Concrete Stamps
Advertisements
Concrete doesn’t always have to look like concrete. And that is why there has grown up an entire hobby and creative subculture around using stamps to create wonderful new designs in concrete that maybe never existed before. But by using a little imagination and learning some new skills you can use the art of stamping to create the look of brick, decorative stones or other pleasing designs and do so inexpensively.
You can really get as innovative as you want using stamps to create a unique look in your concrete. You can buy rubber stamps that already have a cool pattern ready to go so you can quickly get busy creating a stone or brick impression in your concrete with no artistic talent needed by you at all. These kinds of pre-cast stamps can create a cobblestone look or one of antique rock or brick that can really change the look of concrete pathway or wall. That means that once you get the hang of how to work with concrete that is specifically crafted for stamping, you will able to let your creative side go wild and find yourself with a passion for creating new looks using this technique.
There are many stamps that you can buy ready made that will give you an outcome in your concrete creation that is interesting and that has a lot of personality. And it is a good idea when learning the art of using stamps with concrete projects to go ahead and buy a few ready made stamps that you can experiment with right away.
You might even to a couple small projects using these kinds of stamps to get used to the method and to see how the finished product looks. In that way, you know you are working with stamps that were designed to be used for creative concrete design and that you know will do well interacting with pliant concrete. Then after you build your skills, you might expand your interest to creating your own stamps from materials at home or using patterns you see when you are out and about.
Once you have developed the skills to use stamping to produce really interesting and artistic concrete results, you can expand your hobby to use just about any object you can think of that would lend itself to stamping. Not every object is a good choice because when using a stamp, you must be able to condition it so it can leave the image on the concrete and pull away without bringing material with it and at the same time leaving behind a perfect image over and over again. In that any stamping project involves producing multiple images from the same stamp, the object in use whether it is a patterned artwork or an object with an interesting shape, must be easy to maneuver and work well with the stamping concrete.
Advertisements
You will get a good feel for what kinds of materials will do well as stamps. Even if you find a pattern that you love in an object that will not interact well with concrete, that is just another creative challenge to reproduce that pattern in a stamp of your own design. That is what makes this kind of concrete so much fun and so rewarding as well.
