I finally got around to doing tiles. I guess I was waiting for the right inspiration. I recently met someone who is a marketer at an auction house that specializes in rare stamps. It was an interesting conversation. It seems that stamp collecting is sort of passè and the whole market is changing. I thought it might be fun to engrave the image of a rare stamp on a tile. There are plenty of neat looking stamps out there so one of the difficult parts was choosing one.
My first foray into this was engraving the One Penny Black on a slate coaster, but as luck would have it, I gifted the coasters and forgot to get a pic so it was on to tiles.
I chose the Inverted Jenny for the tile. The stamp is “rare” because of the obvious goof of printing the plane in the middle upside down.
To create it was nothing fancy in terms of file creation, I decided I wanted to create a vector of the stamp so I traced an image of the stamp and modified as needed. One of the stamps I used sharpie to color it and on the other I used red acrylic paint. I rubbed in the color with pen or brush then wiped away the excess. With the sharpie I used a little alcohol and it seemed to help create a sort of aged look.
One thing I can’t quite figure out is why the engraves came out dark. You can see the darkness in the stamp border. That is how it looked before coloring. In most examples I have seen on the forum, the engraves are very white. Perhaps I engraved too deep and should have aimed for just removing the glaze, but not sure. I tried to clean it up but it didn’t budge. I am sure it is not a laser tile, too. I picked these up at an art store that was, unfortunately, going out of business. I dont think they are particularly special . Anyway - here are the pics. The first one is the acrylic. There was no color added to the plane.
Thanks for posting! I’ve been playing with tile this week and still working with different markers. I was wondering how acrylic was going to turn out!
I also most definitely love this idea to print stamps on tile as well!
That is a super cool thing to do with a Tile!
I would love to find a source of those! the white on white is standard and the one I made with the sharpie color has faded away totally,
Beautiful Tile! You are right that the market is changing but stamp collecting isn’t passé. It’s how people go about it changed. Before Glowforge came in my life, I needed a hobby that didn’t take up a lot of space. I been buying discounted Canadian stamps for my side business and any I loved, I kept for my stamp collection. Out of boredom posted them on Instagram as stamps are little works of art. Then people messaged me all over the world asking me to trade stamps! As with any gendre, there’s always the 10% of serious collectors - some asked me to trade only to find my $0.50 face value cent is actually worth $10 And you learn a lot of the world through stamps
These look great! I collected stamps as a child, and always enjoy looking at any stamps. New or old.
I buy a LOT of stamps to keep on hand. Lots of styles and colors. Ugly stamps to pay bills, maybe. Pretty, cute, fun, or interesting ones are for mailing letters and cards.
Somehow I hear Mr. Mooney from the Lucille Ball show crying about his upside down aeroplane!
But this is a great tile design choice. I just keep forgetting that simple things like this can really be great gift items because the hardest part of designing is done!
I am liking the stamp on tile more and more as I think about it. In a strange twist, I was perusing the back of the tile and it is stamped with a website. Good news is that there may be a way to get more, bad news is that it is a website in the Netherlands. I will write them a note to see what minimum orders are. Maybe we can figure something out. Maybe they or there supplier would know specificaly why some engrave black and others not.
Interesting! I didn’t think about looking at Instagram! I will check it out. I wasn’t even sure if the YouTube generation had ever sent a letter or seen a stamp but leave it to social media to make every aspect of life available to any who look.
I am liking the idea more and more as I think about it! I think it will be one of my focus areas for 2020. It is fun and interesting. And as @marmak3261 pointed out, the design part it done. Just pick a pretty one, make some tweaks, do some fun coloring and there it is!
This is one of those things you miss not living in the US. I live in the Netherlands. When you go to the post (post offices don’t really exist, they are just kiosks in common places like a grocery store) they have stamps but they don’t seem to have anything interesting except stock 1 euro stamps whose designs don’t change. Most of the time, they weigh your letter or package and put a sticker on it with the postage, no stamps. Not really pretty.
These look great! Being able to engrave without coloring sounds really great!Would you mind sharing the tile information and supplier? For us europeans it might be easier to get these…
I found this site had a great selection of drawings from patents. The actual patents can also be found via google, but this is a good starting point. https://www.mypatentprints.com/product-category/cars-automotive/
Any non Canada stamps are just from trading. People seek out collectors from other countries and some of those are so beautiful. That account also go me into trading Starbucks Cards and Postcards due to that hobby. Stopped now because got too busy with the Glowforge
And you learn a lot of the world through stamps