Tropical colored birthday card

While I love to make cards, I have difficulty making a card for a specific person. I prefer to keep a stash of handmade cards on hand and then select from that when a card occasion presents itself. When my daughter celebrated her 12th birthday two months ago, nothing in my collection quite suited her or seemed age appropriate. I also wanted an element of surprise. What to make?

Inspiration began with the color theme. When my daughter chose a paint color for her room last year, she selected a blazing lime green, which we accented with other strong citrus colors and turquoise blue. We call her room "Key West" because when you step into it, you've left the cozy sensibility of the rest of the house and entered a tropical zone. A budding graphic artist, she has a fondness for circles and incorporated them into her room and her art designs. I decided to follow her cue and do the same on her card.

I started with a sheet of watercolor paper. I stamped dotted circles in Versamark and heat-embossed them with clear embossing powder to create a resist. I then loaded a brush with blue and green acrylic paint and pulled the brush over the paper just once--no blending or go-overs because I wanted the white paper to peek through and add a visual spark and texture.

While my resist technique worked, it didn't have a strong graphic impact. Hmmm. What to do next? And what would be the focal point of the card?

I had a new stamp set from Stampin' Up that I had just purchased and had not used yet. I loved the mod flowers and thought my girl would too. They were also the perfect scale for the card. I selected a blue ink slightly darker than my blue paint and randomly stamped the flowers on the paper. I liked the effect, but it was subtle and the card would need something to give it some visual pop.

That's when I decided to re-ink my dotted circle stamp with black and create another layer. Now I was getting somewhere. I had planned to use the circular birthday stamp from Stampin Up as a design element but not as the card's focal point. However, I was now in love with my background paper and wanted it to have a starring, not a supporting, role in the card.

So I chose a lime green cardstock, heat-embossed the circular birthday greeting in black for maximum impact and texture and then punched it out with a circle punch. I framed it within a dot circle on my paper and glued it on. Voila! Well, not quite. I thought the card needed one more bit of visual interest and texture.

I tried layering a flower brad over the black flower but it didn't work. A rhinestone didn't suit the card's style or my daughter's taste. An orange brad was too jarring, a silver or blue brad too boring. The small yellow brad turned out to be just right. I cut the watercolor paper to size and mounted it on turquoise cardstock. The perfect card. My daughter adored it!

Cards with autumn colors

This week I decided to make cards with autumn colors and also experimented with metallic pigments in acrylic glaze. Unfortunately, the scans from my printer don't convey the gold and copper metallic sheen portions of these cards have. You'll just have to imagine how magical these are when the cards catch the light.

A return of my favorite blackbirds

This card has a subtle metallic shine across the whole background:

 

All images copyright 2009 Veronica McCabe Deschambault, Compost Studios

Labor Day weekend in the studio

I reserved space at a fall market in the city park, and my friend Lisa and I are going to sell our creative wares. Lisa makes jewelry, and I'll be selling cards. The market is less than a month away, and I'v been busy with my professional writing (www.VeronicaDeschambault.com) and wrapping up the summer with my kids. When I can, I've been slipping into the studio to make cards, usually on the weekends when the Man is around to keep the Charming Offspring engaged in life.

When I escape into the studio, I never know what I'll produce. I've been focusing on making cards with my own hand-painted backgrounds, and much time is spent hunched over the maple work table either 1) trying to choose paint colors and techniques to use, or 2) staring at background papers trying to envision the cards they could become, or 3) Wondering which efforts should be abandoned to the recycling bin.

What media is best? What color cardstocks and paper to use? What mood to convey? What image to make the focal point? Portrait or landscape? And then once decisions are made, there's the crafting of the card itself with glues, pencils, pens, ink, stamps, heat guns, etc. The debate over whether adding one more element will perfect or ruin what I have, and finally, a setting aside of the finished product.

By now it should be clear that making cards is a labor of love because it takes me forever, and whatever I make from their sale will be scant compensation for my time. Still, it's a good process. Sometimes the finished products thrill me, often I'm ambivalent, and occasionally I think, "Oops, missed the mark on that one."

Arts and crafts continues to be a journey for me, a learning experience, a commitment to stepping outside of my comfort zone. I tell myself the more I flex my creative muscles, the stronger my work will become.

No matter what form it takes, there will be people who like it, those who are indifferent to it, and those who find it cringe-worthy. That's life.

Here are a few recent creations:

It's not visible on the scan, but the darker leaves on the background are done in metallic copper and the main leaf has gold highlights.This is one I like *most* of the time.  : )

  This one took some work to get the composition right. The colors are softer than they appear on the scan. There are things I would change, but I won't tell you what they are.  : ) 

This one is complete departure for me in terms of colors and style. Maybe it could be a Chinese New Year card?

Here is one I'm ambivalent about, but I like that it's a different style than many of my other cards.

This looks like it could be an art journal piece, or a card you send you a loved one after spending a weekend together. 

The colors in this one thrill me. They are softer than the scan indicates, and there's a sweetness here. I'm normally not about "sweet," but I love the tender feeling this combination gives me.

I've saved my favorite one for last. I'm not sure I can sell this one! So serene.

If you like looking at cards, check out my Gallery. There are more there.

How I spent my weekend

...in the studio, making cards. : )

  

Selling cards

I've spent the summer focused on my kids and their activities, avoiding taking on any big projects, wrestling with major decisions or becoming embroiled in personal dramas or too much introspection. I've spent a lot less time staring at my computer monitor and more time staring at the tree-framed patches of blue sky above my deck. I've kept house and kept the peace and not complained too much about domestic duties.  

The interesting thing is that in the process of living in the moment and not setting any goals this summer, I came to a place where I'm fully ready to do that now. While my conscious mind was on vacation, my subconscious was busy making plans for me.

One of those is to begin selling my note cards. This is something I never seriously considered in the past because I didn't feel the cards I was making would find a unique place in the market, especially when so many people are making handmade cards using rubber stamps and major greeting card makers are imitating the hand-stamped look in their product lines. Once I started painting my own decorative papers to use in card making, I felt differently. Finally I was producing a handmade card that was different than most of the ones I was seeing. Each one is truly unique, and I like to think that sending and receiving them would make people happy.

I don't expect to make a lot of money, but I do hope to make some. Just as keeping this blog has pushed me in my creative writing, I think selling cards will push me artistically. Tonight I printed out the 24-page (!) PayPal user agreement to see how it would serve me if I choose to sell from this site.

I'm also considering etsy, but there's a listing fee per item that has to be paid up front and then paid again on each item if it hasn't sold in four months. They also charge a small commission on sales. The fees are not exorbitant and would not be an issue on bigger ticket items, but on individual cards that would only sell for $4-$5 each, I'm not sure my profit margin would be high enough.

While I've made purchases from etsy, I'm not convinced it makes sense to position your product with thousands of other producers who are selling a variation of the same thing. I find the etsy site hard to navigate because there aren't enough options for filtering search results. I'd have to drive traffic to my "shop" using other marketing channels because the chance of someone stumbling upon my work on etsy and making a purchase seem slim.

With that in mind, I may just sell via this site and on consignment with some gift shops in my area. We'll see. I'm planning on reserving a space at a fall market in a local park and seeing how that crowd responds to my product. I already have a business license for my freelance writing (www.VeronicaDeschambault.com), but selling a product, not a service, will require collecting sales tax. I need to check on how to do that with our local commissioner of revenue.

So, still some issues to resolve before I can go forward, but I'm excited and ready to get into my studio and make art and see what happens.

Have any of you sold on etsy? How did it work for you?