Postcards: The Wages Of Sin

As you well know, if you are a regular reader, is that I struggle with quotes.  Choosing them.  Laying them out.  Writing them legibly.  All of it.  You might think I would keep that in mind when adding someone to the postcard exchange, and you would be wrong.  I asked Pam if she wanted an image or quote, and she went with quote.  That was silly of me.

As usual, I turned to Terry Pratchett for my literary needs.  I considered “She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you,” but I thought that might lend itself to discouraging, which is not the goal of postcard exchange.  “If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy” is really great, but I have already used it, and wanted something unique for Pam's first card.

So I went with this.  

Below you can see me struggling with layout, which is 100% my MO.  I wrote the quote out once in grey, and knowing that I was early in the process just went ahead and wrote over it with the red.

I think it was around here I started whining to Jen about layout.  Here I switched the line spacing and went at it again.

Unhappy with the uniformity, I changed orientation, hoping to find a way to emphasize certain words.  I end up using less than half the space, but stumbling across a format that allows for emphasizing Death.  

Orientation not being the problem, I rolled back to the horizontal design, but incorporated the line split after Death.  The stamp in the corner solves some of my spacing issues, and is, in my opinion, cute.

Jen suggested I go with a brown background.  Actually, Jen suggested a hot pink background, or an institutional beige background, or a pink and brown background, a photo of an officer worker as a background, or someone being run over as a background, or a halo, or TGIFridays's green stripes.  I aimed for institutional beige and landed on sandwich bag brown.

Because any artistic process has to be as frustrating as possible once you have a goal, I put the stamp in the wrong spot.

When masking the card, I made the lower border two millimeters larger than the other three borders.  I then stamped the card upside down.  Luckily I have a tool for correcting this sort of error.

And there you have it.  Is it perfect?  No.  If it were digital, I would play with spacing until I had everything just so.  But is it as good as I can draw it by hand?  Probably.