Outgoing

That refers to the mail, not my personality.

I've learned to fake it really well, but my true self is socially backward, fearful of everyone, and quite content to be alone, thank you very much.  If I don't know you, I'd really rather not talk to you.

As a kid I would sooner pee my pants than ask where a bathroom was.  Literally.  I'm not kidding.

And this hatred of talking to strangers is not limited to face-to-face interactions.  I also hate talking on the phone to people I don't know. It took me until I was 35 to get up the nerve to call for pizza.  Thank goodness I've always lived with someone who's willing to do it.

But I digress.  Today I remembered to scan my mail before dropping at the post office, and here are a few things going out to folks from the "good mail day" list:

This next one is for a swap-bot trade that involved using a file folder as an envelope, and restricting your collage images to a single book:

Happy Friday.  I'm going to crawl into my cozy cave and make more art!

Epic mail day

You know how you start using a word to be ironic, and then you say it so often you lose the irony and it just becomes part of your vocabulary?  Being surrounded by 10 and 11 year old boys all the time made me start saying EPIC as a joke.  But you see where this is heading...

It's like in high school when my friend Holly and I started making fun of the deadbeats who used the F-word all the time.  (keep in mind this was the early 80s and it was slightly more shocking to say fuck).  We mocked them by peppering our conversations with the word so often it became a habit and now I swear like a truck driver.

But it's the MAIL I came to write about.  It was an amazing mail day.  (a fucking amazing mail day)  I headed to the post office with 11 post cards for an international post card swap.  I totally forgot to scan them and took quick pictures on the way out the door, but the pictures totally suck and the mail is gone so I can't go back and retake them.  So here's a blurry montage of them.  I think if you squint they look better.

 But then LOOK at the bounty that was waiting for me in my box!  Three letters and four postcards.  One of the letters came in an envelope made from a Tim Horton's bag.  How cool is that?  And a post card from MadMadge always makes my day.

My postcard making spree is paying off!  To get good mail you've got to send good mail.
And my mail is about to get a lot cooler, because LOOK:

I went to college just slightly before the computer era.  We had computer labs on campus, but nobody owned one.  I made all my spending money by typing people's papers on a typewriter for $1 per page.  If I really liked you, and you weren't a very good writer, I would correct your grammar and spelling as I typed for no extra charge.  My friend Alison had a 3 page paper due every Thursday at 2:00.  She would still be WRITING it at 1:30, and I'd be typing the first page or two while she was frantically finishing.  I did a lot of on-the-spot editing for Alison.  I'm especially glad I did, because, as it turns out, she's the person who introduced me to Ric in a round about way.  We've lost touch.  She doesn't know I married him, but I'm grateful to her.

And that's fun fact #something or other.

Alcohol Inks revisited

Remember my epic fail with home-made alcohol inks and the wussy colors they made?
I decided to have another crack at it.  Janet, who actually WATCHED the video on you tube, left me a comment saying the "recipe" called for one sharpie per ounce of alcohol. And I had 3 ounce bottles with just one lonely Sharpie per bottle.
Since I was already this far into it, I decided to completely pillage my sharpie collection and add 2 more busted sharpies to each bottle.  And this time I wouldn't just squeeze the inserts impatiently for a few seconds, I'd let them soak.  In fact, I forgot all about them for a few weeks and yesterday took them out, and fished all the floating dead sharpie bits out of the bottles, and made a colossal mess, but LOOK:

The colors are WAY brighter.  These are sprayed on card stock, bristol paper and gessoed cardboard.  They dried really fast and since they're made from permanent markers they don't smear or bleed when you add other material.

The pages below were just regular copy paper used to blot up the excess from the top of the plastic stencils.

Since a lot of people use alcohol inks for non-porous surfaces, I tested it on the plastic alcohol bottle:

and on some aluminum duct tape:

and on some little metal wings (un-stained ones pictured for comparison).

This shot also shows the plastic stencil as another example of staining plastic.

So it works pretty well - but is it worth it?  If you pay full price for a multi-pack of Sharpies, the pens end up being about $.80 each.  I bought the spray bottles for a dollar each.  The alcohol was only a few bucks for a giant bottle (enough to fill ten 3-oz bottles).  All told, each little spray bottle would cost about $3.75 if you bought everything new.  Informal browsing shows me the average retail cost of spray inks and alcohol inks is about $4 per ounce.  Are these as totally vibrant and yummy as those?  Probably not, but since I had SOOOO many old and inherited permanent markers laying around, my out-of-pocket expenses were $12 for 10 colors, 3 ounces each.  (and a lot of elbow grease scrubbing the ink stains out of the kitchen sink).  Totally worth it.

So here's what I did with one of the pieces of paper while I was waiting for my insomniac son to fall asleep last night.  I sprayed a few colors of ink over various stencils.  Put down different stencils and sprayed different colors.  Covered it all with a light layer of gesso and then sprayed another layer of ink over another stencil

And since I'm still obsessed with my "posterized" image of myself, I painted a larger version of the stamp on top of a background that was layered with inks, then gesso, then more ink.

In all of my self-portraits I have the chin and jaw of Jay Leno.  I mean, I do have a pretty well-defined jaw area, and a hugely wide mouth, but I don't look as much like a mutant as this image would make you think.

on the other hand, I CAN put my whole fist in my mouth.

and it's not a particularly small fist.

And that's the 5th (or 15th) thing you've learned about me this month.

Betcha can't wait for more!

Center of the Universe

In 1973, my family moved to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.  I was in first grade.  I lived there until I went off to college in 1985.  It was a pretty idyllic childhood, with a fantastic family in a safe suburban community. Kids, in general, were considered a lot more competent than they are today, and so we had a great deal of freedom and independence.  

Here's my Jill Berry-inspired map of the key features of my town.

 (according to my childhood self)

I used a variety of my own paste papers as backgrounds. 

Each of those little squares is actually a door.

(oooh! flappy!)

If you've got really good eyesight (and the inclination) you could read what I wrote under each flap.

But if you don't have good eyesight, here's a key:

1. House: I lived here from 1973 to 1985 and for as long as my parents continue to live here it will be home.
2. State Route 140:  Be careful of the curve. (Yes, mom)
3. Spring Street School, Grades 1-6: The first person I met in this building, in 1973, is still my good friend today. (She calls me Bitch every time I talk to her.)
4. Mountain View Cemetery:  We smoked our cigarettes here. (see Pizzeria)
5. Hale's Drug Store:  This would have been a better place to buy candy if the lady wasn't so mean.
6. Shrewsbury Public Library: my first job was shelving books here for $3.12 an hour.  I secretly wish I still worked here.
7. Shrewsbury Pizzeria: They had a cigarette vending machine.  In 6th grade we pooled our change and made Christine go in and buy some. (see cemetery)
8. Center Dairy Bar:  best place to buy candy and chips. (green apple flavored Bubs Daddy bubble gum!)
9. Maple Ave Sidewalk: Got asked out by a boy for the first time ever.  He carried my books.  We broke up 20 minutes later.
10. Shrewsbury Jr. High:  7th and 8th grade.  Enough said.

__________________________________________

P.S.  Even though I've since lived in New Hampshire, Western Mass, Seattle and Greater Boston, the lure of "home" was too strong to resist.  I moved back to Shrewsbury in 2004 and live 3 miles from my parents.  Max is having an idyllic childhood, though I hope to god his map doesn't include cigarettes in the cemetery.  

P.P.S. I both started and ended my smoking career in 6th grade.

P.P.P.S.  good old spell check has informed me that ONCE AGAIN, I have spelled cemetery wrong, as well as pizzeria.  I could go fix the map, and rescan it, and repost it here, but instead we'll pretend I did it on purpose for the sake of childhood authenticity

P.P.P.P.S.  Does this count as one thing or ten things?

painting of champions

Cereal is the perfect food.  I will gladly eat it any time of day or night.  (For those of you keeping score at home, this is the 3rd of the 29 exciting things you need to know about me.) As a kid there was no greater treat than being allowed to have cereal for dinner. A friend recently told me how guilty she felt when she was so tired one night she couldn't cook and gave her kids cereal.  Are you kidding me?  I assured her she was not a deadbeat, and in fact was the BEST MOM EVER.

I'm equal opportunity when it comes to my cereal.  I equally enjoy a bowl of high-fiber twigs-and-sticks type cereal and those technicolor sugar bombs disguised as food.  When my son was small and I was obsessing over the nutritional quality of every morsel of food that passed his lips, I would wait until he went to bed to take the junk cereal out of hiding.  Now that my mother-of-the-year award has been revoked, we bond over which box has the most marshmallows and which makes the milk turn colors.

My idea of heaven is not unlike my college dining hall - a dozen kinds of cereal lined up in giant plastic dispensers and permission to eat as much as you like.  *sigh*

One of the many good things about going through boxes of cereal the way some people go through glasses of water is that we always have empty cereal boxes in the recycling.  And if cereal is the perfect food, then cereal boxes are the perfect substrate.  They've been essential to my recent postcard making spree.  Last week, as I was cutting the little flappy parts off the front and back of the box, I decided to put them to use as collage elements.

So here's how my painting started: 

(oh thank god she's going to get to the point at last!)

After half a jar of gel medium and a few days pressed under a stack of heavy books, I was ready to slather it in gesso and get started.  I painted it a bright yellow green and rubbed dark oil pastels around all the edges:

Then I brayered on another few layers of gesso:

And then I stopped taking pictures.  

I do that all the time - I get so excited about what I'm working on that I forget my good intentions of documenting the steps along the way.

You'll have to take my word for it when I tell you I added a bazillion more layers of paint, and some big loopy black handwriting and some more paint and some more oil pastels and at some point covered the whole thing in tissue paper and painted all over that and tried some stenciling and hated it and covered THAT with more paint. 

I finally liked the look of the background, so I added some hand-dyed paper and a few charts printed on tissue paper and rubbed the surface with some pan pastels.

Here's where I ended up:

I was kind of liking it until I scanned it and saw it on my computer screen and then I hated it. Does that ever happen to you?  When I looked at this digitally, I didn't like that all that black and was especially peeved that the graphics weren't straight.  I'm usually pretty slap-dash, good-enough when it comes to life in general, but I couldn't get over this crooked bit.  I decided to cover that whole middle part with gesso with the intention of printing a new copy of the chart and putting it on straight this time.  As I was adding layers of paint on top of the gesso, the tissue paper underneath started to bubble up.  I though about stopping and letting it dry, but instead I tried to peel it up.   I figured I'd just add more gesso and more paint, but I ended up really liking the effect of the peeled area and leaving it alone.

so HERE is my very very layered cereal box painting which I gleefully link to the Butterfly Effect (whose theme this week was making layers) and to Paint Party Friday because it's been a long long time since I visited that talented group.

Thing #2

I know the words to a lot of songs.

A LOT of songs.

Regardless of whether I learned the words 40 years ago or 40 minutes ago.

I don’t even have to like the song.

I can’t help it.

Sometimes it’s a good thing.  When you know a lot of songs you can pretty much always find something to sing along to, and we all know how much I like to sing.

But then I think of all the things I’ve forgotten, while still being able to sing all the words to a Betty Crocker frosting commercial from the 70s and I start to worry.  

Just how much premium brain real estate is being taken up with song lyrics?

Thanks to advanced modern imaging, I was able to find out

First Thing

Two things are dominating my thoughts today.  First, I started reading Jill Berry’s  book “Personal Geographies” and I can’t stop thinking about all the maps I want to make.  Second, Tammy has been musing about photo organization over on Daisy Yellow and encouraged us to doodle our photo path from camera to blog.

Computer organization is easy for me.   I’m a linear thinker.  I love lists and outlines.  My computer is full of folders and sub folders that are clearly labeled in ways that make sense to me.  I can find just about any document, photo, or scanned artwork in seconds.

If only the rest of my life was like that.  I have so many ideas in my head that I’m trying to pin down right now.  I wish I could say it looked like this:

 Instead, this is the sad reality – no less than SIX little notebooks scattered about, and a purse full of crumpled post-it notes.

But if you look back at that neatly organized bulletin board, you can see I was contemplating the “29 faces challenge” over at AyalaArt.  (one face for every day in February).  I still might do it for the sake of practice, but the thing is – my faces suck and don’t make for very good blogging.  My best posts were when I was being interviewed by Amy back in October.

So in February, I’m going to tell you 29 things about me that you may not already know – complete with illustrations, and maybe even maps.  Today I leave you with these sketchbook pages I made a few years ago, when my life was in chaos and I had both a desperate need and some time to try and tame it through visual journals.