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Picking a Subject

© Amy E. Badurina

All the technical mumbo-jumbo aside, one of the challenges to any type of creation process is the decision of WHAT to actually DEPICT (or turn to abstraction) in your work. It can be maddening at times to sit down at your computer (or your desk, for you luddites who do all of this by hand!), and have the desire to create with no inspiration of what to create.

Luckily, the medium of faux postage is one that's a wide-open canvas. Anything you can think of, draw, or take pictures of can become a postal issue with the right focus. On the flip side, having that much freedom can be daunting when there's so much to draw on. This is especially hard, in my experience, for the "newbie" of artistamp creation. Fearful of making a "mistake", they often don't use some of the creative ideas floating around in their heads, in order to stay with some preconceived notion of what an artistamp "is".

The next time you're stuck (or the first time you're trying this form), try one of these ideas. Feel free to make these your own, however you'd like to customize them to fit your own ideas!

1. Issue a set of stamps based on your favorite food. (or foods) There were some incredibly creative postoids that one artist made commemorating macaroni and cheese at one point, for instance. Just think what you could do with an entire sheet of stamps based on cheesecake or chocolate! Take it literally, or make them into little chocolate people -- anything. (This would be especially interesting if you're really into Peep Art -- melting marshmallow peeps into bizarre-o shapes.)

2. Try an issue based on common household objects, seen in a new light. Sue Bender, in her book, "Everyday Sacred", talks about an art exercise in which she had to draw one hundred sketches of a simple household bowl. The first twenty or so looked exactly the same, but as time went on, she tried different mediums and locations and light sources to make her bowl more fun to sketch. Try out this exercise and publish a set of stamps with your ten favorite sketches.

3. Go through your family's old photographs. Find some that are particularly interesting (the expressions on the faces, the positions, the locales), and issue stamps with strange titles or themes. (I did one about family vacations called DRIVING DAD (crazy) that commemorated the tradition of family road trips which was very well received.)

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