How to Make a Blingee Stamp

Damon Pham

this is a tutorial for making falling sparkles, drifting petals, hovering birds, etc. for use in Blingee or PicMix compositions. we refer readers unfamiliar with either website to this interview for an illuminating introduction.

do you place the head of the week on Sunday or Monday? why January, and why midnight? if your quarantine has been like mine, these questions have become severely open-ended: weeks mash into a paste, months run through one another. my calendar looks like an acrylic pour painting of soymilk and oatmilk and almondmilk, and I lie on a bed of napkins, tilting its surface over in new ways, and honestly that kind of works. after all, what is texture if not a form of repetition? or: the same object can be made to feel different by altering the feeling apparatus. try Crest and then Tropicana. try playing the video backwards? squint your eyes and you can make out the shape of most kinds of gratitude. anyway, i’m getting ahead of myself. the first step for making a Blingee stamp (or PicMix sticker) is to discard immaterial beliefs of where it will start or end. just pick somewhere and make the incision—April, or 7 PM. lay down the first frame.

the next step is to make it move. float or fly or shimmer or just kind of appear here and there. it is the hardest and easiest part, for me at least, to act this action, to show up and work the thread between the previous and succeeding frame. sometimes, knowing where you want to end and savoring that mental image can be a dangerous barrier to actually getting there: allosteric inhibition by dream-product. should you get stuck, just try a unit translation, rotation, or expansion. a single wing-flap. thankfully, strangely, there is a satisfaction in cleaning your face, your cupboards, though you expect no visitors. while a single frame might be wholly skippable, the entire GIF is but an ordering of single frames, so there are no shortcuts ad infinitum. it’s so possible to act faithfully, though, so why bother? snowfall is nothing more than many falling snow particles. but you knew that.

the last step is to finish, the mechanism for which there exists a taxonomy: “scatter,” “reset,” “loop,” or “loop-x.” stamps that “scatter,” e.g. the classic White Glitter, have atomic units which materialize and dissolve without byproduct, even smack in the middle of the stamp. how bold! there is no modesty, no sleight-of-hand, because there are no hands. finishing is a foreign concept; each frame completes its own task, translating nothing exterior to it. this Poisson process is perhaps not objectionable for glitter, though, which catches light as it falls, and thus only appears to disappear and reappear. twinkling stars are an analogous phenomenon.

moving on, the next category is stamps that “reset.” their frames are contiguous except for the first and last, the only pair that belies the stamp’s finitude. in autumn ortega42, there’s a moment when the leaves suddenly teleport to a prior location; papillon vert-butterfly features a friend who says hello and flutters away into the background, only to be born again right in front of you the moment it becomes too small to see. these stamps bank on the viewer’s appreciating the gestalt of a Blingee composition, rather than conducting a Holmesian inspection of the path of each maple leaf or butterfly, in the same way a magician performs for their live audience who laughs at their jokes and not the viewers on Youtube wielding x0.25 playback speed. each time the last frame becomes the first, “loop” stamps ask us to suspend our investment in physical laws, which should be an agreeable request.

the last two categories are comprised of seamless animated stamps for which no suspension of disbelief is necessary. транс ivk ivk_trans petals ivk_gadgets is a great example of a “loop” stamp. watch as a single flower petal falls to the bottom-left, and a new (or the same?) petal emerges from the top-right to take its place. how beautiful! if the spawn and de-spawn locations are placed at the edge of the composition, or behind a convenient object, the Blingee remains a window into a world much like our own. lastly, the final category, “loop-x” stamps, extends the magician’s wand a bit further. here, instead of replacing itself, a particle takes the place of another particle which takes the place of another… see the tandem snowfall in SNOW-GIF-WINTER-flocons-de-neige-HIVER and the adjoined hypnosis of фон ivk gold ivk_Gold and Animated Water in Sepia. “loop-x” stamps are engineered for frugal mimesis, rightfully occupying the highest echelon of Blingee technology. try to make one if you feel brave.

you may be surprised by the moment you finish crafting all the frames in your stamp. press play: how does it look? when you are ready, string the beads onto the necklace and tie the knot. press submit, firmly. take pride as you release your stamp into the world, adorning photos of strangers’ loved ones and sometimes themselves. maybe one day you will find your stamp in the wild, remixed and transformed, looking a bit wiser and taller than you remember. what have you learned?

perhaps, like me, you’ve acquired a greater sensitivity to the Blingee stamps in your everyday environment: the swaying of a neighbor’s tree, the stream of water from a kitchen faucet, the passage of cars across a freeway. there’s an astonishing richness to these idle-pose animations. how can something develop when it ends where it began; how can it do work without displacement? the stamps presented here reveal an ecosystem of potential responses. for me at least, Blingee stamps have helped me foreground my present priorities and future ambitions in the context of the revolving hours, days, and months of quarantine. I hope for you they can do something similar.