Collaborations, part 2

I'm part of another great group, making collaborative postcards inspired by Tofu's Millennia mail art project.

This time, Tammy Garcia (of Daisy Yellow fame) asked some friends to choose a theme and a style and she created a card for each of us, filling in one square per card before passing them to the next person.  The cards have gone from Tammy in Texas to Natasha White (Natasha White Designs) in New Zealand to Hanna (iHanna's blog) in Sweden and to Michelle (Lost Coast Post) in California before landing in my Massachusetts mailbox.  This morning I sent them along to Roben-Marie (Roben-Marie Smith) for their last stop in Florida.

Here's what all the cards look like at this point:

My own card is orange themed and pie shaped  (no surprises there!)

The triangle I added is the center one in the top row.  To make it, I collaged stripes of my hand painted papers.

Roben-Marie's theme is Circles, Dots and Doodles.  My square is the lower left and started with a doodly gelatin print. I then painted it with a layer of stenciled orange and pink dots, and glued some blue paper circles  on top.  An embossed blue swirl finishes it off.

 Michelle's theme is "Wonderland" and I interpreted it rather literally as "Alice".

The background is cut up playing cards and there's a tissue paper print of the cheshire cat with some painted and collaged Alice legs on top.

 Hanna characteristically chose pink as her theme.

My square is the bottom center.

I pasted two different painted papers in the background and cut out the star shape from origami paper.

 Natasha's theme is ocean.

Mine is the bottom strip.

I collaged different pieces of magazine paper that had been distressed with citrasolv.

Tammy's theme is happiness.

Nothing makes me happier than painting paper, so my strip is made from some recently marbled paper.  I was digging through my box of random text and found this bit that says "keep the good, discard the bad" and it seemed the perfect recipe for happiness so I glued it down.

 

Finally, we are making a card for Tofu with the theme of trees and leaves.

My strip used pine branches as a mask for white spray paint.

 

This has been a great project - thank you all for your beautiful work!

collaborations

I've been involved in some great collaborations lately.
The card below was inspired by the Millennia Mail Art project started by the San Francisco based mail artist Tofu.
 

My "super mail artists" group decided to do something similar.  There were eight of us in the group and we each started a 6"x8" card, divided it into 8 segments and filled in one part before passing it along to the next person in the group.  The cards went round-robin style around the globe, starting last September, and mine has just come home to me.  I made the small collage in the upper left corner.


A rather spontaneous collaboration came after I sent Carroll this postcard:

 

She sent it back to me with these fabulous swirls all over it and I absolutely loved the idea of giving my card a second life.

So I sent her a background that looked like this and asked her to do something with it:

Here's what I got back:

 

I decided to combine the two:  I cut up parts of the swirly collaboration and added them to the blue/green collaboration , and added some paint and bits of napkin on top.  It's on it's way back to Carroll now.

 

Another amazing round robin project just wrapped up.

The Super Mailartists created a postcard zine.

We folded and stitched 5 pieces of cardstock into a booklet.  We then decorated one side as a postcard, taped the booklet shut and stamped and addressed the other side.

Here's what mine looked like after I got it back - you can see just a peek of the tantalizing pages within:

Here are the details:

This is what I sent to Kerri

 

Kerri made this page and sent it to Stewart

Stewart made this page and mailed it to Danielle

Danielle made this page and sent it to Jenny

Jenny made this page and sent it to Angie

Angie made this page and sent it to Mandy

Mandy made this page and sent it home to me!

 

This project was so much fun, a number of us have started another round!

Here's the cover of what I just sent off:

More collaborations are in the works, but I'll save them for another post.

6 out of 60

Terrie (Creative Explorer), Lorinda (Everyday Endeavours) and I are all working on making 365 collages in 2013.

We decided to do a little paper swap with each other for inspiration.

Terrie's envelope arrived Friday, and here's what was inside.

With an evening to myself stretching out ahead of me, I sat down to play.  I challenged myself to only use papers from the envelope - no supplementing from my own stash.

I finished six collages, and it was only when I scanned and numbered them that I realized I am officially up to date on this challenge!

Here are the results:

 

 

There's nothing like new materials to kick start your creativity.

Thanks for a fun evening, Terrie!

lather, rinse, repeat

postcard for an everyday ephemera swap:

go to the post office

pick up the prescriptions

grocery shop

pay the bills

make the lunches

chew some gum

go to the library

recycle the junk mail

get a papercut

enjoy a delicious beverage (or two)

make some art

Round and round it goes.

What did you do this week?

What's in store for your weekend?

Triptych update

Thanks to everyone who left suggestions and feedback on what to do with these pieces:

I made some color copies of them so I could play around - tried Jill's suggestion of cutting them and patchworking them into a single piece, tried Jen's suggestion of adding a word that spans all three pieces, tried covering them with different washes, and laying them on different backgrounds.

I wasn't getting any closer to making a decision.

It was Terri's comment about found objects and "something on long stalks" that made me grab these dried fronds that sit in a vase in my studio.  Suddenly I felt inspired.

Here's where it stands right now:

At the moment it's just taped down to a piece of shiny black poster board (hence the reflection on the left side), but I really like the overall effect. 

I took the plunge and glued the fronds to the collage.

No more waffling.  

Commitment is good.

It is currently taped to the dining room wall, and this is probably where it will stay for a long time.  One wouldn't want to rush the choosing of a more suitable mat and frame. 

We'll call it judicious waiting rather than procrastination.

Anyway, your comments were so very helpful.

Sometimes I'm great about responding to comments, but this was not one of those times.

I do not wish to appear ungrateful.

Your presence here means an awful lot to me.

Bring on the bling

Tammy is hosting an art journal challenge at Daisy Yellow:

create the worst, gaudiest, tackiest art journal page in the universe.

Here's mine:

Time to sparkle!

This was so much fun!!!!

I stumbled upon two pages in an old sketchbook that I had used to test some cheap shimmery paint.

As we used to say in high school, it was FUGLY.

What better place to start?

I wish you could see this in person, this puppy shines.

I plowed through my stash for things I own but don't really use because they no longer reflect my style.

We've got glitter glue, regular glitter, shiny embossed butterflies, silvery metal wings, silver star confetti, blue sparkly fun foam, smiley face ribbon, silver star garland, scrapbooking embellishments, bronze lumiere paint, glimmer mist.

 I am laughing myself silly in the studio.

Just when I think I'm done I come with another idea of what to add.

I crack myself up over and over again.

It was completely liberating to set out with the intention of making something ugly.  No worrying about the blank page, no critic in the head telling me it sucks.

Pure silliness.

I'm still giggling.  I'm downright giddy.

 

You need to try this.

Link up your entry to Daisy Yellow by Saturday the 23rd.

and get ready to have a blast.

Gelatin printing vs. the Gelli plate

I love gelatin printing.

The first time I did it was back in April 2011.  I made my own plate with unflavored gelatin and printed papers for days on end.

(you can see that original blog post/tutorial here)

I had another epic session last fall, covering every surface in my studio with beautiful papers.

But it's kind of a pain to make gelatin.

It's not that it's hard, it's that it takes planning and I'm not much of a planner.

So I sucked it up, dropped the cash and bought a Gelli plate.

I quickly found that even though it's pretty great, I don't like it as much as an actual gelatin plate.

The biggest disadvantages are that it's too firm, and the paint dries too quickly.

With real gelatin, the plate is somewhat moist so the paint stays wet a little longer, giving you more time to work, and more prints per single paint application.  I also didn't realize how important the wiggly-ness of the gelatin is to me.  It has more give, so the objects I lay on the plate get sort of embedded in the paint, which makes for a much more detailed print.

Check this out.  This is a piece of cheesecloth laid on top of black paint, on top of the gelatin.  I first rubbed paper on top to remove most of the black paint from around the cheesecloth, then I pulled off the cheesecloth and took another print:

This just blows me away.  It's almost like a photograph.

I did some side by side testing with the gelatin and the Gelli plate and I couldn't get this level of detail on the Gelli plate.

The gelatin gives crisp detailed images of delicate objects like plants, flowers, feathers, etc.

Of course it being winter right now, I didn't have much plant life to choose from, but here's a print of some pine needles.

Now, I'm not knocking the Gelli plate.

It's pretty awesome to be able to pull it off the shelf any time the print-making mood strikes.

And I certainly got some wonderful papers from it.

(stacks, and stacks, and stacks....)

I'm not sorry I bought it, and I know I will continue to use it for background and collage papers, but I will continue to use real gelatin when I want the print to be the focal image.

Here's my summary of both types of plates:

--> -->

gelatin advantages:

·      cold/moist – paint doesn’t dry as fast, can get more prints

·      more flexible/wiggly

·      gives more detailed ghost prints

·      paint rolls more smoothly

·      easier to wipe clean

·      inexpensive – my grocery store sells boxes of unflavored gelatin for $1.79.  I used three boxes to make my 8x 10 plate and it was weeks of fun for under six bucks

·      since you are pouring a liquid into a container of your choice, you can make virtually any size or shape plate

gelatin disadvantages:

·      planning ahead – you need to buy the gelatin, mix it with the boiling water, and let it sit for several hours to get firm

·      It has to be refrigerated after use, so it hogs a fair amount of refrigerator space

·      after a while it starts to break down/crack/pit, but I probably made over 100 papers off a single block before it really became a problem

Gelli plate advantages:

·      it’s always ready, there’s no prep time, I can print on a whim, I don’t feel compelled to print a million sheets in one sitting since I know it will always be there when I need it

·      the residual paint that doesn’t lift off can make very interesting layers on subsequent prints. 

Gelli plate disadvantages:

·      it’s too firm

·      paint dries too fast

·      it has a weird smell (am I the only one who thinks this?)

·      the cost of plate (the bigger the plate the more expensive)

limited size (they come in a few different sizes, but you can’t customize the size to your project

My recommendation?

If you've been dying to try this technique but find the Gelli plate too expensive, go make your own gelatin.  If you absolutely love it and become addicted the way so many of us have, you might want to start saving your pennies for Gelli plate. 

Want more info on how to make and use gelatin plates?  Linda Germain has a wonderful website called printmaking without a press, and she's got a lot of excellent information as well as her wonderful art.  Her video on making a gelatin plate is here.  (or the written instructions here)

I leave you with collage number 44/365, made entirely from pieces of various gelatin/gelli prints: