Mail Art

I opened my PO Box on Friday! Now I'm ready to start sending (and hopefully receiving!) some mail art. I sent out about 10 pieces of mail over the last 2 days and only after I dropped them in the mailbox did I realize I'd reversed the numbers in my PO Box and put the wrong number on my return address. DOH!

Here are some pictures the outgoing mail. Some of them were notes inside of envelopes. Others are postcards. The quality of the photos is kind of lousy - it was about 2AM and I was bleary-eyed. Meant to take more pictures in the morning but I was excited to drop them in the mail and I forgot. I wish I had put the stamps on them before I took the pictures.

Guerilla art

I've started leaving little cards in various places. I love the idea of people finding random bits of art, and hopefully putting a smile on someone's face. It also answers the question "what do I DO with this now that I made it?". I first collaged one side of a piece of cardstock, and painted the other side, then I cut it into 9 even shapes and added pictures/text/more paint to each.

The first one was left in the middle school library. I was attending a long and boring school committee meeting and snuck this card in between two books in the stacks.

Then I thought about adapting the "3 little words" technique from 21 Secrets and started cutting apart an old discarded library book into 3-word chunks of text and then putting them together in different ways. I left this one inside my book when I returned it to the library.

This one was left behind at the gas pump.

Here's a bunch more just waiting to be left....

Street Team Challenge No. 51

Here's my first completed challenge as part of the GPP Street Team. The theme was Home Sweet Home and it's part of the "Evidence" series. I've re-purposed an old book I found at a thrift store to use for the challenges and can't wait to dip back into the 50 previous challenges.

The project really got me thinking about what makes a space feel like home? I've always been the kind of person who likes to decorate a space, no matter how short a time I'll be living there. I used to bring posters for the walls of our 2-week summer rental when I was a kid. I've always personalized my offices too.

At this point in my life, as cliche as it might be, home is about family and love. So first I listed all the words I associate with "home" and I wrote them out on little squares of vellum.

Then I painted the background pages with colors from the living room and stamped them with my favorite swirly stamp. Here's the finished page.

I stenciled the letters onto close-up photographs of various things around the house (lamp, rug, dishes, guitar, etc)

I cut a simple house shape from some of my own marbled paper and overlaid it with some of my painted tissue paper. Pasted on the vellum squares and outlined them watercolor crayons. I added a few pressed dogwood flowers just because I liked them.

I then though some more about what I would bring if I had to move away from home/family for a little while. These are the things that make a place feel like home to me.

When I finished I almost ripped it out so I could start over, but I'm working on silencing the inner critic, enjoying the process, and learning from each experience.

More Abstract Adventures

Here's another abstract - this one was done largely without brushes. I applied most of the paint layers by dragging and scraping with an old price-chopper card. I added some think globs of red with a brush, and lots of drippy layers with a sopping wet brush.

After living with it for a few days, I decided it was too light and drippy in the middle, so I scraped on some more layers, added thick black brush blobs, and then misted it with water to create a few new drips. I like it a lot better. I'm not sure it's done, but I've moved on to something else for a while.