Stamp Projects | Shannon Kaye Color in the City

My friend and fellow artist, Meagan Lewis, creator of Brown Pigeon, and one of Etsy’s best sellers, was approached by Chronicle Books to create her first book, Put Your Stamp On It!

SK: What’s your favorite project in the book?
ML: My favorite project at the moment would probably be the “Scrap Rubber Photo Boxes”. When you begin making your own carved stamps, you’ll quickly notice that you’ve acquired a pile of scrap pieces. When my own scrap pile began to overflow, it hit me! I mounted the scraps onto a block of wood, inked that up, and was delighted by the pattern it created.

SK: Who should buy this book?
ML:This book can be enjoyed by the beginning stamp lover or an artist who is looking to expand their creative repertoire. My hope is that not only will you feel inspired, you’ll feel ready to start stamping!

SK: What’s your favorite color combo right now?
ML: Right now, my favorite combo would have to be mint, pink and brown. Yes, those are the colors of Spumoni ice cream. And I love that too.

SK: Thanks, Megan. You totally inspire me and remind to keep carving out my own creative path. Buy the book, everyone. It’s absolutely beautiful.

They say, it’s not what you know, but who you know. I couldn’t agree more!

Case in point, Meagan Lewis, founder of Brown Pigeon created the X and O stamps for my stair project. I found her ‘randomly’ last year while looking on Etsy for custom stamps and homemade booklets for an event I was planning.

Her stamps are so creative and precise, I had to come up with a way to use her work in the videos. I gave her the concept for the shapes which she turned into the perfect size and style.

Gotta love when a plan comes together.

Megan has a beautiful book coming out with Chronicle and continues to expand her horizons on with her shop on Etsy, custom designs, and lines she’s developing for boutiques. Check her out!

And then there’s stencil guru, Melanie Royal of famed Royal Design Studio who’s been a go-to resource since the early years of my business including Fresh Coat on DIY Network.

I recently had the honor of talking to Melanie! I thanked her for her creativity AND reliability for people like me who need all kinds of stencils from traditional to modern, large scale, accurate, beautiful, AND custom things- usually done quickly- with that intuitive understanding of a ‘real’ decorative painter.

She sent me these candid pics for her studio- very cool.

Recognize that stencil?

This one, below, is Melanie’s patented invention. It’s a Modello which is a one-time use decal stencil that allows me to incorporate the negative space as the main feature in a design like this.

I’ve been using the negative pieces of my own stencils for years in my more fine art pieces, like this painting below. The main winged heart is a regular stencil I designed and cut out from poster board…

The other winged hearts are made by placing the piece I cut out- the negative piece- on the surface and painting over it, rather than inside of it. Make sense?

Anyway, when I saw Melanie’s Modello stencils it was like the Heaven’s opened up and sang (AHHHH!) because it allows even more creativity for us stencil fanatics who can’t stop thinking in layer and pattern. Thank you, Melanie!

But wait, there’s more! Tomorrow, I’ll introduce you to even more heavy hitters that helped get these videos done.