Origami postcard project ...

Hmmm ... been a while since I posted anything here ... here's what's on my desk this evening ...

Finishing up some postcards for a postcard swap, and using up what's on my desk, including a package of 2"x2" neon origami squares. They've been hanging around awhile and I thought it was time to turn them into art. I had no clear plan when I started these, just trusted that something would happen as I went along.

One thing that happened is that I kept wanting to add *more* stamping to fill in the emptyish bits. As in more stamping than I would normally do. I thought it might be fun to show you all the "steps" as they came to me. A few words about stamps ... I have a lot of them, but I tend to a) buy them on sale and b) not buy any set that doesn't have at least one stamp that I think I'll be able to use on multiple projects. It was kind of fun to "shop" through my stamp collection for just the perfect little thing.

For those who *really* want to know, here are the stamp sets I used ~ and just one stamp from each set.
Step 2: Stitching from Kelly Panacci / Sandy Lion's Clear Borders.
Step 3: Sun from Farm House Paper Company's Fair Skies Dusk.
Step 4: is from ... uh oh ... clear alphabet set I received as a gift ... not sure of the origin.
Step 5: Text Strip from Prima's Christina Renee My Rose set.
Step 6: Flourish from Penny Black's Dancing Deer set.

For those who know me, these are not the usual colours I work in ... but the contrast of the bright neon origami papers seemed to really need that crisp black in the stamps. These postcards are heading off to Tangie Baxter's Art Journal Emporium's postcard swap at the beginning of March ... good to have them done!

That's all for now ... planning to post some of my day to day journal pages soon. I've been re-inspired by seeing some other people's working journals and thinking it might be time to share ... more to come!

More gelli fun - zine covers + envelopes ...

Finally had some time this afternoon to sit down with my Gelli Arts plate again. My goal today was to make some bases for zine covers and goodie envelopes for an upcoming zine swap. Although it might look like it, I didn't actually approach my colour choices in any kind of organized way. I just arranged them this way for the photograph afterwards.

I usually use a variety of paints, but these ones were mostly made with higher quality paints so I could get good "pick up" when pulling up residue paint off the plate. On the higher end, some colours were Golden, as well as Kroma (a local paint company in Vancouver). Kroma tends to be very buttery and lovely to work with. I love their pigment quality and how they blend. Slightly down the economic scale, there is some Pebeo and Amsterdam acrylics. Still good pigment, but not as good on the pick up. My new favourite colour is still Titanium White - the zine cover on the right-hand end must have about eight layers of uglier and uglier paint experiments - all saved by cross-texturing wavy lines in white. Fabulous.

For this gelli plate session I used some of my favourite "pattern makers" : 12x12 stencils from The Crafters Workshop, two pieces of wavy corrugated paper (not sure of the name or the source ... still trying to track down more of this stuff!) as well just plain old dragging a triangle graining tool through the wet paint.

I only foresee one problem with these zine covers ... I have to give them away in the swap. I wish I didn't fall in love with all the stuff that comes off the Gelli ... it would make life easier when it comes time to hand things over, even when I'm getting a bona fide art journal zine from some pretty amazing artists in exchange. Sigh.

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 ...

Celestial Navigation ...

This evening I'm finishing up another art project ... this time an international postcard swap I read about at Artists in Blogland. It seemed like a nice quick little swap, and a good exercise between some larger projects I'm working on.

As well as the three people in the swap I'm sending to, I've also done as the instructions suggestions, I've sent one off to FEATURING Magazine for possible inclusion in an article on mail art, so who knows .. maybe it'll surface again.

For those who know my work, the celestial theme will be familiar, as will the colour scheme. I'm tempted to tell you way too much about all the bits and pieces that went into its creation, but I'll keep this post short and  not get carried away ... let's just say mixed media and leave it at that, shall we?