Launch Day Craft Crush: Julie Nutting Doll Stamps

It’s been months of nights, weekends and holidays, but it’s finally time to launch the Artful Geek Girl! I’m so excited to let my creative alter ego have free reign here on this blog and in my Etsy Shop. I thought a great way to celebrate launch day was with my very first Craft Crush post.

We all have them, craft supplies, artists and techniques that we are totally crushing on. Sometime they are things we already have in our Supply Stash, other times they are things we dream about adding to it and other times it’s one of the amazing craft designers who we’d love to meet.

Today’s Craft Crush is something I wanted to add to my supplies for several years, but just never knew exactly how I was going to use them. I remember adding several of them to my shopping cart online just because they were so damned cute, then having second thoughts and taking them out.  When I recently began dabbling in mixed media I finally had a reason to buy…Julie Nutting Paper Doll stamps!

As you can see, once I bought the first one, I had to have more. In fact, my growing collection is what prompted me to find a storage solution for them. The stamps are unmounted, meaning you’ll want to invest in an acrylic block of some sort.  It needs to be a BIG one, because these stamps are huge.  Most of them are just over 7″ tall, with certain dolls, like Lorena in the long gown above, can also be over 5″ wide!  That’s a big stamp.

Each doll is named, and has their own personality, not to mention details like pretty little ruffles and cute shoes. I started with Candie (shown flipped for detail above) who was quickly followed by Marisol, Adam, little Toby and Adara and my most recent addition, Lorena.

If the clothes they come in aren’t fun enough for you, Marisol and Adam have outfits that can be purchased separately, like the pants show above. You can also get a set of different shoes or hats.  Yes, you guessed it, I had to have those too! Don’t you just LOVE the bunny slippers?

But just how do I use them you ask?

I start by stamping a doll onto heavy watercolor paper and coloring in the parts that won’t be created from decorative papers with my Copic markers.  I don’t cut the doll out until after I color them, that way I don’t have to worry about staying inside the lines so much.  I always have been an outside the lines kinda girl. If I’m using the outfit the doll came with, I stamp it again on whatever papers I’m creating the outfit from. In Marisol and Adam’s case, I have separate stamps for their clothes so I just stamp the pieces onto the papers I want. Then I cut everything out and glue it all together. I always finish my dolls first, before I add them to a mixed media background.

I got Adam and Marisol dressed up for Homecoming 2015 in the images above, drawing my inspiration from an actual homecoming dress I saw online. I usually always add dimension to the paper doll. I then draw inspiration from the theme and the outfit for the mixed media background and pop the doll(s) off the background as well. 

If you were a fan of paper dolls or loved dressing Barbie as a kid, I’d be willing to bet you’d love these doll stamps as well. Julie Nutting is brilliant for designing something so versatile and FUN. So go ahead, make them your Craft Crush too!