While I was making cards, I decided to make a valentine for Jeremy.  I’d already cut out the Jack of Hearts scans, so I started by glueing on on the scrapbook paper background (the scrapbook paper is to cut the print for the invitation I didn’t use.)

I bought the red handmade paper at a Japanese import store last summer. It was meant to be used as wrapping paper.  I tore a heart out of it, then cut a second heart out of the middle.  Then I painted glossy gel medium in the middle and added the pink glass beads. I liked the tiny heart from the reversed jack, so I wiped that part clear of beads.

I call this one “Laura’s Crown” because of the crown and because it reminds me of my sister’s style. She has a wealth of papers, paper cutters, and decorative fasteners.  Most of her creations look very tidy, unlike mine which don’t feel complete unless something had to be cleaned up afterwards.

The card on this is from a Mexican lottery game.

Part of a series of six greeting cards inspired by the need to make a birthday card for Jane Cheek.

For this card I started with a greeting card blank that I’d started to stamp an invitation on (I ended up not using the invitations because evite is easier).  I cut a rectangle of scrapbooking cardstock and glued it down.  Then I cut out the jack from a scan I made.  I had the scan of the stamps too, and I liked that the colors coordinated so I ripped a piece off the photocopy.

There’s a publisher that puts out a calendar of Rumi sayings every year.  I don’t care too much for poetry, but I love the artist (Matt Manley)’s work so much that I buy a copy every year.  I mean to cut them out and frame them, though I haven’t done so yet because I don’t like the holes in the pictures.  I took one of the pictures and cut it up so that it just showed the texture.  Then I tore a piece of art paper to mimic the arc of the negative space left by the head.  I put a piece of origami paper behind it, and glued them down before adding the jack to the bottom corner.

I thought it would look finished, but there was too much middle-ground texture and no focal point.  I’d cut the heart out for another card, so I used that, which worked well since it was the Jack of Hearts on the card.  Then for another card I was playing around with laser print decals, and I wanted to put some text.  I love the way handwritten text looks on collage art, but I hate the way sharpies look (and when you’re writing on glossy surfaces, really sharpies are the only things you can rely on).  So I photocopied one of my writing notebooks, blew the text up about twenty percent, and printed a scan of it.

The full text was from a first draft of my story “Emily’s Fifth Birthday.” The sentence originally read “She’s brought Emily a designer pink tulle dress.”  With most of the text cut off, and the pining expression on the Jack’s face, it looks like he’s just come to a party and learned that someone (Emily’s mother perhaps?) has brought the object of his affection.

I was originally going to use one of the etched copper embellishments I made for this, but decided against it because the metal would be too heavy to mail. When I mail letters, I tend to cut extra sheets so I can add a lot more text than the stationary-makers think a person needs, and they push the edges of allowed first class weight.

I’d saved sheets from a magazine that had nice landscapes in the background. This was from some kind of ad, I think.  I cut off the part with the people and adhered it to the scrapbook paper background.  I’d already decided to use the polymer clay embellishment (I made it when I made the other things for Jessica’s jewelry box).

I knew for this one that I wanted to have text on it. What I like best of all is hand-written dip pen on paper.  Of course, hand written dip pens are tempramental, and won’t write on glossy paper, unsized paper, or anything coated with acrylic paint: therefore, no collage work. I’d bought these laser decal transfer sheets when I bought the printable temporary tattoo paper for my practical joke last year.

I had known I wanted to do something like this, so the last time I wrote Jessica (different Jessica) I scanned a couple sheets of my letter to her.  This particular paragraph talks about my friend Jerome, and about a question he posted on our private forum asking for advice about a writing workshop.

I’d made the linoblock of a woman reading for another birthday card for Jane, and the print was still in the pack of cards. I cut it out and placed it experimentally on the blue scrapbooking paper background.  It wanted some kind of outline, and I love the idea of using text, so I took a piece of a novel that I’d altered and cut around it.

The edge was too harsh, so I softened it by burning it with a woodburner.  I wanted to adhere it and also tint it blue or violet to match the rest, so I added some violet pearl acrylic to the tranparent gel medium.  It’s still not quite as tinted as I would like, but I jsut left it.  I also added some mardi-gras colored glass beads to the pitcute while  it was still wet. You can’t see them very well in the photo.  I also added the dove feather, just because I had it lying around.

I had already decided to make a laser decal of writing for another card, so I took the scraps of that and laid it over this, just because the colors didn’t clash.  You can hardly tell it’s a decal. It looks a little like I drew directly over the linoblock print (except I can’t make it look good just by drawing. I freeze up and don’t know what to write, and my handwriting doesn’t look natural.)

Jane’s birthday was the impetus behind all this card-making.  I wanted to make a birthday card for her that was really special.  This particular card was the hardest to make, as it didn’t seem to turn out the way I wanted it to.

After I chose the card color and the background scrapbook paper, I had established the theme of red and gold.  Next I took a piece of the background paper and drew a cake and candles on it.  I’ve seen hand-made drawings used in collage to good effect before, but not this time. I just couldn’t make it work. I tried adding gold paint to it, but even that didn’t help. The problem, I decided, was that the syncronicity between the papers was too obvious. No matter what I put in between them, the fact that I’d used the same paper twice stood out.  I tried using gold paper behind it, but even that didn’t help, so I ditched it (and eventually used it in the middle.)

My next try was to draw the same birthday cake on a piece of brass with a sharpie.  It looked terrible. I ditched it.

So I cut a piece of the orange art paper and pasted it, then picked up another piece of the red handmade paper and tried to decide how I could make it work. I’d had a little tube of rub-n-buff that I bought a year ago and have never used.  Part of this whole card-making exercise was about experimenting with new materials, so I opened it up. It smells delightfully toxic, like turpentine or spray paint. It also made a rather organic-looking smear of gold on the handmade paper.

Once the gold was on there, the gold paper worked beautifully, so I cut it out.  I was going to try to paint one of my fimo faces with bronze or iron paint, but when I saw a red one in my scraps drawer, I decided to make less work and just use that.  The acrylic gel (or the brush) had some blue in it, probably from the blue linoblock ink on the haloed blue reader card.  I’m not fond of the blue underneath the face, but it doesn’t look terrible.

Here’s another collage in the series I did. When I decided that the first one needed help, I set about cutting linoblocks.  I’ve cut three so far, all of birds, and I have three others that need to be cut.  No problem collaging on the slightly rough gessoed surface, so that’s good.

I’ve gotten more use out of this swallow linoblock than all the other ones.  The shape of a swallow fascinates me.  Like the songbird collage, this one has printed text from the first draft of the short story ‘Emily’s Fifth Birthday’ that I wrote at Clarion last year.  I like the way hand-written text looks as a background image, so I’ve taken to scanning my letters to friends for future use.  Collage is all about building up a store of stuff you’ve made so you can reuse them later.

The black-and-brown woodcut pattern is from wrapping paper from my favorite stationary store in Prescott.  I did the outline of the leaf by gessoing over a pressed watermelon leaf.  The sparrow linocut I did myself.

In addition to learning about what looks good and what doesn’t, I’ve had to learn how to photograph 2-D pieces.  I tried scanning it, and that works, to a point, but the file sizes are huge and I don’t like the way it pixelates when I resize it to something managable.  I have a fairly decent photography area set up for photographing my 3-D art, but it’s not suitable for flat pieces.

My solution was to tack the picture to a piece of white matboard, and then set it up on an easel.  The easel isn’t very good, and it takes some finagling to get the tripod and the easel to align with one another.  The colors never come out exactly right either way, so I just have to choose one and know it’s not exact.  It will never be exact, anyway, because I use metallic and iridescent and interference paints, and they shift with the angle of the light.

One surprise is how much better they look with flash.  I endeavor to disable the flash when I photograph 3-D pieces, pottery especially, because I don’t like the reflection and the glare.  You can see on the songbird collage piece the difference between a scanned image (which resembles a flash-less image) and the completed one that was photographed with flash.  I thought that with three spots the light would be sufficient, but it turns out that more is better.

One of my great joys in life is learning more each day about something I thought I knew well.

I’ve been trying my hand at collage lately.  I’m so impressed by the beauty of a lot of the collage artists I’ve seen, impressed enough that I want to duplicate everything I see.  This is my first time using gesso for anything other than priming a canvas.  I saw the technique in Cloth Paper Scissors, and I like the layered opacity of it.

I started with the test canvases from the mural.  There were three of them painted orange with the outline of a black crow and two maple leaves on it.  First I took my Clarion notebook from last year where I’d written out the first draft of a short story.  I enlarged it 200% on my scanner and printed it out.  I didn’t change the color; I often write with sepia ink.  I wanted to use two pieces, so I traced the outline of a crow’s wing (also from the stencils I made for the mural) and cut around that. This canvas has the negative around the wing; another one has the wing itself.  After that I layered white and green-tinted gesso over it.

Next, I cut out the bird image from some paper I bought. I really like birds, and don’t mind making all my pieces themed around them, but after I was done I decided that I really didn’t like using others’ art.

I’d pressed some garden leaves flat to use for printmaking, but I got involved in other things, and by the time I got around to using them, they were too brittle to use for printmaking.  They are still suitable for stencils though.  I painted bronze acrylic over the leaf, and then lifted it.

It looked pretty good, but it still needed something.  I decided to trace around the bird with sharpie, to make a dark contrast as a focal point, and to make the bird more my own.  I think it was the wrong choice.  I sketched the crappy little birds in the upper right hand corner to create a second, smaller focal point, but it didn’t help.

To salvage it, I cut a linoblock and printed the design over the image, to scratch the other art out.  I don’t know if I saved it. With abstracted art, it’s hard to tell if something is ‘done’ or not.

In the future, I’ll avoid using anyone’s art but my own.  Just because I don’t like to draw, doesn’t mean I can’t do it.  I’ve already started cutting linoblocks with bird images on them, and I just bought more acrylic paint.  Also, if I do use photographs or art, I’ll make sure to cut around them more carefully.  It takes a little more time, but it doesn’t have so much of the ‘pasted’ look.Â

The girl’s face is a acrylic transfer of a photo of my daughter.  One of the problems I found with the acrylic transfer is that when washing off the paper from the back of the photo, I also damaged the mat board I had painted on.  I suppose that’s why they use canvases or wood instead.

The gold leafing is done on top of a butterfly drawn in hot glue.  Hot glue makes a good medium for attaching gold leafing to, excepting that it’s difficult to draw well in it.  It doesn’t have a very good luster, because I coated it with the acrylic sealer afterwards.  That’s my main issue with gold leafing.  It looks fantastic when it’s done, but once you seal it, it might as well be paint for all it shines.  I got some new spray acrylic sealer made just for that; I hope it will work better.

The faint gold butterflies in the upper right-hand corner are from a piece of paper I bought at an art store. I trimmed around it, and then put linseed oil on the paper to make it translucent.  It felt like it needed text, so I wrote on it in sharpie.  I’m never happy with the text I include.  It always seems that the words take on too much significance.