Vintage Stamps

I ran across this while cleaning out my studio last night. It was a small test for a larger series of collages I wanted to do.

Always fascinated by vintage stamps, I especially love the colors of these.

Lisbon in Yellow....

It's Fall Colour Week over at Poppytalk and the color today is yellow. One of the things that I loved most about Lisbon is that it is a town of yellows. I'm not quite prepared to post all of my yellow Lisbon photos just yet, but as today is yellow for Fall Colour Week, I thought I would post just a few...

Positively Playful Palace

On my first full day in Lisbon, a few of us went to Sintra, which is a tiny little town just outside of Lisbon, to see the Pena National Palace, which looks like a little castle.  I've never seen such a lively, colorful palace before and would like to have spent many more hours wandering through it.

The outside of the palace, while worn and obviously very old, was brightly colored in hues of red, yellow & blue. Perhaps my favorite part of the castle were all of the vibrant tiles, some with a raised texture to them, and the bold doorways. Apparently they chose to build on this hill because of the great views over Lisbon and to the sea, which makes for better defense. It's a beautiful location surrounded by a huge lush park and a short walk to the cute little historical town of Sintra with it's twisting cobblestone streets and ancient buildings.

Best Part of Spring?

All winter long my little yellow cruiser has been sitting out back patiently waiting for it's day in the sun.  Yesterday it was around 60 in Denver and we busted out the cruisers for a ride through Wash Park after stops at the library and coffee house. 

(Oh, and the best part about my hot yellow bike, which you can't see in the pictures, is that the tires have a flame design in them.  She's on fire!)

Summer days are almost here again!  So get off those computers and go out for a ride.

Almost an art disaster...

I very nearly ruined my latest piece. Luckily, it's small, because I was experimenting with a new technique, so it wouldn't have been a huge disaster to have to throw it away, but I would have been bummed.



I've been experimenting with acrylic. I have been using stamps of one or two colors for my backgrounds, as in the two pieces below, but as you can see , the backgrounds get noisy sometimes. I like them for their colorfulness and the backgrounds are interesting if you take a close look, because of course I think most stamps are interesting, but sometimes the stamp backgrounds drown out my message.

Which is why I've been experimenting with painted backgrounds. They definitely make my pictures pop out more, though to me these backgrounds are a little less interesting. But the paint is really difficult to adhere the stamps to. They slip and slide all around, frequently become crooked and have to be completely reworked- it takes a lot more time to build on the paint background than on a background made of stamps.

Today I tried sealing the paint first, with varnish, before laying my picture down on the black paint, but the varnish and the adhesive had some weird chemical reaction and all of my yellow stamps looked gray from smudges of paint! Very disappointing- especially because yellow stamps are incredibly hard to find- countries just don't make many yellow stamps for some reason. Luckily, I was able to take the whole picture off, repaint the canvas and rebuild another yellow house. I actually like this one a little better than the first one, so I suppose it all worked out.

Here's my latest miniature canvas 'Spring House':

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22466370

Andrea at Studio6