Handmade easy stamps and some random thoughts

I actually create all the time, even if time is rare and work is stressing me out quite a lot these days. The balance between my love for research and the stress involved... I don't know. *sighs*

But I joined "Life Book 2016" and also just a few days ago "Wanderlust 2016". Both are mixed media online courses. Experimenting with different materials, techniques, whatever is something I enjoy as well as need. It keeps me sane. I did a lot of painting and stamping a few years ago, then changed to polymer clay, went to jewellery, had a break for metal work and ceramic clay and now like to play with paint a little bit more again. It is all not exclusive. What really changed is that I lost my fear to waste material or to ruin something by overdoing it. I allow myself to play and learn and let my hands remember what they used to do ;)

The online courses allow me for something I enjoy most: To watch how other people create! To see how they use their tool and fingers and everything else! This is getting me to play more, try out some new things and get some tips and tricks. Most of the time the lesson itself is just inspiration.

For one of my paintings I used some of my old craft foam stamps (the tiny dots as well as the negative space). What I made I'll show you the over the next days (hopefully as well as with some new jewellery!). 

The craft foam stamps work perfectly with stamping ink as well as acrylic paint and I just made some more! I used dots (I have a lot of different sizes) that I bought ready made, cut myself some strips and other organic forms... and also there are ready made shapes like the flower or the "blob" that I just glue down on some background like wood to create a stamping block.

Super easy and fast to make, really cheap and versatile and until now none of them broke. I also made some big background stamps with just tiny dots. Keeping in mind how expensive they often are, is even more a reason to create simple shape background stamps by myself. 

As a side note: I dapped the paint manually on the stamps. If you use a roller with acrylic paint or just stamping ink and a little bit more pressure, you'll get perfect stamped images! I just like the irregular ones for my backgrounds. :)