Inspiration Deck

Jessica, from In Search of Dessert, dreamed up this great project.  She was deeply moved by the book "Desire to Inspire" by Christine Mason Miller (which I also happened to be reading when I came across Jessica's great idea)

The back of this book features some perforated inspiration cards featuring art and quotes from the contributing artists in the book.  Jess thought it would be cool if a bunch of people from all over the world created their own deck using a set of standard playing cards, mailed it to her, and then she would assemble a new deck for each participant using a different card from everyone involved.

Here's a shot of the cards I made:

Jessica emailed me last night to say she'd receive them and wondered how I'd made them.  I only took one shot of them in process, but here's a quick description.

First, I ironed them to a sheet of freezer paper so that they'd stay in place while I painted the background.  I started with a few coats of gesso to completely cover the face of the card.  Then, using a brayer, I rolled on two shades of orange paint, haphazardly.

While it was still wet I flung on some darker orange paint and then rolled over it with the brayer to smoosh the orange drops.  After it was all dry, I flung some aqua and white paint to make all those little drips and dots seen below:

Once totally dried I decorated them with collage papers, stamps, colored pencils, more paint, etc, and wrote a different quote on each card.

I had to gesso the backs one at a time because I was afraid to iron the painted cards to more freezer paper.  I then laid them face down and used spray ink to color the backs in a bluish aqua color and I stuck a mailing label with my contact info on the back of each one.  

aren't those labels cool?  I scanned some of my painted pages and printed the image onto blank white labels, and then ran the labels through again to put my contact info on top (using the regular label template through Word)

Jessica will hole punch each card and bind the new decks with a metal ring before mailing us each our very own one-of-a-kind inspiration deck.  I can't wait to see what I get back!