A Tag from SMCreations

On a Facebook group for artists, I helped a member recover her Wordpress site after it went down.  (Soon I will post a blog article about an easy way to do that.  When it happened to me, I had to search a lot of forums for the answer and play around with things.)  To thank me, she sent me this gorgeous artsy tag.  You can see her art at SMCreations.  Thanks, Michelle!  I love it.  :)

Make Mail Art Postcards By Reusing Old Art

Making mixed media postcards is fun and easy to do!

Here I used a variety of materials:  scrapbooking paper, an image from a magazine, rub-on transfers, ink painted deli papers, markers and more.

Postcards made from recycling artwork

I must confess that I made these two 4x6" postcards by cutting old up old artwork.  See, I have so many paintings and collages in drawers that I have created over the years.  There's not room on my walls for all of them and I've given away others.  Some I choose just to place in my drawers of collage fodder.

Using old drawings, paintings and collages for mail art will give them new life

Find an interesting area of an old artwork and cut it up.   Cut it into 4x6" sections for postcards or smaller for Artist Trading Cards.  Add other collage elements or marks on top to tie the piece together.

I made these for the postcard swap at Artists in Blogland.
Also sharing with Artists Play Room

Don't forget that there is a mail art call at Featuring magazine!

Featuring Magazine Issue #3 is being shipped out now!  It's not too late to order your very own copy.

We are having a MAIL ART CALL for Issue #4.  Do you like to make mail art?  Check out the details below:

Call for mail art

FEATURING is looking for all kinds of mail art to illustrate an article. If you like snail mail and love to make mail art, you are welcome to send it to us. There’s no ‘reward’ or something so you have to make it out of love for this art form – but then again: creating something beautiful is a reward in itself, isn’t it?


You can send your mail art to:
FEATURING Magazine
Sint Wilfriedstraat 4
5643 SC Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Be sure your email address is somewhere noted on the art you send us, so we can contact you. Your mail art has to be in by February 25 (take into account that it may take approximately two weeks for your mail art to get to us if you send it from outside Europe)

5 x 5 Collaborative Art Project

IMG_0511, a photo by marciadotcom on Flickr.

I participated in Seth Apter's 5x5 collaborative art project. You can see some of the artwork on his blog today.

Participants were asked to make a 5" x 5" artwork responding to one of the following:


1. If your artwork could talk, what would it say?
2. Who has had the most impact on your creative life?
3. What is one thing you have never shared with the creative community?

(I answered question #1)

Creativity Update + WOYWW

I am playing along with Daisy Yellow's Creativity Challenge and here is my update of my art adventures.

It is Spring Break, so I have a little extra time to play around!

Art journal page

another art journal page

Today I went to my friend Sarah's house and we decorated Easter eggs.  She is just like the big kids at school who don't want to wear smocks, so we had to take her shirt off.

I made some more stickers by creating images and printing them off on sticker paper (just full sheet of Avery labels).

And here's my desk view... well, it's actually our kitchen table.  My husband makes sure that I get it cleaned off before dinner every night!  I have decided that I am going to make baby steps towards opening an Etsy shop.  I have a lot of vintage postcards which you can sell there.  So, here I am organizing the postcards while watching a video online.

While organizing the postcards, I found these old letters from a Japanese penpal I had when I was a child.  I should look her up on facebook.  She always sent the coolest letters :)

Here is a reconstructed sketchbook!  I bought a pad of Canson's watercolor paper, cut the pages in half and used the bottom of the sketchpad as the back cover.  I took all of the pages to the UPS store and had them bind it on the edges.. They put the black covers on it for me too.  I love this sketchbook.. it will be perfect for watercolor.  And look at the next picture..

This is how it opens!  It opens on both sides to create one long quadruple spread!  UPS store bound it for about $4, a pretty reasonable price, don't you think?  The only thing is that I should have asked for a fatter ring to bind it.  If I add collage materials, the sketchbook won't lay flat anymore, because it will bulge out.  Next time I will remember to leave some room.

My Collections, Part 4: Mail ART!

You can see the other parts of my collections series here:
Part One: Autographs
Part Two:  Zines
Part Three:  Trading Cards

Today I opened up my boxes of mail art from years ago.

Around 12 years ago I traded decos with people all over the world.  What are they?  They are decorative booklets in which each person collages and adds artwork to one page.  After the artist has decorated a page, they send it on to another friend, penpal or artist who swaps them.  I swapped these for years with a large number of people, mostly through the mail.  There were (are) communities online in which to find other people to swap them.  Whenever you send out a booklet in the mail you take the risk that it won't ever return to you.  I have received probably hundreds of these books back.  Thousands of other people's books passed through my hands.  I would receive big envelopes full of deco booklets and then make up big envelopes to send to other people (usually including one or two new ones that I made, but mostly those from other people.)  

Years later, I am still occasionally receiving full booklets home!  I'm sure many of them got lost in the shuffle, or were unable to return to me because I've moved several times since then, but I've connected with a few people from facebook who swapped them.  

It is amazing to look through them and see the variety of artistic styles, the countries they passed through and the little messages people wrote as they signed in.

I really loved to attach ribbons, yarn and little doodads as I bound the booklets together.

Drawings, rubberstamping, lettering, collages....  so much to see.  It is a joy to flip through the books.

I would spend probably at least $50 a month on postage to swap mail art.  Crazy, I know!  And that was 10 years ago.  That's one of the big reasons I stopped swapping.  Postage kept going up and up and my disposable income kept going down.  Now it just wouldn't work in my budget. 

There were some of us online who got to know each other well and enclosed personal letters each time we swapped.  Most have since stopped swapping.  One of my penpals from the Netherlands even managed to take a couple trips to the United States and we were able to meet up with her a couple time!  


While I was swapping decos, I also organized an online group to make and trade postcards.  These were really fun, because then you'd get an immediate result, rather than waiting years and years for deco booklets to possibly make their way home.   I have hundreds of these too.  Mostly people would send their handmade postcards (usually based on a theme) to the swap host and then that person would organize and distribute them so you would get one of each person's cards back.  I started punching holes in the corner of them and then attaching them to a metal ring, so that I would have them in little books I could flip through.

I have so much more I could show you.  Each of the deco booklets are filled with about 5-10 pages of mini collages and art.  So much fun!  Another day I will take more photos for you.


I have other collections too, besides the ones I blogged about.  I used to collect stamps and regular postcards too.  I'll save those for another day as well.