I never got around to posting the last 3 postcards from last weeks mailart365, so I’m doing a little mini dump today. I’ll post this weeks cards tomorrow.
I created 3 little stamps for the background pattern. BTW, is there a name for that scallop-like pattern? Anyway, I stamped the background of all three postcards at once.
I gave this first one a very light gesso wash to make the background more pale. It looked very Eastery, so I painted an egg shape in the center and then drew a girl with bunny ears inside that. I love drawing on gesso. If you haven’t tried it before, I highly recommend it.
It’s card #38/365 and the list that was written on this postcard is something like My favorite people.
The next card I put the mixed stamp stamp over it and called it a day. The card is #39/365 and the list on the back is things I hope happen in the next year.
Postcard #40/365, I did a dry horizontal brush in gesso and then another vertical to give it a hopefully textile like texture, then I stamped my polaroid hand carved stamp on it. The list on back is a list I really liked that I came up with, Things that should happen on road trips. I wish all lists were so easy to come up with.
This morning I was awarded the Stylish Blogger Award by Joyce at Young By Design. Thank you Joyce! I will return soon to share my fun facts and share the award with some of my favorite stylish bloggers.
Who knew, when I began this month that I would become obsessed with hand carved stamps. I lay my head down on the pillow at night and all I can think of is new stamp ideas. And that is precisely where the idea for this one came. I have a huge collection of Polaroid cameras. Well, I guess huge is a relative term, I have about 15, give or take a few. I went through them all, searching for the perfect inspiration of what a Polaroid camera “looks like” and chose this one, as well, as another that had the rainbow stripe down the front, so I blended the two together.
I love perusing all the handcarved stamps on flickr, here is a little collection I made from other artists. If you click on the picture, it will take you to the post where you can find the links to each artist.
It’s definitely a lot harder than I was hoping and once again I have greater respect for those that make stamps. At first I was going to just do a simple circle with stripes, but it just wasn’t looking how I pictured it. I took a break and then suddenly it came to me… my little balloon man! I’ve been drawing him for over 10 years and he’s even my flickr avatar. My friend Nicole (that lives in Seattle) has always loved him and has told me on several occasions she is going to get a tattoo of him someday. He came out really cute, so now I think I’ll either have to send him to her, or make another to send to her and keep this one for myself.
I couldn’t find any tutorials on how to attach a handmade stamp to a wooden disc base so I just had to wing it. I scored the back of the stamp with an Xacto and used hot glue and it seems to be holding up fine now. To show you some of the awesome stamps people offer over on Etsy, I’ve created a treasury. Check it out!
I’ve also seen that Swap-bot has a whole category for stamps and I must have seen some stamps in my flickr contacts stream where someone said they doing a swap. I think it would be fun to do a handmade stamp swap, but before I do that I need to either get my tools sharpened, or use a much denser carving material. The Quick Kut is so soft that it actually is harder for tiny precise work, than if I were carving a wood block for printmaking.
I was excited to see today that my grass journal made it to Etsy’s front page early this morning. I think Cal Patch put it perfectly when she said “In the world of Etsy, being featured on the front page is one of the highest honors” and when it turns out that it was an Etsy curated front page, well, that is enough to gush over.
