Vintage Postage Stamps Inspire Fanciful Storybook Scenes Painted by Illustrator Diana Sudyka

Chicago-based Illustrator Diana Sudyka uses vintage stamps from Europe as the starting point for fanciful paintings created using gouache, ink, and watercolor.

Chicago-based Illustrator Diana Sudyka uses vintage stamps from Europe as the starting point for fanciful paintings created using gouache, ink, and watercolor. These miniature engravings of portraits, architecture, and ships  become fully formed figures and landscapes that merge with trees and flowers and convene with animals.

inkydepths

lady_stamp

Many of the artist’s paintings include phrases of hand-painted text that add an additional narrative element to the works. “I let the stamp inform the subject matter and color palette. It’s a very intuitive process. The stamp is really just a stepping off point to get my imagination going.”

inkydepths

lady_stamp

Working mainly as a children’s book illustrator, Sudyka creates her stamp paintings primarily as relaxing interludes between client projects. She explains that her background is as a fine artist, specializing in intaglio printmaking, and her history with stamps goes back to her days as an undergraduate when she was inspired by collage artist Joseph Cornell, and picked up some vintage stamps at a coin collecting shop in her college town.

peveto_stamp1_2015

sermonofthecrows

sulpherlichen_stamp

summerhome

wolfstamp

womanandspirit_stamp

Discuss in Kanban.

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