Concepts Stamping LIVE Workshop

G’day Friends!

I’m holding my first jlbCREATIVE Workshop LIVE Online on Friday June 5th, 2020, so I thought I’d share some more information about it here.

This class is my Concepts Stamping Workshop and was previously only taught in-person. It runs approx. 90 minutes and is designed to teach my #stampanillustration (stamp an illustration) technique.

What is #stampanillustration you ask?

Well, let me first show you some of my Signature Collection Stamp Sets…

Now, let me show you an illustration that’s been stamped together…

If you do a bit of detective work you can spot all the shapes and elements in the stamp sets displayed above.

To put it simply, I’m using the stamps as a BLUEPRINT; a jumping off point, a starter, the base, the skeleton, the structure…

even the idea itself.

In days of old, as much as I enjoyed a little stamp here and there, I couldn’t justify single use stamps. I have no personal vendetta towards them they just never liked my shallow hip pocket. Through my own process of using a few sets I owned and desperately trying to make the most of them, I found that I could re-work the images with a few lines here and there and *magic noise* I had a new look from the same stamp.

I set out to create my first stamp sets in 2017 and included a 4x6 set of blank faces called “Face Base”. At first everyone thought I forgot to add the features, but I quickly exposed the choice to leave them as plain as I could for a specific purpose; I wanted to draw them in! I had the faces mapped out to the proportions I enjoyed at the time and it was when I started making my advertising samples (or Stamples as we now like to call them) that I truly realized how valuable they were to me.

They save me so much time!

Not that I needed to go faster, but it was just such a pain to have to take the time to sketch out my faces and worry about the symmetry and proportions EVERY SINGLE TIME I sat down to enjoy myself. When I’m sitting at my desk for a bit of Moi Time I don’t care to test my skills at making eyes symmetrical - I just want to play and decorate and color-in EVERYTHING!

So, that is what I did, and for years now I have enjoyed the process of stamping together my blueprints and finishing them off like I would any other illustration.

Since January 2019 I’ve introduced 3 “Concepts” Stamp Sets as a way to have an all-in-one option for stamping illustrations and building unique looks.

Before these 3 sets I would pair the Face Base and Decora -a Japanese fashion trend short for “decoration”. Adding these little decorative stamps to my drawings was a way of collaging together new shapes, styles and patterns. It always offered me a more interesting result than when I set out to “draw something interesting” and inevitably froze. This style of stamping out my drawings became an exercise in puzzle play and abstract thinking. Armed with the structures of the faces and bodies, simple shapes and motifs to adorn them, I would stamp countless fabulous and outright bizarre pieces into existence.

Of course, the stamping is part one. Part 2 is the illustrating. I love to teach this technique to artists of all levels and disciplines. I love to see the stampers start to illustrate and paint, bridging the gap between “stamper”, “scrapbooker” or “crafter” and “mixed-media artist”. Being more of an illustrator myself, I noticed it brought out my more crafty side while stretching my ability to create more imaginative works. Typically, working from my imagination involves a great deal of visual recall and can be difficult for me, which became almost uneccessary when I had the stamps to create with. My work became less about memory and accuracy and more about play and exploration.

I should also mention the obvious at some point - it was really easy to start over if I wanted to. It takes about 0.08635 seconds to re-stamp your piece as opposed to the 65,000 hours it takes to re-sketch.

My thoughts about the benefits of playing and exercising your skills with this stamping technique are ever evolving and I love to get people playing with it. The Concepts Stamping Workshop is planned to put my process on display and guide students through how I use the stamps, create ideas with them and how I take them from stamps to finished pieces.

So that’s the quick backstory on the Workshop, what #stampanillustration refers to and why I get so excited about it.

If you’re going to be at the workshop, I’ll see you there next Friday! Remember to have your “Concepts” 6x8 Stamp Set ready to go and be prepared to STAMP EVERYTHING!

- James

If you’d like to know a bit more about the workshop, click the button below.

If you’d like to see more of these stamp sets in action, you can find more videos here.

If you’d like to purchase any stamp sets, you can find my shop here.