Another batch of postcards ready to go out for an international swap ...

Another batch of postcards ready to go out for an internationalswap.

One of the things I love about making art is that you can keep re-creating ideas in new ways. The phrase on this postcard has had more than a few incarnation over the years. I have a weird affinity for sentences where all the words have the same length, and in the past I've put this phrase into a tidy little grid. This time around I gridded the background and let the words be funky (i.e. random type and not lined up, lest you think I mean something else).

This background is becoming my new favourite background to work on ... it's made from the reader's digest pages where I clean off my brayer while using my gelli plate. I love that cleaning my brayer gives me huge stacks of colourful text pages to play with - there truly is no waste ... just lovely texty coloury bits to play with. For this background I cut the text pages into 1.75" squares, glued them down in a pleasing sort of spectrumy order, and then gessoed the borders, dry-brushing towards the middle of each square as I went. The trouble with this background is that I kinda fall in love with each step as I go (well okay, maybe not step one ...). A friend of mine at seeing step three called this background "Paper Pillows" and it's as good a name as any I can think of myself, so here are the steps to Paper Pillows in case you want to give it a go yourself:
 

 
The frames are a rubber stamp, and the last step (for my postcards) was to stamp text in the frames. I've also been using this same background in my art journal and then doing non-grid drawings/paintings on top of it, but I'll save those images for a future post because I still want to tweak them and add more detail.

Hope you're all having a colourful day ...