Postcards: Fighting Spirit

In my last post, I may have failed to mention my latest resource.  The Bluejackets' Manual from 1940!

This Naval training guide is a wealth of collage material.  There is an abundance of quotes I am likely to use as a jumping off point.  Check out this virtue.

I knew I had to find a human biped, preferably with pants.

Now, let's get this boy on a hill-top to somewhere he can blossom into the red-blooded go-getter he was meant to be.

Finally it all just needs to be thrown together and trimmed down to a postcard.

Postcards: Smiles for Dagny

Sometimes a good quote is all it takes to get me hunting through my collage library.

Honestly, I was really hoping I had a picture of Batman smiling.  Sadly, I did not.  The Blistex ad is about lips, so I took that.

Digging through a celebrity magazine, I found my smiler.

I posted a teaser for this card on Instagram, and my friend Dagny was drawn to it, so off it went to a new home.

Postcards: Cretaceous Punk

In my Field Notes is a sticky note on which is written (in clearly not my handwriting) "the secret is I'm almost always a dinosaur" - Jane M.  It was something Jane said that cracked me up; I asked her to write it down thinking I would eventually put it in Barista Powers.

So... I haven't written a Barista Powers in a while.  I thought, what if I just drew Jane as a dinosaur?  By that I clearly meant "I am going to draw a dinosaur, but maybe I can give it blue hair or something."  So I did.

Are you familiar with Webcomic Name?  Because it captures so much of my artistic process.

Sigh.

Might as well keep adding!

And with borders, it hopefully all looks like I planned it.

Postcards: Why do some families seem to get more out of life?

Answering a question with a goofy response may be one of the simpler forms of humor, but it's a pretty solid form of collage.  To be fair, "Encyclopaedia Britannica" is already an odd answer to "why do some families seem to get more out of life."

I did not document this one as well.  It is a fairly simple card, but the text is larger than I would like.  I found it challenging to get the family and the question onto a postcard while leaving room for additional elements.

The combination of a 1940s Nat Geo, a 1960s Life, and a 1940 Bluejackets Manual has led to a number of  Fallout inspired cards.

Postcards: Gambling with Goodyear

I saw this ad, and was fascinated:

When I read "send a postcard to," my interest was piqued.  I told Carley "I want to write to Goodyear to see if they'll honor an offer they made in an ad in 1962."  She said "you should."  And so I got to work!

I started with this postcard from Life.

I threw in a map to Akron, home of Goodyear.

I wasn't sure if all my pieces would provide sufficient coverage, so I cut out this repeating Life pattern.

A nice bit of text providing the setting.

Collage, assemble!

Postcards: Learning about embossing powder

Melanie gave us some crafting supplies when she moved to Vegas.  I had never worked with embossing powder before; the first few postcards using it are definitely experiments.

First I used to stamps to place the... glue... stuff.  I guess I should learn what that part is called.  Then I dumped embossing powder onto it.

After hitting it with a heat gun, I was left with this beetle.

I tried filling in the beetle with ink.  The melted whatever acted like a resist.

I asked Jen what it needed, and she said it needed some texture.  The beetle felt scarab-esque, so naturally I took inspiration from the cartouche of Thutmosis the Third.

Postcards: Not a Lorde Reference

As you must be quite familiar with at this point, I've been messing about with layering stamps over other inks.  I've done it again here.

First, a color stripe, with some scratched in symbols for texture.

Then the stamps!

Postcards: Stamp Experiments to the Moon

Requests: they're like inspiration, sort of.  Sometimes.

I was playing around with layering, and posted the results on Facebook.

A friend of mine said "..the crab and moon are amazinggg."  That's all it took for me to get to work; I was looking for an excuse to play with my stamps.

First up, let's complicate that background!

Then add the stamps of interest.

Postcards: Dog Man

Dog Man.  It's a thing.  Look it up.  This is based on the cover of Dog Man and Cat Kid.