POSTAGE STAMP ARTWORK - A TUTORIAL

 

 We will be moving into a bigger rental property soon (dances around the room) and we are allowed to decorate it and hang pictures etc. This may be every renter's dream. This renter's dream is currently the gallery wall that I so desperately want in our new office/crafter space. While we already have some pictures from actual artists, I want to make the space as personal as possible so have a number of ideas of simple picture projects which will tie everything together and reflect 'us'. I was wandering around a particularly disappointing flea market, when I came across a sweet couple selling old stamps and postcards. I bought a mixture of 150 postage stamps for 1 Euro and went home with dreams of artwork. It is very easy to do, quick and budget friendly, so let's get started, shall we?


To make this you need: a picture frame (of any size), old stamps (can be saved from letters or found fairly cheaply on ebay or at flea markets etc.), a piece of card, a piece of paper, a printer, scissors, tacky glue and a spreader.

Pick out all of the stamps you like the best. When you have a good pile, move them around in front of you until you have a pattern you like. My good friend Lesli suggested that we tried clustering similar colours together and it just worked.

Starting in the middle of the card, with the middle stamp, start to arrange and then glue down your stamps. I didn't want mine to overlap too much so it took some moving around to fit everything on. Some overlapping happened along the way, but not enough to matter challenge my obsessive need for order. The amount of stamps you need to stick down, depends on the cut-out you want to put on top. Mine was large, so we nearly covered the whole A4 page in stamps.

For the cut-out, find a shape you like on the internet and paste it into a word-processing document. Make the necessary adjustments, like re-sizing, until you are happy. I reversed my image before I printed it so that when I cut it out, the printed lines would be on the back of my project. Doing this reduces the stress of the cutting process, as there is no need to be perfect when cutting.

I cut out the shape and then placed it over the stamps. I found that I needed to stick a couple more stamps around the edges to fill in some gaps. Once this was done, I stuck the piece of paper (with the originally-unprinted side facing upwards, as mine was reversed) on top of the stamps....and placed it in the frame.

There are so many possibilities for this artwork. Geometric shapes, stars, a giant letter, a country, a state or any silhouette of practically any item would work. So let your imaginations run wild! Please let me know if you make one yourself. Leave a link to the project in the comment box, or tweet me a picture!