we all know of course i buck everything traditional and why not send out happy autumn cards instead of christmas cards? christmas is so stressy and so expected. i like to send cards out in different times like spring and fall. my plan almost worked! however, i didn't get them out until the week of thanksgiving instead of mid-october as planned. um, ok some aren't even done but for those people i will make them a christmas card instead. maybe. hey! i tried and it really almost happened dang pneumonia ruined my fall. i am such a procraftinator. anyways... they turned out completely different than imagined but i had fun as always. so my big plan was to do woodblock prints because i needed to make some thing i could mass produce quickly. my neighbor built a fence with a million wood scraps and i loved printmaking in college so i thought piece of cake! i will print my cards! the only problem was that i did every difficult printmaking technique but the oldest one in the book! WOOD! i researched and asked my trusty co worker "awesome brian" how to do it and he even brought me his tools since he has a plethora of everything handy. i got to work say... early fall. then i got a little behind when i almost cut my finger off ( your supposed to put it in a brace but i was being lazy, go figure.) when i gave up on cutting my block. i rolled out paint on foil. using a brayer mixed two colors to make it fade. rolled it onto the woodcut. placed my paper on top, or you could say unsuccessfully centered. pressed with a wooden spoon and my body weight, pulled off the paper, chased liam and sia out of the kitchen(yeah i was babysitting! what was i thinking?), laid them all out to dry for the next woodblock which would be a different color and letter shapes .............................................................................................................................................................................................i seemed to abandon ship on the second woodcut and decided to let it become what it may as usually things in my life seems to go. pull out the stamps, the paint and my crazy brain...
my woodblock print cards quickly became mixed media
envelopes needed to match cause i am weird that way
i got a little off on some of my prints and had to make up the space by adding some additional marks which i wanted to look like were printed. end of paint brush handle and PRESTO!
"holiday" family portrait. taken with iphone because as you can see in pics above, my camera is still broken. jareds head is almost chopped off but its really hard to take a pic with a moving 2 year old. after about the 5th try she was done.this one seemed perfect!
dummy me forgot to take a finished photo but you kinda get the gist from the photo above. so TA-DA! there they are and i am pretty happy with them since it was my first time trying that technique.i really like how the print is raised, kinda like its embossed. i defiantly will try it again, but maybe i should stick with linoleum blocks till i make a brace....i would like to live my life with all my fingers. we will see what happens next time.
gettting wrapped up in garland was the ultimate fun!
sia was all about the decorating (throwing)
it took a couple tries but once she figured it out she was hooked. no pun intended.
so intense 
sia was all about the decorating (throwing)
it took a couple tries but once she figured it out she was hooked. no pun intended.
so intense 
