Blue in the Mail

These are finally on their way to Karen for the Mail Me Some Art Blue Postcard Swap. I've been meaning to join one of her swaps since she began them. It took me a while...on the plus side, I am so pleased with these four cards. They were fun to make, and I think I've improved quite a bit since my first postcard swap. The "rule" for this swap, as you might have guessed, was to use blue. A bit of contrast is okay, but mainly, we're looking at blue. Why blue? Karen also lives in New England. Have you visited New England in January? It can lend itself to the blues, if you catch my meaning. So.

These four began as one 9x12" sheet of Bristol board, collaged and painted. Then I sliced it into four pieces and added more collage pieces individually. Here's the first:

 I added the circles of text and the ghostly image on the right-hand side. It's a cut-out ghost sunprint of a skate egg case, but it kind of reminds me of someone with their hands over their head.

To this second one, I just added some washi tape, a strip of text painted blue, and a blue circle sticker. One of my kids was given a game for Christmas that had stickers that needed to be applied, and there was lots of leftover background sticker on the sheet, so I saved it to cut shapes out of.

I really like this third one. Those are more sunprints, cut out and glued on.

And the final one has this little girl in a blue-checked dress, cut out from a vintage sewing pattern envelope.

I really like beginning with something larger and then cutting it down, because I enjoy the found compositions in the smaller pieces. They each become their own little world that I can work into in various ways.

The swap is open for another week, if you're interested in joining in--the postmark day is January 21.