Ok, I'm about to drop a snob bomb. Please don't be hurt - if you create with stamps, designer paper, inkjet printouts - more power to your badtastic artistic self - but it's hard for me Momma. HARD. I have hangups.
I know this will sound snobbish in the extreme, but there's something I don't like about using the same imagery as other people, readily available, just ink and press. I don't like it. I love other people's work that uses stamps sometimes - like any medium, some is great, some is good, some is less so but as long as people are creating, yay. I don't generally like mine. I've never felt enough connection to the imagery.
Buying a lot of the repro "ephemera" and designer papers feels to me like solving a visual problem by throwing money at it. It's not that I don't spend money on vintage papers and books that I'm willing to give the chop - and I'm lucky to be near the ULTIMATE source (more on that later) - I find that I think harder and more about what I'm buying.Limiting myself to really having to hunt though things and decide which old things are right for repurposing - which feel "too good" for being remade into art, which have an interesting backstory - this is part of my art process. I can't get that from a digital collage sheet.
I've even been resistant to using the distress inks - it's not a dis on Tim Holz, whose work is great, I just don't like the whole thing of "and now I shall make a Tim Holz project" that follows from grabbing up the whole line of offerings. There's a ton of distress ink in this though, the greens and some tea stain tones. Yes, they're fantastic to use!
Overall, this is probably something I should get over, but it's definitely something I find I think about a lot.
So for me I guess a good challenge piece would be to use only materials from designer lines or something.
