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I just don't think I have the talent to carve the building. Baby steps!

Here are the baby steps you'd need to take. See if any of them sound too imposing:

1) Take a picture of the building with a digital camera. Or you can use a film camera, develop the film, then lay a print on a flatbed scanner and scan it.

2) Open the photo in MS Paint. Look over the image and see what colors are involved, then pick one of the colors from the toolbar at the bottom of the screen that doesn't exist in the picture. For example, if the building is largely brown with dark green plants around it, you might pick bright red.

3) Draw the building in the color you've selected, right over top of the photo. Don't use the thinnest line size available; remember that you're going to shrink this image down to rubber stamp size and you'll want these lines to be visible. Be sure to save your work regularly, and save it under a filename that ensures you don't overwrite the original picture. Being a building, there are probably lots of straight lines, so you're just using the straight line drawing tool. If there are any shrubs in the picture, just draw sort of a blob outline around them.

4) Save the picture and close MS Paint. Reopen the image in Irfanview. If you don't have Irfanview, it's a free download, get it.

5) In Irfanview, select "Image" then "Decrease Color Depth". Select 16 colors. The image will change rather drastically to something that looks pretty awful.

6) Select "Image" then "Palette" then "Edit Palette". You'll be presented with the current palette of 16 colors, one of which is the color you selected to draw the outlines of that building. One by one, double-click on each of the other 15 colors and click on the white box among the colors to select, turning each of those colors to white. Finally, pick the color that you drew with and turn that color to black. Obviously, save again, once again using a different file name -- and file type, for that matter, this should be saved as a B&W .TIF file.

7) The image you now have can be printed and transferred to the rubber for carving. However, for your own benefit, you might want to open the .TIF file in MS Paint and select the "fill color" feature and turn entire areas of that image black. This will allow you to envision what the image will look like when stamped. You will need to decide which areas of the drawing should end up black and which areas should end up white.

8) Carve along the lines. Nuthin' to it.

9) Remember that you might end up stamping with an ink color other than black, or stamping in black and then coloring portions of the image with colored pencils or markers. Whatever makes for a nice image of the building you're trying to represent.

WOW! Thank you for posting these instructions! And of course-you say "nothin to it!" :) I will have to download that. I use Print Shop for all of my stamping pics. I'm printing these out now and going to try. Thanks!

Here are the baby steps you'd need to take. See if any of them sound too imposing:

GREAT info, Kirbert. Thanks for posting these steps. I'm printing it out for future use.

Here's another idea that will work for some photos if you happen to have Kodak EasyShare software. Probably other digital camera software has the same capability, but I'm not sure which ones. Anyway:

Open the photo in the Kodak EasyShare program and click on Edit. Then click on Fun Effects. Then click on Cartoon. The software will find all the major lines in the photo, which you can then use for your carving pattern. Just print out the "cartoonized" photo, resizing as necessary.....or resize it on an old copy machine and use the acetone method of design transfer.

The first photo I tried this with was an heirloom photo of my grandmother in a swimsuit, taken in 1916. I was amazed at the clear results!

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Open the photo in the Kodak EasyShare program and click on Edit. Then click on Fun Effects. Then click on Cartoon. The software will find all the major lines in the photo, which you can then use for your carving pattern.

Irfanview has a similar feature called Edge Detection. Oddly, it gives you a black background with white lines -- but it's easy enough to follow that with a negative to put it to black lines on a white background.

With some images, this kinda thing works great. With other images it works great, but not in the way you expect it to -- it'll pick out shines and shadows in the photo, giving you a surrealistic image. But sometimes that's a really nifty effect you can use!

The reason I so often resort to hand-drawing the image rather than relying upon these automagic methods is because drawing the lines in by hand allows me to choose which ones I want to appear in the final image. I can simply omit features that I don't want, and I can even draw in things that didn't come out clearly in the photo -- such as an edge that was hidden in the shadows.

Sometimes I'll even do both. I'll try the automagic edge detection, and then realize there's a couple of things in the picture that aren't showing up. So I'll edit the original photograph, typically manually drawing white or black lines on it. Then I go back and try the edge detection again, and this time of course it'll pick up the lines I drew in along with all the other edges in the image.