Creating a rubber stamp

First tip on making stamps...

EVERYTHING IS REVERSED

What does that mean? White is going to be the color that your stamp, stamps and it is a mirror image of what will stamp

Start with a shape thats going to basic shape of your stamp, in my case it's going to be a rectangle.

I wanted to have a border around my stamp so I made a white box by nesting a smaller rectangle and combining it to give me the negative space that will be my stamp outline.

I wanted to add a cartoon like turkey to my stamp so I found this image online to use.

Tip #2:

Chunky or thick lines will look better on your stamp, very fine details will be lost during the engraving process

My turkey was just a GIF so I needed to convert him to a SVG for this project. I used an online GIF to SVG converter to do this step.

Once I had my turkey as a SVG, I imported him into XCS using the "Image" import tool.

I set him to engrave to better see what he will look like filled out.

I position my turkey friend in the stamp body, remembering that it will be a mirror image when it is completed and stamped.

Using the combine tool, I "subtract" the turkey from the rectangle, remembering that It is the opposite, white spaces are what will appear as color when you use your stamp.

Lastly because everything that is dark and being engraved is negative space, I save time, laser life and some rubber by cutting out the wasted middle of the stamp.

I mounted the cut rubber stamp to a block of wood with some double sided tape and here is my stamp.