12 Days, 12 Stamps

I've embarked on another little challenge for myself. This time it's about stamps. I still have certain problems with stamps, and haven't completely figured out what they can do for me. But I'm getting there. My main problem with stamps has been that a lot of them are what Gwen Diehn refers to as 'determined materials' in her book The Decorated Page, i.e. materials that themselves carry a strong message that may override your own message. I've written about my relationship to stamps before here and here.

To help me along with my stamp-making I decided to challenge myself to make a stamp a day for 12 days. The number is of no significance: it's just the number of squares that fitted on an A4 page in my sketchbook. To make things as simple as possible I'm going to make the stamps out of craft foam and mount them on a A4 transparency sheet that I've cut into 12 pieces. Please refer to my earlier blog entry for a description of the technique.

This challenge also ties in with this month's theme in The Sketchbook Challenge: Doodles. I haven't been active in TSC for months, and it's about time I got back in again. I've done some doodling this week and I figured that I could use my doodles as inspiration for stamp-making.

Here is a doodle I did yesterday. I like the way you can create texture with just a simple mark such as a small circle. I want to explore this more.

 

Here's another doodle - one that I did earlier in the week. There is a lot I could pick out from here for stamp-making.

I'm going to start with the three small dots that have followed me since I was a teenager. They have a tendency to sneak into my drawings as soon as I look away, so I might as well embrace them as Lundadoodle no 1.

Apparently this is a mathematical symbol meaning 'Therefore', when the triange is standing on its base, and 'Because', when the triangle is top-down. I like that.