Let's Jam

Steph and I decided to do a bit of a postcard jam between us. We've done a few collabs together, including some absolutely fantastic artbooks (which, she thankfully blogged about because I was not on the blog train yet). It's always fun to work with her because our styles are so different. We overlap at mixed media with her super powers extending to collage and mine extending to uh, drawings of half naked ladies and lizards. You heard it here, folks, that is the spectrum of art.

Anyhow, setting out to make backgrounds I wanted to do something she will hopefully be excited to work on. I thought: bold colors, lots of layers, repetition, abstract. 

11 x 14 inch mixed media paper. I started off with a dodgeball pattern in a tasty rainbow of gelato sticks. The hashmarks are totally an homage to the fact she uses them on everything.

I then promptly destroyed the hashmarks. I blended the gelatos using the tea bag from my tea because I was too lazy to get up care deeply about recycling and reusing materials.

Flowers stenciled on in black. The stencil was made for my mother's day cards this year and was its own ordeal.

More stenciling! Some white acrylic sponged on over a torn strip of paper.

I added a few more layers during a phone call (speaker phone is a godsend) and forgot to photograph them, but I cut a circle out of paper and sponged around that with white and then used black and grey to redefine some of the original flowers. After those layers dried, I coated everything with gloss varnish and sprinkled a tiny bit of charcoal glitter over the top. I sponged the glitter lightly to make sure it was embedded in the varnish and will hopefully not emigrate to Steph's floor.

I ended up with these 6 roughly 4 x 5 1/2 backgrounds to send her way. I am really happy with how they ended up looking and excited to see what she does with them. Unfortunately, I was reminded, yet again, that gelatos do not play well with, um, any other art supply. The paint and varnish are both fairly prone to peeling because of this and they got a tiny bit distressed during trimming. I imagine by the time Steph is done with them though, they'll be sturdy enough to survive being hoarded forever mailing into the world.