Post card art

Last Sunday I went to my friend Leslie's house again and we made some post card art! I had seen THIS page from Create Media (look at photo 2) and wanted to do that technique. Luckily Leslie has a lot of great art playing room in her studio!

We grabbed all our gelli prints and started cutting and gluing and came up with some fun post cards! Here is one I finished.

I have a few more partly done that I will finish soon and then send off to some of my waiting mail art friends! It was fun doing some art again -- it had been ages!

Sending out some Mail Art...

I realized the other day that I was lagging behind on returning some Mail Art post cards from several folks, so I made up a bunch of collage cards to send out. They are collaged from magazines, newspapers, old junk art papers, and a lot of doodles and stamping and miscellaneous coloring. A little different for me but I like them. I made two sets, similar to the couple I am showing here. Hope the thicker ones make it through the mail ok. I scanned these before I added some final stamping but I didn't want to scan them again.

Paint Chip Postcards...

Last Sunday I went down to Leslie's house for an art play day and we made paint chip postcards for the current MMSA swap. You can see hers HERE.

At first I tried to make a scene with the paint chips and it came out ok but I am not usually so patient and this one took a bit longer than I thought it would.

So for the next 2 I used one of my garish orange and purple background post cards and did some geometric pattern stuff on them.

I really like how these came out actually.

One of these days I will scan or photograph some of the Mail Art I have been getting from these swaps and other mail art trades.


Linked to:
Creative Every Day

Made a few more postcards...

This time not for a swap but to keep on hand for sending out Mail Art. These are similar to ones I made before but different color sets.  I have pieces of cardboard big enough to make 4 post cards so I did 2 sheets of it with gelli prints and stamping then I cut them up and doodled and stamped more. Now that I have started swapping and putting my snail mail addy out there I am starting to get mail art I want to respond to and now I have a few post cards ready to go!

Linked to:
Creative Every Day

Second set of asemic post cards...

For the same swap I mentioned the other day on THIS blog entry.    HERE is the original MMSA swap page.

I wanted to send in 4 cards but had only 3 of the backgrounds I used, so I made another set of 3 more today on a different background. Now I have one each to save for my reference.

So these started with a lighter background and I used some map scraps, old gelli paper scraps, postage stamp, other ephimera from an antiques catalog, a hand-carved rubber stamp and pens.

Hot pink and orange...

When Evie and I had our first apartment in San Francisco way back (1970?), it was painted a lot of bright colors. I remember the bathroom was bright pink and orange! THIS MMSA swap reminds me of that! The swap was for hot pink and orange so I took some white cardboard and gelli printed those two colors to start, swirling them around and getting nice blobs of color. That would have been fine for the swap but I had to add something, so I added a couple of stamps...

Here is one of them closer up to see the  color blends:

As with all these swaps, part of the fun is in making them and then part of it is in receiving post cards from others! It is amazing to see the variety from the same prompt.

Linked to:
Mandarin Orange Monday
Paint Party Friday

Asemic postcard for swap...

Sometimes a challenge comes along that intrigues me so I need to drop everything else and do it. Such was the asemic writing postcard challenge for MMSA (Make Me Some Art swaps). Asemic writing is wordless and without contextual meaning. 

Google has a lot of cool examples of asemic art HERE.

This evening I played around with it using 3 previously Gelli-printed post cards. I also used: tissue pattern paper,  stamps from India, topo map fragments, black and purple pens. This is what I came up with.:

I will probably use 2 of them for the swap and keep one for myself as usual. Then I will probably make a few others in a different look so I can send in the maximum of 4 for the swap. 

Getting back to Mail Art...

I took a long break from doing Mail Art these last years but those of you who knew me back when might remember all my stamping and mail art post card days... well, they might be coming back! Now that I have time to play, AND a new Post Office Box, I have reawakened my fondness for interesting little pieces of art via snail mail, aka mail art.

My friend Leslie has been doing this for a while (and has sent me things now and then) and also introduced me to the MMSA site (Make Me Some Art) a year or more ago, but I only did that sporadically. I also now and then made some post cards or ATCs for SwapBot then stopped when I had no extra time to play. Now I have time and I plan to let that be more of my art fun -- things I can fit into little snippets of time here and there and which are so much fun to do.

So yesterday I finally sent Leslie one of the two bird postcards we made together months ago. I forgot to scan the one I sent but it was very similar to this one which I kept:

Then today I continued to work on a few cards I had gelli-printed and stamped a long while ago but had never done anything else with. I added some doodles and paint pens and got them ready to send out. The top two are near ready to go, the bottom 2 need more work:

They made me think of the art pages I did last year in Roben-Marie Smith's style so I added more doodles in that vein. Nothing too serious, just something light hearted to send as a mail art postcard.

Want to exchange mail art cards with me? My snail mail info is in the CONTACT ME tab above...

Getting caught up...

So the last couple of weeks I started back to school, got a rip-roaring cold, managed to get a couple of last swaps done and finally went to check my post office box... and was dazzled with the amazing mail art that came my way! I thought I would show you some of it here.

The swaps were from MMSA (Mail me some art) and Swap-bot as well as a few other things that came my way.

Suzanne @ Stempelkrempel:

Pamela @ Cappuccino Art Journal:

Postal Swap @ MMSA:

Various ATC swaps (Swap-bot and personal):

And several envelopes of stamps traded and other notes and such that I didn't photograph.

And for next weekend, I am looking forward to another Sunday of art play next week with my friend Leslie, who has been very busy making wonderful arty things! Take a peek!

Now that I think I have the being-back-at-work thing figured out again (how quickly we forget over our long wonderful summer break that being back in school zaps the energy right outta ya!), and my obligatory first of the school year cold is done, I think I will be able to get back to being more regular about making art and blogging! Once I figure out how to organize all my new received art! (I should take a photo of my desk now and save it for WOYWW for Wednesday's post!)

Back to Mail Art...

Years ago (like 20) I was very deep into mail art and swaps, with things constantly gracing my table that I had gotten or needed to send out. Then I stopped... (and many years went by where no art happened)... and now the Mail Art bug is back! There is something so fun about making a post card or an ATC (Artist Trading Card) and sending it off to anywhere in the world... and then getting one back again!

And then yesterday I got my first Mail Art in the form of a post card from Leslie! Testing out my new PO Box and making it pretty!

I hadn't played with the gelli plate for a while and it was calling to me so I made some starter background pages this morning which I will turn into post cards (or maybe ATCs, although I prefer to do a whole page then cut it specifically for those). I will do some more with these before I cut them into card sizes to wait to send out. I love the gelli plate... so simple: paper and paint and the result is always fun! (If not, just do another print over and eventually you have an unexplainable thing of beauty!).

Here's a close-up of one I particularly liked:

And here are my very high=tech techniques for some of the patterns...

For the bubble lines:

And for the overlapping circles, I just used this contraption several times on the gelli plate before I printed...

Here is how you make it:

Told you it was high-tech!

So now to just join more swaps and find some new Mail Art buddies and I am good to go!

If you would like to trade mail art (post cards or ATCs) please contact me using the contact form in the tabs above if you want to set up a specific swap. For just random Mail Art postcards, feel free to send me a post card and I will send you one in return. Don't forget your return address! My addy for mail art is:

Rhonda H.
P.O. Box 292745
Sacramento, CA 95829

Looking forward to seeing your fun mail art!

Linked to:
August Gelli Party
Paint Party Friday
Creative Every Day