Making Branches - 2004-12-12 23:04:56
I wasn't about to do any religious imagery, being a raging atheist and all. Winter. Birds. OK, cardinal on branch. I rolled some of the gold gunk on the glass, inked up the 2 pine branches, put them ink down, and pressed them onto the cards with a book.
Results: spotty. I did damage control not with a paintbrush, because I couldn't find one, but with one of those typewriter-eraser pencils with a brush on the other end. The kind they stopped making 20 years ago. This fumbling brushwork added random streaks that, when squinting with a Zen mentality, looked artful. I idly wondered if anyone else in Ypsi was making Christmas cards by rolling hair highlighter onto pine sprigs.
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Next: the cardinal. I decided to stencil it, and re-used the cardboard from the picture frame to sketch a few ideas. After searching fruitlessly for an Exacto knife, I ended up hacking out the cardinal with a kitchen knife. This inventive, MacGyver-like resourcefulness added an organic roughness to the cardinal outline, one I immediately eliminated with some duct tape trim. The project was already twice the effort I'd anticipated, yet I forged on.* * * * * * * * * * * * Stenciling the Bird - 2004-12-12 23:14:59
Stenciling with cotton balls produced slightly blobby cardinals, some apparently with brain tumors and others with thyroid problems. I touched things up on the fly.* * * * * * * * * * * * The Result - 2004-12-13 06:45:57
Success. Or rather, completion. The rough nature of my efforts is outshined by the appeal of a hand-made, however inept, item. In this age of prefab artificiality, a homebrew card hearkens back to a Norman Rockwellish era when people didn't have better alternatives. It's nostalgic. Yes, my flock of bulgy cardinals on ill-defined gold branches is beautiful, in its own way. At any rate, that's all people are getting this year, so that's that.* * * * * * * * * * * * The Best One - 2004-12-13 06:48:01
This is the best one, earmarked for my boss. The flash washed out the twinkly gold branch, but it's there, resplendent. Now all I have to do is groggily stay up till 1 a.m. addressing the envelopes and writing perky, tediously personalized holiday sentiments with my silver, green, and red pens. Did I mention the envelopes are recycled from wedding invitations that were never sent? Yes. It's the junkyard version of a Christmas card, yet strangely beautiful, in an ineffable way.* * * * * * * * * * * * add your comment: