Two Looks, One Stamp: The Stampsmith's Ophelia

My friends! You might know from already having read this post how sad I am that the great Stampsmith is closing its doors and liquidating all stock in its Etsy store. The Stampsmith is known for incredibly detailed photostamps (many of which are difficult to tell apart from actual photographs) and very intelligent and quirky images, most of which are vintage or historical. If you care about such things at all (and of course you do!), you might want to visit their Etsy shop ASAP to grab a few of whatever images are left before they are gone forever.

[blows nose loudly into lace-trimmed hanky]

Despite my grief, I thought it might be fun to feature one of The Stampsmith's all-time best-selling stamps in a couple of different projects, not only to whet your appetite for this lovely image (which is still available as of this writing), but because it's cool any old time to see the various looks you can get out of the same stamp. At least, I always dig that kind of thing.

The image under discussion is one of a series of illustrations of Shakespeare's heroines taken out of a 19th-century edition of the Bard's work.

--But soft! What beholdest thou below with thine eye agleam? 'Tis she, Ophelia, languid, nubile, not having gotten herself to a nunnery...

This image above is how the full stamp looks. (Yes, it comes with the text, which you can choose to ink up or not, or even to snip off the unmounted rubber to save for a separate stamp, which is what I did.)

The first project I have for you featuring Ophelia experiments with only partially inking the stamp. You can see that I inked only her face, so that she appears to float in the surrounding textures (which were made with dye inks, matte chalk inks, and metallic inks, which impart quite a bit more liveliness  to the background than the photo shows). The soft edges to the partial inking were meant to evoke a sort of ghostly or apparition-like effect.

The second piece is an ATC whose specifications were that it be made in a Gothic arch shape and in black and white. Here a bit more of Ophelia is showing than in the project above, but I still didn't want to use all her dark hair and garment, so she was again partially inked, and then cut out and covered in layers of B&W collage.

Unlike in the first ATC, where Ophelia is the darkest thing in the composition, in the B&W ATC she is the palest thing. (Unless you count the stars...but aren't stars uncountable anyway?)

The materials on this one were dye and chalk inks, enamel paint, glitter, transfers, and collage, including a black faceted rhinestone in the "firmament" of glitter at the top of the card (which I also thought could suggest a rose window in a cathedral). Because this piece was all black and white, I tried to maximize its dimensional and textural qualities, attempting to include matte and shiny, velvety and rough, hard and soft. Not sure how much of that translates via photograph!--but at least you know what I was thinking.

Anyway, back to the Ophelia stamp. You can see that this is a very romantic and versatile image. FURTHERMORE, The Stampsmith still has it available in a couple of sizes! If you end up getting this stamp, I would absolutely LOVE to see what you make with it. It's very gorgeous. 

But you KNOW I am a sucker for anything Elizabethan (even when reinterpreted with a Romantic-era Roman nose).

Talk to me below! xo