Waterfall

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I can certainly relate to the sentiment on this month's 12 Tags of 2014 by Tim Holtz which is, "out of limitations comes creativity." Perhaps that's another way of saying, "necessity is the mother of invention." All I know is I seldom have the products to make an identical tag so I have to improvise and that often gives birth to a whole new level of creativity.

I did use watercolor paper, his bubble stencil and distress inks for the background and enjoyed this relief printing technique.

The butterflies were made using a handmade stamp on book paper and sewing machine stitching provided the accents.

I know I'll use this technique again with other stencils and I think the key is to use good, smooth, heavy watercolor paper.

Best Souvenir

Somerset Studio had a call for artwork, the theme was "Le Cirque," and this piece was published in their Summer 2014 Gallery issue.

As a child, my strongest memory of the circus were rows and rows of Kewpie dolls lined up for sale as souvenirs. They had pretty costumes with sparkles and feathers and I really wanted one. I haven't been to the circus since then and wonder what the best souvenir is now?

Artistamps

From Wikipedia:

The term artistamp (a portmanteau of the words "artist" and "stamp") or artist's stamp refers to a postage stamp-like art form used to depict or commemorate any subject its creator chooses. Artistamps are a form of Cinderella stamps in that they are not valid for postage, but they differ from forgeries or bogus Illegal stamps in that typically the creator has no intent to defraud postal authorities or stamp collectors.

The Monday blog challenge at Simon Says Stamp is The Artsy Stamp and I decided to take a bit of a twist and make a collection of artistamps instead. I used tiny bird stamps, some colored pencils for tint, a black fine tip marker to mimic the perforations, and a vintage envelope for the background (which had an interesting embossed design).

The Wiki article further states:  While the method of production is entirely the choice of the artist, creators who exclusively or primarily use rubber stamps are occasionally held in contempt by members of the artistamp community, some of whom refer to such producers as "bunny-stampers."

Well, I don't care if they call me a bunny-stamper because these are actually birds (duh) and they were really great fun to make. The hard part is getting a realistic looking perforation--I opted to use a less authentic (but easy) method by making tiny black dots along the edges.