played around with to show off the different inks I have at home in my stash. I used Color Box Fluid Chalk inkpad, Ranger Distress Ink & Memento.

This is the supplies I used. One set of stamps are brand new, never been used. I used Prism Cardstock for my stamping base.

Here is the example page of the inks with a variety of stamps.
I found that the

1. Distress Ink did just that, distressed the image. It didn't give a CLEAN, crisp image. But it didn't BLEED into the page as I thought it would. Sometimes it does this depending on the paper I use.
2. ColorBox Fluid Chalk - This had the sharpest images. I felt that it stamped a clean, crisp, seamless image for the most part.
3. Memento - This is a BRAND new inkpad, I opened it to use on this demo. I purchased it to use with my copic pens that I just recently purchased (yesterday). this stamped very well, but not as crisp as the colorbox ink. Very close though.
   

Today I also labeled my Distress Ink - ink pads. My collection is starting to grow and I'm always digging through my stack to find the color I want. I got this idea from the Ranger blog.

Happy Sunday!