PFF #4 – LARGE Letter & FREE Mail!

As I noted in my last Postcard Friendship Friday post, I did the lower example usually one an evening at least the last two months I was in Vietnam. This is one that did not meet requirements for the Free Mail privilege because my return address is not in the upper left hand corner. But – who cares? I know I didn’t! This is one that for whatever reason has not lost all of its color although it hasn’t been treated any differently.

The first one is in response to Marie Reed's post of a LARGE LETTER postcard from her home town last Friday. I thought I’d toss this one in as a bonus. Have I done any Old Paper Art lately? The answer is a resounding NO. I’m busy doing Federal Duck Covers to support my old paper buying habit, and just wait until you see my most recent purchase!

I've received several comments already this morning regarding the 'postcards'. I have to admit that they are really NOT postcards. They are really 'mail art' masquerading as cards. They are envelopes. The LARGE Letter did not go through the mail. It is called a First Day Cover. I have subscribers who purchase one of every issue that I do when the USPS issues new stamps.

Kilner Paper

Seth at The Altered Page, alerted me this AM via his own post that this is Inspiration Wednesday. I had no idea. I thought to mark the occasion, I'd post an image of a piece of paper that I just acquired to put my art work on, and let you see what kind of raw material I look for.

The clue on this piece is not what's on it for line items, but what isn't.

So - that's what inspired me and caused me to purchase it on eBay.

Constructing Art

Mary Green has Deconstructing Art, so I figured I could have Constructing Art!

I’m going to participate in my very first Quick-Draw/Quick-Finish event on the 7th of August and my second on the 8th. So where to begin?

I was notified a couple of weeks ago that a couple of pieces of my art work on old paper had been juried into the Blackfoot Valley Art Auction. The notification came in the form of a nice letter and a business envelope with a corner card. They also invited me to participate in the Quick-Draw event, and I reluctantly said yes. The reason I say reluctantly is because I’d never done it before, and I have no idea if I can actually finish something in an hour! Because both letterhead and envelope had a Western Swallowtail Butterfly as part of the design, I at least had somewhere to start.

I decided to do a Mini-Poster because although most of my art work takes at least a day, there are a couple of things I can do fairly well including a generic landscape of mountains and trees. I started with a palette on which I put the particulars for the event using a couple of vintage lettering styles. All of my design and preliminary work is done with a pencil. I did perhaps six layouts in pencil of the palette and lettering before I was satisfied with what I had. I left the day area of the date line blank, intending to do the same basic thing for both events, but change three things: I’m going to use a different Red Rose Tea Trading Card, the day will be changed, and the landscape – trust me – it will be different. I simply can’t repeat it.

I purchased some heavier 30# scrapbooking paper in ivory, scanned my layout, and printed two copies of the layout. I proceeded to complete the lettering on the palette and since I used two different trading cards, the color of the lettering will follow the colors present in the butterfly wings.

Using the template again, I produced a layout on the same ivory paper, and did forty-five minutes worth of ‘landscaping’.

Using the Bog Fritillary butterfly wings as a color key, I finished the lettering on the palette for the Friday Night Event, and using the Western Tiger Swallowtail as a color key, I completed the lettering for the Saturday Night event.

The third image is as close as you or I are ever going to get to seeing what the finished piece looks like, or at least I hope it is. I realized by the time I was done with this one that I need more trees in the landscape, but that's easy to do.

Hopefully, it will walk out the door when the Auction is over!

Postcard Friendly Friday #3 – FREE Mail!

I started putting art work on envelopes when I was a kid. My folks took us to the opening of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, in 1953, and I saw what Charlie was doing with his letters and envelopes. I was a really great letter-writer, I tell ya! I mean, what young kid really likes to write letters, right? Charlie put art work both on the letters and oftentimes the envelopes, and my folks encouraged me to do the same. Sooooo – when Grandpa and Grandma were supposed to get a thank you for birthday or Christmas gifts, what they got from me was a very short-winded note with an appropriate illustration. I never stopped.

I spent a year in Southeast Asia, Vietnam specifically. Six months in the bushes with a Marine unit, and finally, three months at the Company Aid Station, and finally the last three months at a Battalion Aid Station. I took night duty by choice. Sleeping at night was next to impossible, so I spent my eight hours of duty ‘minding’ a surgical ward. Although I sent occasional letters in decorated envelopes to my fiancé while I was in the field, it became almost a necessity while I was at the Battalion Aid Station.

Oftentimes, I’d send only a short note, and the last 52 days I sent her a card from a miniature deck of playing cards. I tried to send her something, however – every day. Most of these envelopes I could finish in eight hours. I used a Rapidiograph pen and some of the ‘new’ (back then) felt-tipped pens that came in a variety of colors. I look at them now on their album pages, and the colors have faded. The ink was not lightfast, and they weren't always hidden away.

I received several interesting letters in return, one of them from the Military Mail Distribution Center in San Francisco, and to paraphrase: I didn’t really need to put much more than the Zip Code on my envelopes – they knew where they were going.

For the next few weeks, I'll post one of these envelopes with the word free in the upper right hand corner where the stamp belongs. Abe Lincoln, over at his Brookville Daily Photo blog and Pick a Peck of Pixels blog has been posting images of envelopes from a Canadian artist by the name of Howard Davis of late. Seeing them sort of nudged my brain a little.

I look back at them now (she’s my wife, and she’s kept them all), I’m thankful I did them, not so much for her, but for me. I’m selfish. I enjoyed doing them. I’m still a bit crazy, but HEY! That’s what friends are for.

Buried Treasure RELOADED

Dawn’s First Cup of Fascination

About a week ago, Seth Apter of The Altered Page Blog posted a second call for hosts of Art Blogs to repost one or two of their ‘ancient’ posts and then link to his Blog (as I did above) where he would post a list of all the Art Blogs that agreed to participate in his Buried Treasure, Part Deux. Since I’ve only had the blog up since February, I doubt any of mine could be considered old. The first time around I got little work done at my own drawing table while feasting my eyes on all the eye-candy I’d been missing in the blogosphere, and I don’t expect anything different this time. Let’s get on with it!

I was perhaps four or five years old when my folks took me to the opening of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. That trip started me on a fabulous artistic voyage that continues even today.

It wasn’t an easy task to get me to write a Thank You to Grandpa and Grandma for the presents they sent, but after seeing what Russell did on envelopes and letters, I was hooked – for life. From that day forward, as long as I could draw something on paper to “go-with” the thank you, I was a happy, but not very wordy letter writer.

In late January of this year, my wife and I made a fascinating trip to Seattle that included a side excursion to Saltspring Island, BC. We stayed in Seattle with my sister Penny and her husband Chuck, and she and her daughter Dalwyn graciously agreed to guide me to Canada to meet the author and artist Nick Bantock in his studio. Penny was the tour guide and Dalwyn the pilot. Myself, I was just along for the ride.

For those of you who don’t know who Nick Bantock is – he’s the author and artist of the best selling Trilogy, Griffin and Sabine, two artists that exist only in Nick’s world. Griffin lives in London and creates postcards. Sabine lives on one of the (fictitious) Sicmon Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and creates postage stamps for the islands. They carry on a correspondence, and the reader is allowed to ‘share’ it.

How did I end up in Nick’s studio? My oldest sister Penny and my youngest sister Judy were shopping one day in Seattle a number of years ago and saw Griffin and Sabine, took one look at the cover, and decided that this was a book that I would appreciate – and I did.

Nick has also written a book called Urgent 2nd Class, which is truly an artist’s guide to utilizing ephemera as a part of your art. We spent the afternoon looking at his art firsthand, and I came away from his studio with the idea of giving old paper a second life with a different twist than Nick’s.

The first thing that I did after returning to Helena was to visit the local antique shops. Whereas Nick was incorporating various pieces of old paper into his art, I struck upon the idea of finding old paper that had references to something I could portray visually – on the paper itself.

The second shop I visited had no paper but for a large two gallon baggie full of sheet music for the princely sum of $7.00. I hadn't intended to even look through it, but it happened to be the only paper that was in this shop, and I was somehow compelled to look. I leafed through the contents and near the bottom I found what amounted to a ‘book’ entitled "Un Giorno In Venezia", or “A Day in Venice”. It included four songs "for the Pianoforte", which was the forerunner to the piano. This small music ‘book’ was published in 1898, and although there were no pencil marks or penned names included, the lower right corner and entire bottom edge of all the pages were badly foxed and the lower right corner of the opening page, "Dawn", was stained from being thumbed as that first page was turned - perhaps hundreds of times. It hooked me.

I contemplated what to do with this find for several days and remembered that my sister's husband, Chuck Pefley, had been to Venice and perhaps had some pictures which would help me give this music a second life that didn't include being stifled in a large baggie. I perused his site until I found this picture of a cup of coffee, taken while it perched on the railing of the balcony outside the apartment he stayed in while he was in Venice - at Dawn. I immediately knew what Dawn needed - and that was a cup of coffee.

What you see is the result of "wedding" the vision of one artist with that of another, and "First Cup" now hangs on the wall.

And while you're at it, you might want to look at Chuck’s Blog Post for June 18th to see what the Fascination is all about.

Start the week off right - CORN FLAKES!

I'm busy this week prepping my entries for the Quick-Draw/Quick-Finish event at the Blackfoot Valley Art Auction to be held the first Friday (and the following Saturday) in August. I'm also busy putting the art work on the Federal Duck stamp covers for this year.

What is unique about this waybill as this piece of ephemera is called is that the Corn Flakes traveled either from Toronto, Canada, or Battle Creek, Michigan, on at least two railroads that no longer exist. The last one being the Butte & Anaconda Rail Road which existed only because of the Anaconda Copper Company and the need to move ore from the mine in Butte to the smelter in Anaconda. The package depicted is proper for the date which is indicated on the waybill itself - February 11, 1916.