Street Team Challenges

As you know, I love participating in Michelle Ward's Street Team Challenges. This one is a follow-on from a previous challenge I missed, due to being stressed out already.

For my BookArtz Songbook project, I really wanted to use both a stencil and a hand-carved stamp. I made both. In fact, I made three stencils but only used one and didn't use either version of the stamp I carved.

So here's what happened. First, I dug out my carving medium and drew my Beatles logo that was used on Ringo's drum kit freehand on some paper with a fine-tip black Micron pen. I did a pretty good job. Not surprising as I am fairly good at lettering, especially if I can have a second go at it. And drawing from a visual reference makes it so much easier.

I transferred it to the medium by covering it with a really dark black soft pencil, laying it on top and rubbing. That worked well and I started carving with an X-acto knife and a #11 blade. This knife is one of my favorite tools. I like it so much that I have a second one to keep in one of my traveling art kits. And I couldn't find my Speedball carving set, of course.

In the past, I have always used regular wood-mounted linoleum blocks for printing. They are hard to carve, but well worth the effort. Linoleum produces nice crisp lines and has little grain. Because the surface is painted a different color from the inside, you can easily see if you've strayed from the line or made a tiny overcut. It doesn't wobble when you print with it, doesn't distort with pressure, and it is easy to load with ink.

I no longer have the package it came in, but this carving medium is white and about half an inch thick. It wiggles and jiggles and cuts way too readily. In short, I didn't like it while I was carving it. Additionally, I really didn't like printing with it! I think it is MasterCarve.

Rather than wasting more time carving up the rest of what I've got left, I think I'll spend my time trying to figure out what I did with my blank lino blocks!

So on to the stencil. I'd had the idea of doing the song title in a stencil. I was discouraged in this by two things. Firstly, when I tried to cut the first stencil, it just had too much area in the letters and not enough in the background to support them. Then I discovered that stencilling on top of the laser printed tie-dye was going to be a problem. I had to make 33 of these and I was tired of problems. So back to the logo. I used the original drawing of the logo to cut a stencil. I wasn't happy with it and determined that part of the problem was that my cutting skills were rusty. Part was that the original was distorted by having been covered with the pencil lead. Hmmm...

Back to the drawing board. I used my computer and my trusty CorelDraw X3 to simulate the logo, then printed out a few copies of the correct size onto a transparency. That turned out to be just right and I was able to cut a stencil I liked well enough to use on the sun shapes I'd laboriously cut from 90# and 140# CP Water Color paper and painted with yellow acrylics.

I used a pen to close up the ligatures that held the stencil pieces together and then painted Sunset Gold on the rays of the sun.

All You Need Is Love... And 17 Oz. of Glue!

Here's the other project that had me so up to my ears in glue that I was sick of gluing stuff. Luckily, I had scored an entire gallon of US ArtQuest's Matte Perfect Paper Adhesive for half price when one of my favorite paper arts stores (Las Vegas Art Stamps) went out of business. I got a ton of cool stuff there but I'd really rather that the store was still there. Linda is happily retired now though and she's so nice that you can't really complain. She deserves it and she still looks too young to be retired which will be a nice thing for her to have people to remark on to her.

The project was for BookArtz (my favorite Yahoo group, now co-located on the ning social network at http://www.bookartz.com/), the songbook hostessed by lovely Lyn in Michigan (right under the thumb on the mitten, if you're way familiar with Michiganders). Now I'd been way involved in the preliminary discussions of this fat book idea, and had had a very firm idea of the song I meant to do from the beginning. What else could I do but my very own theme song, Love Shack? I even paid to download the sheet music which I was surprised not to find for free online. (If you find it for free, don't tell me because that will just piss me off, okay?)

So even I don't know how it ended up being all about All You Need Is Love!

As you can see from the shape I tucked into the pocket on the front (yes, I know that I like pockets a lot), shades of Fool on the Hill and Here Comes the Sun crept in there. There was a bit of Sgt. Pepper in there too, as evidenced by the tie-dye background. It's mounted on purple card stock because it was printed on a color laser printer from a PDF and I forgot that they print out just a tad smaller than the original. I think I heard that somewhere before. Hmmm...

I got sick of gluing because I had to glue the top of the front to the cardstock but not the bottom. That had the transparency with the words glued to it. I'd originally thought to do the words with a stencil but there was too much letters and too little background to make a good stencil. The back is stamped with commercial stamps. 'Love' is a bought stamp, wood-mounted. 'Is All You Need' was made up with some of my favorite clear alphabet stamps on an acrylic mount.

More on stamps and stencils in the next post!

Mail Art!

Doesn't everyone love Michelle Ward? I do!

She's posted Crusade #10 on her GPP Street Team blog. This time around, it's Mail Art. I've done just a tiny bit of that lately, feeling guilty for not going the extra mile when I get really nicely decorated packages from people. I had a little digital graphic I did for a recent project (see previous posts) that I just love, so I thought I'd turn it into a label. It's the least I can do! I hope you like it as much as I do. It's the background for my pages for the BookArtz Baby, You Can Drive My Car Swap hosted by moi. And guess what?!? The books are going postal today! Yeaaaaaaaa! ;-))

And seriously check out the fabulous art on the blog of Belinda Schneider. WOW!

Yikes, nearly forgot to mention that the recipient of the above label got a return label to send back to me, so I'm spreading the mail art around a bit. ;-))