Enhancing Custom Image Stamps: Tips for Artwork and Handprint Jewellery

1. Open up Gimp (or your chosen image editing application)
2. Find the image that you wish to work with on your Computer and open up in Gimp (or whichever photo editing software you are using).
3. Enlarge the image so that you can see it a little bit bigger, if necessary.
4. Go to the Tools > Paint Tools > Eraser to erase out any smudges or imperfections in the drawing, handprint, footprint, photo or artwork, that you wish to remove.
5. Crop the image to remove any excess white space that surrounds your image. The idea here, is to focus in on the image, not the area that surrounds it.  To do this, go to Tools > Selection Tools > Rectangle Select.  Select the area of the image that you wish to crop and then go to Image > Crop to Selection.
6. When you have cropped the image nice and tighly, we need to invert the image to black and white.  On this Mac version of Gimp I go to Colors > Invert, this will reverse the image to black and white.
7. If you have an image with a lot of shading, as in this example, where the Dogs ears are shaded in, it's important to remove this shading as this will not make a good stamp. It's important that your images are solid black and white.  The easiest way that I find to remove any shading like this, is to invert the image, as described above and then adjust the brightness and contrast of the image. To do this, go to Colors > Brightness and Contrast, then select the contrast button, taking it up higher or lower, to see what setting you need to move it to, in order to completely remove the shading. What we're aiming for is an image which is optimum black and white.  The black needs to be as black as possible and the white needs to be as white as possible. It's important that no part of the image is grey. No part of the white should be grey, it must be pure white and no area of the black should be grey, it needs to be solid black. Equally, sometimes it may be necessary to adjust the brightness, although it hasn't been necessary to do so on this particular example. But always check and adjust the brightness and contrast of your images, to ensure that you inverted image is optimum black and white, with no grey.  
8. When you are happy with the quality of your inverted image, do File > Save As and save the inverted image to a folder on your computer, in a place that is easy to find, for when you move onto the next stage of organising your inverted images in Word.  
9. Move onto th next stage and watch the next video for how to organise your images and make a stamp in word.

For more assistance with your Custom Stamp Making Process, go to my next view Video Tutorials:

> How to make a stamp in Word. 

> How to make a Custom Image Stamp and turn a drawing into a Stamp