stamp people (the siblings)

I thought I was getting my Stamp People obsession under control, but it reared its wild head again and dragged me down a tangent. This tangent resulted in a new crop of Stamp People inspired by each of my five siblings. The images posted here were all created from used postage stamps and old cooking magazines.

I'm the oldest of six, you see. My younger siblings are all unique and possess much more than one talent each. Such as my sister, the poet. My next sister, the chicken lady. My next sister, the sign language interpreter. My brother, the philosopher. And my youngest sister, the poster designer. None of them can be captured in just one image. So it's a safe bet that there will soon be alternate versions of the sibling series. Such as the last image I posted below, which was also inspired by my first sister.

It may be a while before I get back onto the main road of traditional etegami. But not too long. I think.

stamp people

It has been two years since I first encountered Jacki Long's "stamp people." I was utterly charmed from the very start, and I couldn't wait to imitate her style. But the idea must have needed time to ferment deep inside of me, because I couldn't seem to act on my intentions.

Two weeks ago, I was dusting off a stack of stamp albums that remained from a long forgotten childhood passion. This led to the merciless culling of a box full of cooking magazines I'd meant, but failed, to throw into the recycling bin.

Suddenly, the time was ripe, and stamp people collages began popping out of me at the pace of one a day.  It has been LOADS of fun.

The postage stamps themselves are rather boring as stamps go, but the men depicted on them rightly earned their places there, and their stories and characters are fascinating. So here I present to you my first crop of stamp people collages. From the top: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, John Muir, Albert Einstein, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Many more are on their way. Prints are available from my RedBubble portfolio.

house and home (part 3)

illustration friday (spooky)

issa's cows

Haiku inspires many of my etegami. The poems of Matsuo Basho are favorites of mine. But he doesn't mention cows very much, and after my recent purple cow post, I was itching to draw more cows. You know who mentions cows time and time again? The haiku poet Kobayashi Issa. This fact was recently brought to my attention by @Cow Lady when she sent me this link. I took up the challenge and, although I didn't necessarily use the translations provided on that page, I tried my hand at illustrating some of Issa's cow haiku with etegami collages.




In my next post, I'll show you some etegami I did that were inspired by cow proverbs. heh heh. Can you tell I'm having fun?

etegami collages

I've been going a little bit crazy over collages lately, thanks to being stimulated by the works of Western mail artists, who tend to be very collagic (? well, you know what I mean). My versions are always a combination of pictures and words, which technically qualifies them as Etegami. But I wasn't certain enough of this interpretation to introduce the collages on this blog. Then, the other day, I stumbled onto a blog about etegami made with fabric fragments. It was one more in a series of eye-opening encounters for me. You'll have to see these for yourself. The blog, called Ponpoko's Etegami, is in Japanese, but I think you will be able to see the images. Click here. The pictures are formed with bits of cloth and yarn. Sometimes, the artist writes the accompanying words by ink brush, and other times she forms them from yarn or fabric. If these delightful postcards can be called etegami, then my collages certainly can. If any readers of this blog are more comfortable working with fabric than with ink brushes and paints, you won't find me resisting that approach anymore. Just don't forget the element of words. The image I posted here is a collage of photos pasted onto a background made from the kind of hand-dyed wispy washi used in the art of chigiri-e, which I've mentioned in previous posts.

partridges on a pear (tree)

I've been doing a lot of experimenting lately, giving etegami a bit of chigiri-e accent, or combining traditional etegami with the collage-style mail art that seems to be so popular in the West. Today I was looking at some pear drawings that were left over from one year I'd used pears for my Christmas card design. Although I'd been somewhat disappointed in the drawings, I received a lot of positive feedback when I posted them online. So I ended up keeping the leftover drawings I would otherwise have thrown away. Today I decided to use them as a base for a hybrid mailart greeting card, by gluing some cutouts of partridges onto the drawings of the pears. I still have a strong resistance to messing with traditional etegami method. I'm not sure what to think of these hybrids. Shall I put them in the post? The jury is still out.

my magical beans

Years and years before I became involved in Etegami, I dabbled in the art of Chigiri-e, sometimes described as Japanese Torn Paper Collage Art, or even Painting with Paper. Chigiri-e has a long and venerable history in both Japan and China, and was such an enjoyable hobby, that I once considered pursuing instructor certification. But when I discovered Etegami, I was smitten with its relative lack of rules, its simplicity, the freedom to draw as I pleased from the very beginning (rather than years of imitating the teacher until I had "proven" my mastery of the basic skills), and the fact that it combined words with artwork. It fulfilled something in me that Chigiri-e had not.

Recently, however, I had occasion to look back nostalgically to my Chigiri-e days. I was rummaging through my leftover stock of the fibrous, hand-made paper used in the art, when the idea of a collaboration between Etegami and Chigiri-e occurred to me. One characteristic of Chigiri-e is that the layering of the hand-torn pieces of colored paper creates a three-dimensional effect that is not usually possible with Etegami. I tried several experiments, but the most pleasing results came from using the colored paper with a light hand. I glued bits of the special paper on this drawing of bean pods, which resulted in added thickness, texture, and color where the bean bulges are, without overwhelming the drawing's basic Etegami nature.

popov and the goldfish

This is an etegami I submitted to a mail art exhibit at the A.S.Popov Central Museum of Communications in St.Petersburg, Russia. I've been in "fish mode" ever since the etegami I drew for the Sea Exhibition. So I drew a goldfish and applied a new twist. The bubbles coming from the goldfish's mouth were cut out of a magazine and pasted onto the card. There are both Japanese and English words inside the bubbles. These bubbles, combined with the accompanying words, are my attempt to tie the drawing into the theme of the exhibit, which I understand to be the history of communications technology, and a celebration of Popov's 150th anniversary. [Alexander Stepanovich Popov was a Russian physicist who first demonstrated the practical application of electromagnetic (radio) waves.]

The card is, in a sense, a departure from traditional etegami-- a sort of fusion between etegami and collage. It's not something I would have dared to try with etegami until very recently. But my exposure to the wider world of MailArt has been influencing me to test certain boundaries. And I'm having a great time. : )