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

Fun with ATC Jams

What's an ATC ("Artist Trading Card") jam?

Well, first, what's an Artist Trading Card? An ATC is a baseball-card-sized piece of art meant to be shared or traded with other artists (never sold). It must conform to the standard 2.5" x 3.5" format, but otherwise can be any media and any theme.

So! An ATC jam is a collaborative effort between (usually) three artists. The first artist makes a background layer on each of three cards, then sends the cards to the second artist, who adds a focal point to each card and in turn sends the cards to the last artist, who finishes them up and returns one card to each of the first two artists.

Recently I participated in a really fun jam with Gillman and Bohochick on Swap-bot. I thought I'd share a bit with you about how I approached my role in the collaboration to give you a bit of insight into my creative process. I love that I'm working within the constraints "imposed" by the artists whose work came before mine while trying to honor and build upon their contributions to the finished product. It's a fascinating and satisfying thing to do.  :)

Gillman started the backgrounds, putting layers of paint over collaged paper, some of which had text printed on it. (I wish I had photos of how the cards appeared at this stage, but alas.)

Bohochick added some dimensional drizzles and splatters of thick acrylic paint that gave the card more personality, yet left it without a focal point...leaving ME with all the power! Mwah ha ha...

What would I do with these (hardly) blank canvases, with not much direction indicated? Hmmm...

When I got the cards from Bohochick, they were very free-form, and looked like this:

With so much color already on the cards, I tried to think of an interesting focal point for each that would harmonize with the background while still being strong enough to stand up to all that was already going on there.

I settled on three bizarre stamp images from Lost Coast Designs that I absolutely love. (Are they adorable? Creepy? Pathetic? Hilarious? I wish I knew more about them--the time period and the illustrator. One of the guys looks like a monk to me. But back to the story...)

I decided to ink the images in two colors on glossy photo paper (inspired by the gloss of Bohochick's bold white blops of paint). I felt black ink alone would be too stark and not tie in enough with the colors on the cards, so I chose a deep plum already found on the cards to combine with the black, and blended the inks right on the stamps. I love the richness and quality of color of these StazOn solvent inks.

My figures needed a bit of ground to appear against to give the composition interest and depth. So I inked up a clear acrylic checkerboard stamp and rolled it a little haphazardly on part of the cards.

I then fussy-cut out the bizarre little guys and decoupaged them to the cards with glossy Mod Podge (I was definitely into the gloss thing courtesy of Bohochick and that thick white paint!)

It struck me that the cards now looked, thanks to my bizarre figures, as though they might have come out of a very odd tarot deck, so I decided to assign them numbers. I have an ancient (I mean ANCIENT--like 25 years old!) set of stamps in the "Africa" typeface, which worked well here because the characters have a thin line of white inside the chunky number- and letterforms. Since I was leaving my figures white (plus the blended stamp colors), I liked how this white/color duality linked the numbers to the figures.

To finish the cards, I sealed them with more glossy Mod Podge and put a border of dimensional (and GLOSSY!--are you sensing a theme?) black and white enamel paint along the edges. The border started out as alternating dots of color, but the paint wasn't entirely dry when I put the cards in the scanner to take these pictures, so the dots flattened out.  :(  I decided this was serendipitous, since it sort of added to the checkerboard theme going on.

Here's how the finished cards turned out:

It struck me that only the card numbered 7 was really obviously right side up--the other two could be turned upside down and still make sense visually, with the 6 becoming a 9 (and the monk-lizard looking like he was standing on his head, while the bird-bug might have been like some weird bat hanging upside down, with the 8 still reading as an 8).

I decided to keep the 7 for myself and send the 8 and the 6/9 back to Gillman and Bohochick in case they liked the upside-down duality aspect of the cards.

Here's a closeup of my (glossy!) no. 7:

I leave you with a comparison photo of how the cards looked after Phase II (top row) and after they were finished (bottom). Any questions? Or comments? I'd love to hear what you think of this ATC jam. Have you ever done one? Would you like to?

Post a comment!