The Perfect Postage-Stamp

Today’s outgoing mail. It’s been ages since I’ve sent something out (and even longer since I've illustrated an envelope) so I’m pretty happy about it.

But dang if I didn’t find the perfect stamp in my collection AFTER I affixed the floral one! I honestly would have just covered up the flower one if the mountain-cloud one had been tall enough to do so and if the new stamp hadn’t covered over that lovely line of the cloud-bank. Oh well!

I told myself that the flowers are fine because there were so many late season wildflowers out during our visit to the forest and seeing them was one of the distinct highlights of our trip. So the floral one isn’t completely random. But still though, that mountain stamp is A++

Colorful Snails

This past week I’ve been exploring some new ideas with the stamps and these are some of the fun things that have materialized. I had fun with inking patterns and texture on a black and white motif. I finally put brush to paper on a free-floating cosmic snail I've been thinking about for a while. I stamped over watercolor washes and cut out rainbow snails. And I stamped a multi-colored snail-postcard from our collection of hand-carved stamps. I'm really delighted with how everything turned out and now have even more ideas for future tests... particularly in black and white and a new spin on the cosmic snail motif.

Groundhog Day!

It’s Groundhog Day!

I hand drew and sent my first Groundhog Day card to my mom when I was in high school and I've kept that tradition going sporadically over the years since. On years when I missed sending out cards, she always asked about them! So it’s a pretty cherished tradition around here.

Earlier this week I was delighted to pair up with Benjamin to do a quick short-run of Ghog Day postcards. This lovely critter is a Hoary Marmot. They live at our beloved Mt. Rainier and have made our hikes more exciting with their prolific appearances! This sweet critter was carved from a photo we took on one of our hikes a few years ago. So this is a marmot we actually met!

As they are our own backyard “groundhogs” here in the PNW, this marmot was the perfect fit for being featured on this year’s card and I'm delighted his smiling face got to go out across the world to spread some seasonal cheer.

Snaily Thank-Yous & Nibs

I sent some snaily thank-yous out yesterday evening. I busted out my nib and ink for the first time in almost 2 years and not only addressed the envelopes with it but wrote both notes with it too! I'm pretty pumped about that. My ink-cup was all dried up, so I had to clean it out and refill it with lovely, silky new ink. My bathroom sink looked like a squid threw a major tantrum in there and inked all over the place!

I recently ordered several new nibs and a new nib-holder and they arrived yesterday. I'm excited to start playing with them later this week. I’m using them as my reward for finishing up one more pencil drawing (which I haven’t started yet. I’m in major procrastination mode). But my old nib and pen weren’t part of that deal, so I could play with them all through the evening without any internal conflict. (Heh, heh. :-D)

It felt great to be nibbling again. So I'm sending more snails out this evening by the light of my desk-lamp. Even though it's only my second evening back with the nib, I felt so much more at ease with it. It’s coming back slow and steady! I haven't used my mushroom stamp in a while and was perplexed to find that it and my original snail stamp have aged weirdly (they’re all speckled in the recesses where they shouldn’t even have ink!). So that’s concerning, but fine, because they still stamp no problem. It’s just part of the learning process as I get more into handcarved stamps and work to understand what they need to be happy.

These envelopes feature a couple of our latest snail stamps! As per our usual routine, Benjamin carved them for me from my drawings.

An Illustrated Envelope

I’ll tell y’all a secret... I illustrated my first envelopes 1.5 years ago. Mushroom drawings... that are still in my desk drawer. I had a blast making them and am still really proud of them. But I had a crisis of confidence about sending them out and so they’ve just sat there ever since. I have to move them out of the way every time I need a plain envelope to send a letter.

Well, since then, I found the lovely @naomibulger and this summer I took her Beautiful Letter course. It was so nurturing for the budding mail-artist in me that’s just been dying to get out. Now we have a printer for our home so I can print the lovely envelope templates in her newsletters and coloring book.

I have to say that while her course helped unlock my creativity, it was the envelope templates that helped unlock my confidence. After coloring her lovely fox template I felt confident that I could use what I learned while spending time with the fox to draw a portrait of my dear friend’s puppy. I did and then I mailed it! This feels like such a big breakthrough!

When Naomi was finishing up her coloring book she was taking requests for things people would like to have included in the template designs. For the life of me I couldn’t come up with a single thing to suggest. Since then, I have thought of a whole list of things I’m dying to see on envelopes, and at first I thought with regret that I didn’t think of them sooner to suggest for her to illustrate. But then it hit me that if I can draw this puppy that I can draw the others myself too! So now I have a whole list of things I can’t wait to put on envelopes and send out to the world.

Thanks to Naomi's support and encouragement through her work I'm finally drawing and sending things out instead of letting them languish in my desk. I am so excited about that and so grateful.

Taking the Night Off

I took the night off from responsibility, entertainment, you name it, so that I could write some postcards to very dear folks. And I have to say that my brain feels so much better for having done it.

These postcard images are all ours: either photos we took ourselves or photos from our vintage collection. I've mentioned before that I have a longtime love affair with postcards. Sending my own images out into the world in postcard form just takes that love to a whole new level.

When I send snailmail out to folks, I send a piece of myself - my thoughts, my heart, my handwriting - and adding my own images to that mix makes my heart swell! It's just one more way to give something of myself to show my love for the recipients.

A Passion for Postcards

I have a passion for postcards that dates back to probably around age 7 or 8. I mean a true and deep, undeniable, bonafide love for postcards.

It's a treasured ritual of mine to send postcards out to family and friends when I travel. And if you really want to make me feel loved, just send me a postcard from your own travels. Postcards are my love-language! Most recently, postcards have also been my salvation in keeping up with my beloved correspondence even when I've felt stretched thin. They really are the best.

For years I've dreamt of having postcards made from our personal photo collection, and I finally did it!! They've arrived, they are gorgeous, and I'm completely smitten! A few of these are already addressed and ready to be sent on their way, but I had to get a family photo first to commemorate the beauteous achievement of this long-held desire. So many great trips, places and experiences held here in these pretty bits of paper. I can't wait to send these lovelies out into the world!

Stylized Trees

I've been super into stylized trees lately. For a few months now I've been collecting snapshots of trees that pique my interest throughout the city. I've also been getting picture-books from the library and studying how other illustrators choose to stylize their trees and other plant life and implementing bits and pieces into my own creations. A dash of an idea from one book mixed with ingredients from other books to inform how I sculpt a limb or how I shape a canopy.

I'm trying to think as much out of the box as I can. That's why I'm so drawn right now to highly stylized fauna. What are the shapes that make a tree? What are the colors? If I strip down all the detail what do I have left? And then how to I re-insert detail in a way that compliments the stripped down approach? I love thinking about this stuff.

So these trees, and others in my sketchbook, are informed in part by trees in my neighborhood, and in part by brilliant illustrators who inspired me, and in part by my own dreams of wanting to build the things I see in my head and make them real.

It's an incredible feeling to walk through my neighborhood and see the trees I've collected in photos the have become muses to draw from. Spending time with them in observation and then in drawing creates an uncommon intimacy. They pop out at me in the landscapes of my walks now because I know them. I readily notice how they evolve as they pass through each season. It's also gratifying to pick up a book that impacted me and flip through it and remember how it contributed each little understanding of form or texture or color as I integrated those ideas into my own work.

I'm grateful for a neighborhood of trees and bookshelves full of books. My well is full!

This is an envelope I made for my lovely friend. It's marker, colored pencil and acrylic on a kraft paper envelope. Orchard on a Starry Night. The plum tree is my very favorite. You can't tell from the photo, but the plums are ever so slightly raised and rounded. I delighted in running my fingers over them.

HappyMail

With the dust settling from our recent move, I’m returning to the things I love most: reading, writing, my ukulele, my bullet journal, baking and craft projects. It feels so good to be back!

I got my first HappyMail sent off from the new place today! Here’s a detail shot of the gorgeous envelope, made from a page in an old atlas. I love atlases as much as a grown-up as I did as a kid. Such beautiful colors and artwork!