Postcard Studio: Collage and Stamp

1. Introduction: Hello, everybody. This is Lucy, and I'm here in my studio in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada. I'm a graphic designer, Mxartist and top teacher here on Skillshare. And I want to welcome you to my new class in my postcard Studio series. This class is about collage and stamping. The first class was about collage and stenciling. This one is about collage mixing with stamping, making your own stamp, using the mastersheet technique to create your background, and then adding some stamping from your own stamp collection in black on top and then adding a few details here and there at the end, just like that, you have four postcards isn't that great? Do you want to try? Let's do it. 2. Class Project: Your class project is to create four postcards using the mastersheet technique where you collage a piece of nine by 12 bristol board, and we cut it in four. And then once we have our four backgrounds, we are going to make our own foam stamps and we're going to create different shapes and we are going to stamp our card and basically, that's it. It's very simple and it looks really awesome and you can make a whole bunch at the same time. You can create two or three masterbard and just mix and match. Let's get started. 3. Materials: Let's go over the material you will need for this project. First, a piece of card stock. Bristol board works really well. This one is nine by 12, but you can work with a four if you want. Then you'll need some matte medium. I use the liquitex matte medium fluid. I really like to work with that brand, but you can work with any other brand if you want. Also black paint, acrylic paint. This is a cheap student grade. Doesn't matter, it can be any brand that you want. You're going to need a foam brush. This is about three inch, but you can use a two inch if you want. We're going to need some containers. Something that you can use to make stamps with, like this. You can put your foam sticky back foam on there, and this is another top of a container that I use for another stamp. Anything you have around that has a flat top could work. What's great? As a few corks would be great. And sticky back foam, obviously. So a sheet that's about six by nine, something like that. That should be enough, one of them with a sticky back. Then some cardboard to make your stamps. And then a ruler. So scissors. Pencil, the usual stuff, some tape to put on the back of your stamps to make a little handle and your Posca or your gel pen, white. You sheet of words that we used in the last postcard class, I'll put that into the resource section, and then you need your collage papers. The usual stuff, book pages, music sheets, Maps are great, old maps, new maps. This is something we made in print stamp roll class. This is really great. I think it's on filter paper. If you have leftovers papers from that class, it'll be great. Illustrations can be fun too. This is security envelope. Some types fun to use too. So that would be your stash of that kind of paper and then pick maybe three or four colors of tissue paper. And if you have any pattern papers, that's really fun to use because there's little patterns on there. I think that's it. Let's get started. 4. Mastersheets: Our first step for this series of Postcard is to create our mastersheet. You're just going to create a background. What we're going to do right now is use our matte medium and your brush, and start collaging your background. I have my tissue paper here and all my collage paper here. I'm just going to go ahead and just put a nice coat of matte medium where I want to put some paper. I'm going to use the technique that we use in my other postcard class. The collage and stencil, both card class. Because basically you want to leave stuff hanging off the edge a little bit, and then we can cut it after. I also love to use some words in there. It's fun. Use words. I'm just going to use sheet music here where I have this title. Again, you don't want to think about what you're doing too much at this point because you're just creating a background, and you're going to be cutting it in pieces, so it does need to work right now, the way it is. I like this pattern paper. It's fun to have these big numbers in there. So actually, this is the thing I like to overlap. What I'm going to do is put some more papers. This is here, use more of that. Sometimes I like to line it up on the edge. If I have a straight edge, sometimes I'll just do that instead of cutting it after I usually start to collage all the stuff that is opaque. Then I'll come in with my tissue paper and overlap. You can also do all of this with glue stick if you want. Sometimes if you have some illustrations, it's fun to use that kind of stuff too. I feel like, Oh, that kind of stuff is fun too. This is paper that we made in my print stamp enroll class. Super fun. If you haven't taken that class yet, check it out because you're going to create a lot of great collage paper. So I think that's enough for the opaque stuff. Now I'm going to start to bring in some tissue paper. So what was my ten that I had? Okay, so see that kind of stuff is kind of cool because you can overlap it. That's why it's better to use the stuff that's opaque first. Because look, it's really cool, huh? I'm going to put it there. I would be harder to do this part with a glue stick, but you can still do it. Now what I'm going to do is bring in some color with this tissue paper. I'm I think I'm going to use these four colors here. You can use straight edges or you can do shapes if you want. If I wanted to do a little flower shape, for example, I could take a piece and cut it and fold it like that. The way you make a snowflake. I'm going to do this and then I'm going to cut it. This is fun to put in a background like that. I'm going to cut it the shape of a petal. And I'm going to cut the middle and oia, you have a little flower. See? Then what's really fun is you can put it overlap it like here, for example. Isn't that cool? If you want to put a bunch of flowers like that, you can do that. You can put some straight edge pieces. Like that. You can cut some circles if you want. You're basically mixing up straight edges with torn edges. But I want you to filter the whole thing with color and tissue. Alright, so I'm gonna let this dry. And when it's dry, we'll cut the edges, and then we'll take it from there. 5. Cut Postcards: When it's dry, you can use a hair dryer if you want to speed up the process. What you do is you just cut the edges. You could use acto knife if you want or a paper cutter. I just use scissors because it really doesn't have to be perfect. Wonky is good. All right. All right. Now what I want to do is cut this in four. It looks cool, just like that, actually. I like it. I can almost see something happening here like a little cityscape, but that's not what we're doing. Let's not get stuck here. We're going to cut it in four. This is nine by 12, so we're going to end up with a 4.5 by six. If you're using a four, then you're going to end up with a different size, maybe a narrower and longer postcard. But it works too. Whatever size you're working, make sure you just split it in four. Now here I'm going to do six. If you have a paper cutter that goes pretty fast, but I just want to show you that you don't need a paper cutter or an exacto knife to do this. Again, I'm going to use scissors because I don't really care if it's totally straight or not. I just want to show you how quickly you can make four postcards. A Okay. So here we go. We have four postcards already. See that? How cool is that? They all look pretty much different. But, I mean, this is a great start to add to our next step will be to create some stamp to finish those postcard. But look at them. They're so cool already. All right. Let's make some stamps. 6. Make Stamps: If you took my class print stamp enroll, you already know how to do this. If not, I'm going to show you how to do it again because we'll do different stamps on this one and different techniques. For example, I'm going to use different things to make some stamps. This is just a top of container. I don't remember what it was and this one is just a metal container. It just has to be flat. But anything that you find, you can use it to put your stamp on the stamp. Also, corks are great for that for smaller stamps and I also have cardboard. I'm going to start by tracing these because I want it to fit inside of that. And then I'm going to trace this one too. Let's see what else do I want to do? I think that I want to do some kind of a flower like this. Then maybe I want to have some kind of a circle. Maybe I'll do it here. This one will be my rainbow thing. I call this a rainbow because you'll see why. Then I'm going to do some small ones. Then maybe just some border like this. Yeah, let's start with that. This one here, I want it to be some kind of a full rainbow thing. I want to show you when you cut something like that. It's almost when you carve a block, but you're just cutting it in foam. You want to this is the part that's going to be cut. And this is when it's going to be left. I wanted to have this and another thing here. What I want to end up with is those three circles. I'm going to put them on this and I'm going to show you how it works. I'm just going to try to go in like this. It's a little funky here, but that's fine. This is the outside. This could also be a stamp. You want to keep all these pieces. Then this is what I'm cutting because I want to end up with whatever is white is what I want to end up on my stamps and you'll see what I mean. Now I want to cut this part here, this one might be easier if you fold it and just cut it Then you want to end up with something smaller like a little dot here. Here we go. That's our three pieces, and I'm just going to stick it on my little cap here, plastic cap for my first stamp whoops. Okay. What I meant by rainbow, I know this doesn't look like a rainbow, but is that when you stamp just half of it. When you stamp just half of it, it becomes this little rainbow shape. You can use it like that or you can use it as a circle like that. That's this one. Then let's do this one here. I'm just going to cut it little pieces like that. Super simple. I'm just going to go ahead and cut it. Again, I don't mind wonky. You're not going to use all the pieces because you do want to have white space in between, so I'm just cutting a bunch of them, but I'm not going to use all of them. Basically, I'm going to start at the edge here and go to the middle, right? This feels a little long to me, so I'm going to cut it. I mean, if you want to, you can just put them there first and decide how you want them and adjust them. Yeah, kind of like that. I'm just going to stick them on like this. I'm going this one. I'm going to do this one here. First, because with this one, I want to actually I want to actually keep the negative shapes of that. You'll understand what I mean about the negative shape. What I want to do is do my little flower but keep the frame around it. So what I mean is that you have this shape now and you have this shape. So we're going to use this shape You can use it here maybe. Maybe we do that. You can use it on cardboard and you can use it here. We'll just use it here. That's another stamp that we have. Then we're going to use this part. We're just going to put it on here and then it'll be the negative shape that we can print with. I'm going to line it up like this. Okay. Well, once it's on there, you can't really pull it, so it's going to be wonky like this. All right. Okay, so there's another stamp. Then we're going to do this little shape here. It's a little more simple the shape. Alright. So here's another one. Another one I like to do is just put some stripes like this, something like that. Just put a little piece to make yourself a little piece. It's very simple. I'm going to show you how to do this last one here that I use with the cork. There's two ways that you can do this one. Here's Here's this one. And this one. What I'm going to do is I want to have a little bit of texture on this instead of just being a straight circle, I'm going to do with my exacto knife. I'm just going to go and do some lines. You're going to see that texture when you print with it, but it'll be subtle. But I'm going to show you if you have a heat gun, I'm going to show you what you could do. You can open up these lines. But honestly, you don't need one. If you don't have a heat gun, don't worry about it. I just want to show you as an option. This is the first one and this one, I'll show you. If you heat this with a heat gun, you will open up the shapes and don't do it for too long because it's just totally melt it. But as you can see, you have this one and this one. This one is more subtle. You don't need to do both of them, but I'm just going to give you some options. 7. Stamp Postcards: All right let's print. What I'm going to do is I'm going to test first on this piece of paper before I put on my postcards and I'm going to use this foam brush here and put my paint on there, my black paint because it's going to create it's going to be our own little stamp pad. You could use a regular ink pad if you want. The problem is because we use matte medium. It just doesn't dry. So I think it's better to use acrylic paint. Okay, so I'm just going to test it and see if how this works. I'm going to try maybe this one here. See, that's making a little stem pad, isn't that cool? See? It works great. Oh, my God. That's awesome. Then I can do the same thing with this one here. Sorry. This might be a little too big. Normally, I would cut around this, put it on cardboard because honestly, this is going to be full of paint. Maybe this wasn't a good idea, but let's try it anyway. It's working. Then same with this one. Let's not use this one like that. But let's use this one. The other thing you can do with this one, which is cool, do you don't have to do the whole thing. You know what I mean? You just do the edges. Like that. S. Then that's pretty much it. You know what I'm going to do though, I'm going to put some tape on the back to have little handles, and then we're going to start printing on our postcards. So I moved it to a piece of cardboard because what I want to do is you want to cut it as close as you can to the edge, so it gets messy. I'm going to make these little handles that I show you how to make in my print stamp and roll class so I can use it to print like that. Let's get our postcard and see what we can do. Okay, so here's our postcards. I put them under a book, heavy book, so they would flatten a little bit. But you can also spray water on the back of them and let them dry like that, and they will flatten out whichever way you want to do. Okay, let's start with this one. Okay, so now we have a bunch of different things we can add to this. I think I want to use it that way, and now I'm going to do let's see. I'm going to try to maybe put this one here. Let's see. All right. I'm going to put that in a corner maybe. Yeah. I like when it's not a perfect print. I really like the rough edges like that. Then this is another one that I made. It's very easy. You just put a bunch a little dot. It's a really good simple simple one that I use all the time. Maybe I use it here. There you go. Simple, but really fun. This is what I was telling you about this one here that's kind of like the half rainbow. Check it out. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go off here and it's nice because it's transparent. I can see the edge of my My postcard. Isn't that cool? I know. Then I can bring in this other postcard. Actually, what you could do is use the other side here, for example. That didn't work. But do not worry. I'm going to fix that by using this one or this one here. Like that. You can always fix it. Then I'm going to try this one. You can work on them all at the same time or separately. Then in the middle, I would use this one Cool. Then let's use this one here to make some texture. Oh, I forgot to put something on the back here. See, this is why you need a little handle. There's something you can do. Let's say you want to have on each of them, I can just go in here and then See? Okay. And then I'm moving on. I'm going to move on to this one. I'm going to use this here, baby. If you find that sometimes it's messy in here, you can just wipe it off and start again because we have a layer of matte medium on top. Basically, use all your stamps and then work on all of them at the same time or one at a time until you're happy with it. 8. Final Touches: So here's our little set of postcards. Aren't they cute? I think they look great, just like that. But if you want to, you can add some little details with your white Posca or gelpen. You know, I like to add these little stars. But if you want to put your own marks on there, go for it. You know, dots I don't think it needs much really, because it's already kind of a lot going on with the background, but, you know, you can just add a few things. And lastly, if you're going to use that as a card, what you can do is bring in your little I mean, I wouldn't add anything here because there's already something and it's pretty. I wouldn't want to take away from that. But I would add this here maybe. Happy birthday. It's cool, huh? Let's try that. Yeah, that's a good spot for it right here. Here, I could do Congratulations. Like here, for example, let's say I could just put it here. Congratulations, like that. Maybe like that. And from the same page that I use on the last Postcard class. Same here. You know, maybe that a. And this is another series that I made. You see, you can make a little vase here and make a little flower bouquet. 9. Thank you: Thank you so much for taking my class. I can't wait to see your postcards. If you want to upload a project in the project section below, it would be great. I can see what you may. Make sure to follow me on Skillshare so you can be the first one to know about my next postcard class, and I hope to see you soon A vient.