Foam stamping time!

Using these foam stamps I made from a 'textured' sheet of foam stickie back material, I kinda went nuts printing! 

I'm not sure what crops I'll get from these but I had fun stamping this past weekend!  So now I'm back to carving out more stamps to create designs we can crop from. 

This turned out to be my favorite piece!  It was the poster board sheet I laid my papers on when stamping.  Kinda like a paper drop cloth!


Well, I see some crops that might work......but then again.....back to the drawing board!

And the designs and crops continue!

I'm still playing with cropping and designing...sometimes with success..sometimes not so much!  Yes, this is an ok drawing/crop but honestly a crop doesn't need to look like 'anything'...does that make sense.

I guess you could say I jumped ahead to the design phase here putting pieces of my painted/stamped papers to create a 8"x10" page in my journal.

This was another deli background that I placed some of the pieces on.  I haven't glued either of these in my journal yet.  Still deciding!

We're now looking at texture pictures and creating stamps from those pictures.  I just happen to find this foam stickie back sheet, which looked to me that it already had a design on it!  So what did I do!  Yep, carved out positive and negative foam stamps! 

And then....I marked the areas I wanted to cut out. 

So now it's back to finding some more texture pictures.  I took some pictures outside while looking at the wood on our deck posts and rocks, which Hilary loves to print with.  Who knows what we'll be doing next! 

Overdye time!

My last post showed some oe stamped papers I did last week.  This weekend I overdyed some of those...some I wish I had left white but live and learn, right!  Here are some results.  These are all on layout paper and this time instead of using fiber dyes I just used Setacolor watered down...in some cases I didn't use enough water-paint ratio.....actually, not enough water so some colors are too intense for me.
Before pics on the left and overdye on the right..

This feather one turned out pretty good.  I' not big on this shade of blue....but I think it will work as feature pieces vs background.

Yep...better before I 'overdye/painted'...

Ditto for this piece too, ugh.  The arches show up on the left and are lost on the right.  Oh well.

Not bad...again I think pieces of this can be used somewhere!

Not bad with addition of the blue overdye/painting.

I like this one too.

Another favorite...this one turned out really nice.

We should be using some of our papers from the last two weeks in the next week or two for doing some design/collage work in our sketchbooks.  Should be fun!!!

Creating foam stamps and overdyeing

Our lesson last week consisted of making stamps using the stickie back kids foam.  I have done this in the past but I sure had a heck of a time deciding what to carve!  I ended up using an applique pattern for a flower head I found in a magazine!  Creative...I know!  HA

The top two stamps are ones I made several, several years ago and I decided I might as well use them along with my 'newest' stamp(s).   You may recognize the square/circle stamp, which I've used a lot.

I also wanted to use up some of the acrylic paints as well as some of the dyes I have mixed up.  We leave in two weeks so I'll be tossing the dyes since I need all the space in my boxes I already have for my art supplies.   I used primarily Indigo and Turquoise dyes for over dyeing these papers.

So here is my latest homework completed.  These are probably the most unattractive papers I've made but still fun to do and good experience!  I think I prefer the papers before I over dyed....

Once again I'm showing the papers stamped and then the same paper over dyed.

Before/After

Before/After

Before/After

Before/After

Before/After