I love making my own stamps.  I found some small wooden letters at my local craft store and glued them onto a wooden substrate.  Remember, reverse the letters if you want them to read correctly  I didn't care since I wasn't making words,  
This is my favorite stamp!

Lately, I've been making Art Tiles.  Hundreds of them

I don't know why.

My tiles are 2" x 2" and start with a substrate of book board.  I'm layering all kinds of things on top using gesso, paint, gel medium, napkins, tissue paper, book pages, magazine pages, whatever I can find in my studio.

As a final layer, I cover the tile with Diamond Glaze or a Leveling Gel (I don't really see a difference between these products so buy whatever is less expensive!) 

You might ask — what are you going to do with all these tiles?

Honestly, I don't have a plan yet but I'm having fun experimenting with different layering ideas on a small scale and eventually, something will inspire me to make them into a cohesive piece of art.

This method of working reminds me when I did the same process — making lots of 6" squares of fabric to make a quilt.  Hmmmm.  Some things never change!

This small book was made using the "Blizzard Book" folding technique invented by Hedi Kyle.  I first saw her technique demonstrated on YouTube and the instructions are presented in her new book The Art of the Fold.  This book is perfectly suited for holding standard business cards.

I added color to the paper using my Gel printing technique with StazOn stamp ink pads and covered book board for the front and back covers.

Instead of business cards, I created some circles with some flower images and love how the shapes interact.

These mini books are really fun to create and I hope you try one.  Or two.  Or ten.  Yes this is addictive!

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No one knows how this Mandarin Duck came to be floating in the middle of Central Park in NYC.  But everyone agrees it's the most beautiful duck there!

One of the things I do to get my creative juices going is to print out a photo and put it into my watercolor sketchbook.  Then I try to duplicate every color I see in the photo.  This duck was a particular challenge since you don't really see these color combinations in most nature photos.  Hot pink, teal & ultramarine blue, purple, rust, brown, white and black.  The reflections in the water gave me a chance to gray down the colors as well as to add various shades of dark green to my palette.  

This exercise does two things:  improves your color mixing abilities so you can achieve just the right hue, and it trains your rye to be more alert to color in all it's variations.  I bet if you do this with a friend, each of you will come up with a different palette from the same photo.  (Hint:  everyone sees color differently!)

I had an old book that I wanted to use for eco-dying and I interleaved organic material between each page, wrapped the book with string and boiled it for a couple of hours.

Even though the pages took on images from leaves and flowers, I really just liked the way the string and book became it's own work of art.  

So Japanese!