Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Pods and Leaves and Snapdragons, oh my!

Just thought I'd post a quick pic of what I'm working on for this Sunday's upcoming trading session. I've been thinking a lot lately about the actual process of making art and how over the past few years I've been so focused on producing enough ATCs for our trading sessions (we usually have 20-ish or so people attending) that I've sometimes neglected to pay enough attention to the "art" component of my Artist Trading Cards.

For these cards I was inspired by a few of the sketchbooks at the Sketchbook Project, particularly one where artist Karen O'Brien had drawn and painted on text pages. While I was away at my art retreat last month, I discovered a new way to use Caran d'Ache crayons as watercolours, so the two things combined to make me want to try my hand at hand-drawing and hand-painting ... something.

I just wasn't sure what to draw or paint ... so I let my sharpie doodle around a bit, and it came up with the poddish thing in the top left corner, which I realized was inspired by some clipart I'd found while creating trades for Artfest last year. And the poddish thing needed a leaf, and the leaf wanted some bigger leaves, and the leaves wanted some grass, and the grass needed something to flower with it and the snapdragon things evolved. I know they're not *really* snapdragons ~ I don't think snapdragons have tongues, after all ~ but the tongues were just part of what happened and they looked right so I let them be.

I was having so much fun drawing that I got a little carried away and in the end still made a *whole bunch* of ATCs (plenty to trade), and I'm thrilled to say that they're ALL hand-drawn and hand-painted, which is a bit of a departure for me. I have this quirky thing about keeping one of everything I make and if everything's a one-off, you can't possibly keep them all. So I compromised ... I made copies for myself, and I'll (gasp!) give the originals away. How do YOU feel about giving away your one-offs?

1 comment:

Susan said...

Oh, these are beautiful, Pen!! I hope I can make it on Sunday; I have somewhere else to be for lunch. But these are making me reconsider LOL I'm totally into doodling and colouring these days; have been doing ATC's this way myself. There are some on my blog if you want to cross-post. I'm not as good at blogging about the process, however.