silly postcards

Monday morning I was in the mood to play around in the studio but didn't have anything particular in mind. While cleaning up last week, I'd come across a box of recent magazine pages, torn out for a class I took a while back. I tend to work a lot with vintage materials, so for something different, I sat down with the box and some cardboard and just started throwing things together. I made two backgrounds first - one of yellows, oranges, and golds - just random pieces from ads and articles that were mostly those colors. And another one that was a picture of some grasses in a vase that I liked the colors of.

Then I pawed thru the box and pulled out various things that caught my eye, like the bottom half of a cat standing on its back legs (???) and a kid in a superhero outfit - again with nothing special in mind. I'm trying to just let it flow, be spontaneous, spill my impulses, and all the other things the books tell you to do. Just get in there and make art!!!

So that's what I was doing. Pretty soon I had a weird pile of images that eventually came together as the two collages you see here.

I used some glittery sticker letters for Dance A Jig, plus some gel pen and marker work. I bet the guy in the blue oxford shirt from the Xerox ad never expected to end up as a cross dressing, half cat, go-go dancer.

For Once Upon A Time, I added sequins to the crown, plus some more gel pen doodles, which ran when I coated the collages with Gloss Medium and Varnish.

I really need to test every marking device I have against that stuff and keep a list. I love the finish it gives but I'm tired of wrecking things I've made by smearing the ink. Or maybe spray everything with a fixative, and then varnish it? 

Anyway, these are totally goofy and make me smile so I'm going to mail them off to friends and hope they get a grin out of them too. 

How could they not, right?