Tone-on-tone Stamping Tutorial

Stamping onto coloured cardstock with a similar colour ink gives a tone-on-tone effect. You can use this technique to make backgrounds, stamp onto die-cut shapes or die-cut embellishments from stamped pieces. The effect gives your papercraft projects extra depth and allows you to create interesting backgrounds or embellishments to use.

If you stamp onto coloured cardstock with an ink of the same tone you will get a very subtle effect. You can also use an ink which is a few shades darker than the cardstock to make the stamping stand out more. You can use background stamps or use small stamps to create your own designs and sentiment stamps can also be used to make individual backgrounds and toppers.

It’s possible to use any coloured inks for this technique, either pigment or dye inks will work. I have used the new quick-dry inks from Spectrum Noir, as the name suggests the ink dries quickly so you can carry on stamping without worrying about smudging the ink. You could also try using a watermark ink such as VersaMark. On coloured cardstock the stamping will appear one shade darker than the colour of the cardstock so if you are short of coloured ink you could try this.

You can use the tone on tone stamping and die-cutting in a number of different ways as I have tried to show here. You can repeat stamp onto large die-cut shapes with small stamps, or create a background with stamps and then choose which areas to die-cut. You can also die-cut apertures into the card blank and then stamp around the die-cutting.

This technique is great to make matching backing pieces and embellishments from just coloured cardstock and a few stamps from your stash and inkpads.