It started with the idea that I’d make a stamp. Like a stamp to put on the backs of photographs where I could sign them so it would be clear that they were my work. And I thought it needed to have a printing press in it and something about puddles, obviously. So I looked at lots of rubber boots online, thinking that might be a good motif. I have lots of fond memories of tramping around in the spring puddles and naming the geographic features that the run-off from the melting snow would carve into the ice on the curbs–lakes, canyons, rivers, rapids, waterfalls, gorges, streams and ponds; so many features I had to dig deep into middle names and nicknames to put my stamp on them.

I’d also always had this idea about jumping into street puddles and what would happen if the puddle was so deep you sank right into it and it was bottomless and full of wonders like giant whales. And I’ve been reading creation myths with my English class, stories about the world being built on the shells of giant turtles and about the giant catfish that wriggles underneath Japan causing all of its earthquakes. I love the art used to depict those early ideas of what things looked like and that got me thinking of old black & white schematics.

So I pulled together this digital collage. Probably too intricate to work as the stamp I started out trying to make, but sometimes that’s how it goes.

(As far as I am able to tell, the component images were found in the public domain. The printing press comes from an early volume of Popular Science Monthly Volume 56. The whale plate appears to date to the 1700’s but I found it through an artist’s blog.)