Postage stamp art

In the last few months I've been playing with postage stamps, using them in collages and art projects here and there. I love the idea of postage stamp art by creating beautiful pages in a notebook with stamps. Pamela Gerard, a very talented artist and a friend of mine who is very interested in working with postage stamps, has been working on a postage stamp glue book that I fell in love with.

I've been holding on to the perfect little travel notebook that I found in a giftshop some years ago and there I began experimenting with series postage stamps, paint, and pigment color.

These "painted" pages are a little more time consuming, though I thoroughly enjoyed working on them, but I also wanted to do more straight gluing of stamps in groups. These have been a lot of fun to make. I've only started. I've got a lot more to do.

I get the stamps from a couple of different places. Ebay, of course, is an obvious place to search for stamps in large quantities. They are relatively cheap and there is such variety to choose from. I also get some stamps from my local stamp club. It's worth it to do a little research to find out what kind of stamp connections you might have near by. I've also attended my first stamp show not too long ago and enjoyed it. It definitely was a new experience.

I love working with postage stamps though I have to stress that I am not a collector. I'm not looking to have anything of value. I like to sort by theme and color, and I like the cheapest stamps best. That way there is no guilt when I glue them with a glue stick into my pages.

I've made a couple of other projects with stamps. This wall hanging is nice if you would rather create something that you can see, as opposed to closing it up in a book. But books are my favorite substrate, really. This stamp catalog that I turned into a junk journal gluebook is another postage stamp favorite of mine.