Recent Project-Invitations

My son is going to be 2 in 6 days (I can't believe it!!!). My parents are going to be in town for his birthday so I decided to throw him a small party this year and to make his party invitations. We sell pre-made cards and envelopes at the store that I work at.... that made it pretty easy. The images attached are of the card closed



and opened



Because I scanned the card, the colors aren't at all accurate. The folded card is actually a puce color, but the card on the inside is a darker/less green- blue. The image of my son is a rubber block print that I carved. I originally carved a linoleum block and was unhappy with the print. The image is small and has fine details that are hard to depict in linoleum. I also wasn't happy with the block printing ink. The details are very small narrow wells that are carved into the linoleum and since block printing ink is so thick it filled the wells and acted more like an intaglio print. So I carved a rubber block and essentially used it like a stamp. I even used an acid free dye based ink pad found in most craft stores. The result is exactly what I was looking for and I am more than happy with the result.

College Stuff

Sooooo...... I have been cleaning like crazy these past few days. I spent the 4th of July scrubbing the entire inside of my house!!! During my clean-scapade I ran across some of my old artwork from college. And when I say some, I actually mean ALL of my old artwork from college. Most of it is stuff that I don't want to get rid of but I don't want to store it either, so it ends up getting moved every time I clean and it has clearly been a huge hassle to keep. Since I see it every time I walk past it, I have a mental inventory of everything that is there, or so I thought. I opened up one of my portfolios and found old black and white pics that I took in my photography class, jr. year of college. Most of the actual printed pictures were the pics that I turned in for a grade, but I found the negatives and the index sheets that I had made and I couldn't believe some of the pictures that were in there!!! There were pictures that I took that I don't even remember taking and since I was poor, like every college student, I only printed the pics that I thought were the best. So, I decided that I wanted to get the film developed to really get a good look at my "mini time capsule". The only issue was that I had 12-15 rolls of film and each roll has 36 exposures! I called around and most 1 hour developers wanted between 22¢ and 40¢ per picture!!! I can't exactly justify spending around $200 just to reminisce and on top of that, most of the pics may not even turn out. So I found out that Target would take the negatives and put all of the images onto a CD for just the cost of the CD, which was $1.99. SOLD!!!! It ended up taking 5 CDs and cost $10 and some change. Now I have the opportunity to really study the pics before I get them printed, and at a quick glance I can easily say that 85%-90% probably won't get printed. Anyway... here are some of the pics that I am astonished that I actually took.