I’ve talked about this before on this blog, but I once spent several years as the main artist and designer for Stampers Anonymous, a well-regarded rubber art stamp company. The owner, Ginny (who continues to be a friend to this day) has an artistic sensibility, and a love for the weird, that dovetails nicely with mine. I loved designing stamps for her, and probably did hundreds throughout the years.

The rubber stamp community is passionately creative, and one of their favorite people is illustrator and collage artist Nick Bantock. He’s probably most famous for the Griffin and Sabine series, but he’s done many other art books as well. His collage work often utilizes rubber stamps, which is part of what endears him to stampers.

So I’m in Ginny’s stamp store one day, and she hands me Bantock’s lavish, oversized hardcover art book, Artful Dodger, and tells me to look at the collage in the center spread. Lo and behold, there, in the center of the collage, is one of my stamps. Probably the proudest moment of my stamp design career. Check it out below. That’s my artwork, the stamp featuring a quote about art, there in the middle.