I love using digital stamps in my mixed media projects and Silhouette Cameo's print and cut feature is great for my SVG digital stamps. Recently I wrote a review of Pixelmator. I was really impressed with Pixelmator's Sketch feature for making digital stamp graphics.

My process for creating a digital stamp for the Silhouette^R Cameo^R is to start with either a photo or photorealistic graphic. I then create the stamp-styled image in Pixelmator. Finally, I move that image into Illustrator^R to draw the cut line around the image and save the final result in SVG format for the Silhouette cutting machine.

Let's walk through an example digital stamp of a pair of wedding rings. I started with this photorealistic graphic created in Photoshop^R for a wedding designer website. As you can see, the rings are on a transparent background. If we copy and paste this image into Pixelmator, the image will automatically be placed on a solid white background. If we open the .psd image into Pixelmator, the transparent background will be maintained. For this project, you can use either method to move the Photoshop image into Pixelmator.

1. To open an image into Pixelmator, you will start at the Welcome to Pixelmator window and choose the Open Existing Image option.
   
   
2. You will find the Sketch function in the Stylize menu in the Effects Browser. Double-click on the Sketch icon to apply the effect.
   
   

As you can see we have 5 slider controls for adjusting the parameters for this effect. I like the look with the default settings but let's play with the sliders to see what we can get.

NR Noise Level and NR Sharpness
These parameters will add or reduce the noise and sharpness of the lines in the images. You will see that the thin lines are effected the most.

Edge Intensity
This parameter will control the thickness of the lines. At a lower setting only the darkest/thickest lines remain and are thinner. At a higher setting, the lines begin to expand and merge into a solid area with only the lightest areas still transparent.

Threshold
With the Threshold at zero percent the image has thicker lines, the thinner lines begin to blur and the overall image begins to darken. At 100%, only the thickest lines remain and become thin.

Contrast
At the lowest setting, 25%, the entire image is darkened, the thin lines begin to blur and only the thicker lines remain but are thin. At the highest setting, 20000%, the image is the same as with the default settings.

Of course, these parameter settings may give different results depending on the source image. So you will need to experiment. You can get several looks for your digital stamp by combining the different settings for these parameters.

I used this same technique to create digital stamp graphics for an SVG print and cut file. This time the source images were closeup photographs of each shell and the ship wheels and anchor were photorealistic digital art created in Photoshop.