Using Stamps Without Stamping: Love U Valentine Card

Have you ever been inspired while cleaning out your craft room?  My room is a disaster, and I know I need to get rid of some things I no longer use.  One of those things are my stamps.  Stamping isn't my mode of choice for putting sentiments on cards.  I prefer to use one of the many fonts on my computer to simply print something.  I know there are more ink options with stamping, but I guess I don't have the patience for it.  So, I decided I would give away some of my stamps and while going through them, I saw a very small one I hadn't noticed in a set by Fiskars.  It simply said "LOVE".  How appropriate for a Valentine's Day card. Instead of getting out my ink, I started up Photoshop and scanned the plastic piece the stamp was stuck to which had a picture of the stamp image.  After importing it into Photoshop, I extracted the stamp from the white background it was on by using the magic wand tool and selecting the white area and hitting delete.  It was on a transparent background, but it wasn't perfect.  When I magnified the image I discovered a grey area around the letters, and I had to do a little more work to get rid of that.  Once it was done, I created a brush with it so I could use it over and over.  I created a background with the brush, and put it on to these cards:

Love U x3!

 

The card at the front is the first one I made.  I decided I didn't like the "U", and changed it to another font for the other two.  The background behind the stamped image was created using the gradient tool in Photoshop.  I played around with it quite a bit and had a lot of fun seeing the different effects.  My favorite one is the one farthest back where I used a radial gradient.

That's a LOT of LOVE for U!

This picture doesn't do it justice.  I have a lot to work on with my photography skills!  What I love about this card is the simplicity of it, but it still looks nice.  The "LOVE" stamp almost appears to be embossed because of a drop shadow and outer glow effect.  And I said there were more ink options with stamping, but look at what can be done without stamping!

No stamps involved!

 A teeny little stamp, given new life.  And once I've gotten my other stamps digitized (I don't have a huge amount of them, thank God!), I'll give them to the local church that runs a thrift store in my area.   Of course I had to add a sentiment to the inside of the cards:

 Ahhh, more space for new craft supplies less clutter.  Who would've thought a cleaning attempt would turn into inspiration?  I use the word "attempt" because not much cleaning got done as a result of this!  Has this ever happened to you?  Do you digitize your stamps?  Let me know how you do it!  If you haven't, give it a shot, I'd love to hear how it worked for you!

Here's what I used:
Photoshop
Fiskars Stamp "LOVE"
LD Sketch Font
LD Hang Ten Font

Now, start cleaning and get inspired to Have a Crafty Day!