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A Friendly Invitation

© Leslie Frederick

Hi my name is Jo and I am standing in for Lesley until she gets back. I am her managing editor as well as the Dean of Dean of the Arts & Crafts School at SuiteU. I thought I would write about Rubber Stamping from a slightly different point of view. My own major areas of endeavour are Mural Creation, Sculpture and Acrylic Painting.

click to enlarge. Now you might say why am I telling you this? What has it got to do with rubber-stamping?

E c l e c t i c i s m

I am talking about eclecticism in the arts and the variety of topics offered by the SuiteU Arts and Crafts department that are cross related! I am going to discuss Leslie's topic within the context of how her upcoming course fits into the eclectic menu which cross-fertilises the experimental, avant guard nature of the SuiteU - Arts and Crafts Section. Please bear with me.

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Rubber Stamping is a great way of capturing an image and repeating it over and over. Sometimes this is done on the one artwork, card or object and sometimes in a series. So for example, the artist could create a series of cards by stamping one image many times on a series of different coloured cards. Changing the colour of the card would change the emotions evoked by the image. Or perhaps the image may be small and repeated at regular intervals around the edge of the artwork to create a border on the one piece. It can also be used in conjunction with a variety of other media to make up a collage type arrangement. An artist could stamp the words of part of a poem, whilst adding a real dried flower and a splash of paint. Often when I see rubber-stamping it has been done in the context of a collage.

Now there are a lot of similarities in the above example to the stencilling course offered by Carol Wallace - not once but twice. Stenciling101 and Beyond Stenciling. Stenciling is the opposite of rubber-stamping, because stenciling requires that the artist cut out shapes and force the paint through the opening thus creating and image. Rubber stamping uses a raised surface that has had the surrounds cut away from it. The raised surface is inked and then pressed onto another surface - thus creating an image. So essentially these techniques are opposite in nature but used to create the same kind of effect. Often they look entirely different when finished and they are suitable for different kinds of tasks.