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What's an Artistamp?

© Amy E. Badurina

If you've never been involved with the mail art community, the concept of an artistamp seems a bit strange. For those who make them, art never was this accesible or freeing.

An artistamp, defined, is a postage stamp created by an artist for his or her own pleasure. (As opposed to stamps created by professional artists to submit to postal issuances in order to be sold as authentic postage.) They come in myriad forms -- sheets, losse stamps, stamps affixed to hand-designed postcards, cute stamps affixed to bunny rabbit art, political commentary stamps, and even satirical forms that portray alternative images.

There are an equally large number of methods for making your own stamps. You can easily use a computer program like Adobe Pagemaker or Photoshop (information available through http://www.adobe.com) to create them. Or you can hand-stamp or collage images onto regular paper and color copy them in sheets. Or you can create individual stamps by using pre-made rubber stamps that are commercially available and essentially color in the lines. Whatever you can dream up, you can create -- and turn into faux postage.

And what to do with your postoids once created? Stick them, send them, use them up! Many places online and in the mail art network offer exchanges or places to send your postage to be shared with likeminded folk. Once you're inside the network, many people find that the mailbox is never empty -- there are always new and exciting bits of postal ephemera showing up, each with its own mythology and reasoning, and each created in a different manner.

You may be wondering what to call your art, once you begin. Artistamps go by many names, all meaning approximately the same thing. Hardcore artists will argue the nuances of each term, citing subtle differences in creation and intent, but the basic premise is the same. Artistamps, faux postage, postoid, and cinderellas all imply an artist-created stamp that is not used for actual, legitimate postage.

Whatever name you decide to give your art, the main emphasis in this form is creativity. Create a sheet as a commemoration of a life event. Create a series based on childhood comfort foods. Make a set of stamps with your hands and feet, or bits of old photographs, or clip art -- let your imagination soar and your hands draw, and you will have your own self-affixable masterpiece in just hours.

Over the next few articles, we'll be exploring some of the artistamp artists who are well-known (such as Anna Banana, who creates the faux postage for Nick Bantock's books), techniques for creating your own stamps on the fly, recipes for glues and ways to perforate your own postoids. Like all the fantastic sites here on Suite 101, we'll also be creating a great collection of fantastic web resources for mailart and artistamps, and possibly hold some exchanges of our own.