Technique Postcards

On the BookArtz Yahoo group, we have one monthly swap called the Technique Postcard. Every month, Karen Campbell posts a link to a tutorial on a new technique then we sign up to make one postcard to mail to the partner she assigns by the end of the month. This can be really fast and easy and a fun, creative project that doesn't take a lot of time, space, or materials.

Here's the technique for January, 2008. I read it over, got distracted, came back to it just in time to sign up, and then attacked a 4" x 6" piece of thin bookboard with my own version. I ran it through my 5" Xyron machine and brayered it to make sure the sticky was well-adhered. Then I ripped a text page out of an old encyclopedia and tore it into pieces. Once I'd removed the Xyron paper, I started putting the text paper on the sticky side of my bookboard. I think it's important to make sure that the text goes in different directions since that gives a subtle texture to the finished background. You don't have to cover every tiny spot but I tried to cover pretty much all of it. Then I used my handy wooden brayer to make sure it was well-adhered.

I put a few dots of a dark color heavy body acrylic paint around the edges and in the corners. The main thing here is to work from dark to light or from light to dark in progression and then add an accent. I scrape with a palette knife, but you can use an old credit card or a scrap of bookboard. Those fake credit cards you get in the mail come in handy for this and at least they serve some useful purpose! So in my case, I used raw umber heavy body acrylic and put a dot in each corner (a dot being a tiny bit of pressure on the middle of the tube - not quite a death grip - and touching it to the surface) and one in the middle of each long side. I push that around with my palette knife until it covers the edges and starts toward the center. It should be thin enough to be pretty much dry already. If not, you can use a hair dryer or your heat gun to dry it. Don't hold it too close or it will bubble!

Then I added a drizzle of burnt umber Golden glaze overall and pushed that all over the card.

Adirondack paint dauber paint in Aqua went on next and pretty much went everywhere. Then I added it in Juniper around the edges. I found a girl's face I wanted to use in a downloadable angel collage sheet from Shabby Cottage. (You don't instantly download these but Gail gets the link out to you pretty darn quickly!) I didn't want her body or wings, so I cut out the parts I wanted to use and then searched through some magazine ads (my favorites to use in art are Martha Stewart Living, Every Day with Rachel Ray, and Vogue) to find something for her to be leaning on. I found a nice coffee table. I used a UHU glue stick to position these. Don't forget to put glue stick on both surfaces and use the brayer to get the best adhesion!

Now for the details. I used a 1/2" bright painters brush (brights are harder to find these days but I like them for the great control you get over where the paint goes), and painted the dress. Leaving a tiny bit of the darker background around the table legs helps the illusion that the dress was painted before the table legs were put on, but I glued the table on first and painted the dress around it. It might take 2 or 3 layers of paint to cover well enough here. You can see that her shoes are much less bright. That's because they just have 2 layers of paint.

I used my favorite poster paint pens in very fine point to add the turquoise accents and the dots on the dotted swiss dress and outlined some parts with a black poster paint pen, also in very fine point. Finally, I added a tiny bit of pink ink pen to her lips and some light blue to her eyes. I make a postcard blank up on my computer to glue onto the back to complete the postcard idea. Actually, I run the whole thing through the Xyron again when it is dry (being careful to put the right side up!!!) and then position it onto the back of the paper with the postcard blank on it. If you hold it up to the light, you can get it positioned just right and then brayer it to adhere well and trim the edges.

If you goof and get Xyron adhesive on the front of your work, just run it through again with the correct side up. When you peel off the protective plastic, don't let it get messed up. You can position it onto the front of the 'lost' card and then it will just be covered in plastic, but the artwork won't be lost anymore!

The next one has a red stool that is partly what she was leaning on in the clip art and partly drawn on with poster paint pen. The outlines on this one are from a silver pen.

The one in the center has very fine gold heavy body acrylic as an accent and the red I've used on these is magenta Golden Fluid Acrylics, by the way. It flows like the glaze but isn't as slippery, dries faster when the layers are kept thin and probably has six times as much pigment per milliliter than heavy body acrylics do!

The little gal on the right uses Adirondack's mis-named Lemonade (I've never seen a yellow that is less lemon than this one!). I've added some yellow poster paint pen to her hair along with some sepia colored Pitt pen for the low-lights of her hair. The flowers were made by touching the tip of the poster paint pens to the surface and moving on to dot the next flower petal on.

If you try this and like it, please share a link so I can see it, too! Oh and here's a scan of what this prompted me to do in a Frida Kahlo Calendar Journal for the CalendarGirlz 2008 Round Robin.