Nicu's How-to - Rubber Stamp

The origin of this short tutorial is my vote in the referendum for impeachment of the Romanian President, Saturday 19 May 2007. I vote NO to the impeachment and NO to the restoration of the communist mafia, also known as patrulaterul maro or the 322.

nu mafia comunista

How is made

Beyond the political statement, here is a quick graphic lesson, a HowTo about creating the rubber stamp above with Inkscape.

Using the Ellipse tool draw a circle (keep the Ctrl key pressed to obtain a circle). Duplicate the circle and resize the copy (also with Ctrl pressed to preserve the aspect ratio). Change the size of the Stroke (wider for the interior circle).
Now add some content to the stamp. In this case we will use the NU text (Romanian for NO), but you can use anything, even a graphic. With the Text tool write the desired text, choose a font face and resize it as needed. Place in the center of the circles.
For text convert Object to Path and for circles convert Stroke to Path. Make a Union of those paths.
With the Calligraphic tool draw randomly over the figure, trying to cover a large part but not all of it. Select the messy drawing made with the calligraphic tool and the stamp and do an Intersection.
Reduce the node number with Simplify and apply a color similar with the ink used for the rubber stamps (here I used a dark magenta).
Make the color a little irregular by applying a slight Gradient and for a more natural look just a bit of Gaussian Blur.