Real Watermarking

[Ian Grant]

I have that Ideal hand press it's fine, but the seal is for a company I closed in the late 1980's, I have tried it on prints and it works perfectly. In the UK they are very common.

Ian

[David A. Goldfarb]

Anywhere there's bureaucracy it shouldn't be too hard to find embossing seals.

[MattKing]

On our side of the water, you can buy them from stores that sell fancy stationery (think wedding invitations).

[John Koehrer]

If you can find a city official or lawyer you might ask them to emboss a piece of photographic paper to see if you like the result. The embosser will raise parts of the print and may not be objectionable, on the other hand.......
Most currency is watermarked and it is done in the manufacturing process so that's not going to help.

[Monophoto]

Watermarking is done in the process of manufacturing paper. What appears as a watermark in the finished paper starts out as a pattern applied to the surface of an otherwise smooth roll against which the paper is pressed while it is still wet. That's why when you purchase high quality art paper for alternative process printing, the watermark repeats at regular intervals - the distance between watermarks is actually the circumference of the watermarking roll.

In the US, both Staples or Office Max (and perhaps Barnes and Noble) sell embossing seals. I have one that says "From the library of - - -", and I also have several that I used to satisfy legal sealing requirements as a professional engineer.

Most embossing seals are circular, and are large and rather ugly. I think that if you got a smaller seal, perhaps rectangular rather than circular, and used it on the wide border of a print it could be an attractive way to certify that a print is an original.

In concept, using a seal is not all that different from a Chinese chop.

[5stringdeath]

I have a hand held embosser, but its rectangular and has my full name on it. I can press dry prints and it makes a nice raised emboss .. I can't remember where I bought it. Basically its like a press, one side is a flat platten the other is the letters.