Postage Stamp People Collages

I've been having great fun making Postage Stamp People, joining a "craze" that I've been enjoying on a number of different blogs, from Pamela's to Jewels' to the Mail Me Some Art swap site. 

To get started, I went through my stamp collection and pulled out likely candidates--the ones with people's photos and portraits. 

My next step was to look through my collection of vintage photographs, as well as some non-photo drawings and pictures of people.  Then, sitting on the floor with everything spread out in front of me, I matched up postage stamp faces with photograph bodies that seemed to work well with them.

Once I had a match, I glued the postage stamps in place, and looked through piles of postal ephemera (mainly a bin of old air mail envelopes that have been delightfully worn by time and handling).  After some stitching at the sewing machine, my collages were complete!  In this first one, two faces of Queen Elizabeth take the place of two faces of Frida Kahlo, taken from a brochure from an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In this second collage, I used a work of art published in an old Somerset Studio magazine that I had cut out without preserving the artist's name.  I thought this gentleman's rather morose expression fit well with the angels' folded hands, and you can still see a bit of a golden halo peeking out behind his head.

I was especially happy with how the line of the postmark lined up perfectly with the angel's shoulder, making it a great match-up.  A purple "Air Mail" stamp from my envelope stash, and some Italian postage commemorating Dante Alighieri made a perfect frame for my re-imagined angel.



We all know that the ocean can inspire peace and meditation.  It's no different for this nun, who once prayed in front of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre in France, but has taken over the head of an old-time bathing beauty to pray near the shoreline.

And the piece that gives me a grin every time I look at it:  FDR as you've never seen him before!

Yes, that's right.  The tilt of his head on the postage stamp matched the tilt of this cigarette girl's head so well that I couldn't resist.  One shoulder lines up absolutely perfectly (the other one, not so much). 

I have lots more Postage Stamp People to share with you in future posts.  This is one of those projects that is tough to stop once you get rolling!

An interesting side note:  While I was organizing and filing some old articles from various artful magazines, I ran across an piece about the wonderful collage artist Janice Lowry in the Melange section of Somerset Studio (maybe from 2007?  I'm not sure, since the date is not printed on the pages from this section).  She shared her own postage stamp people, and explained that she developed this creative exercise for people who felt that they could not draw heads or faces. 

In each of her pictures, she included a figure holding a copy of Somerset Studio.  That must have made the magazine staff feel good!