A New Blog

HI! Welcome to my blog, where I hope to showcase the products of my hobby: card making and other paper art.

I should start out by saying that most of my life I have pretty devoid of any artistic ability. It was always a bit frustrating, as my mom is a very talented artist. She used to draw outlines of scenes for me to color in a child, and has made some amazing water colors for my sister and me over the years. The artistic gene didn't skip over my sister, either. She can knit a mean dog bandana!

Well, I'd always been pretty sure that gene skipped right over me. In many ways, it did. I can't draw for the life of me. Even my stick figures don't look like stick figures. I've tried painting with acrylics, oils, and water colors, I've tried sketching with pencil and charcoal, I've tried knitting and scrap booking. And every time, they've come out looking like they probably did back when I was five and couldn't color in the lines of my mom's outlines. And interestingly, my mom's reaction to those works has always been the same as it was back then as well ("I love it honey, they're beautiful!" They weren't).

Well, I can't really claim that things have changed so much. I still can't draw or paint or knit or what have you. But over the past few years I've discovered that by working with paper, I can actually create things that people OTHER than my mom seem to like. Honestly, I started making cards simply because I'm cheap and lazy and didn't feel like walking 7 blocks to a CVS to buy one. But over the years, I've developed new techniques and learned a lot from paper artists I find online. You can see an obvious progression of my cards and my other paper works. They start out pretty simple and not so great, and using techniques such as collaging. Where I'm at now is a heavy interest in paper-cutting, as well as other 3 dimensional aspects and incorporating other materials, such as buttons, into my work.

I should note that while much of my work is original, a number of my designs are not. In the cases where they are not original, or where they were heavily inspired by other works, I have included a link to those other works.

So, to start this blog off, I've put up a couple of examples of my earliest cards, which are not only very simple, but they're not that interesting or well done, either. Unfortunately I wasn't wise enough to take pictures of all of the works I've done, so there are many gaps here. On that note, if I have given you a card and you still have it, please send me a picture of it so I can include it!

Since I've been doing this work for a few years now, this blog will probably start of heavy and then slow down as the posts catch up with where I'm actually at.

I'm also happy to include tutorials or materials needed, if requested.

Enjoy!

Oh, and I'll probably throw in a few pictures of my dog George here and there. Just for good measure.

One of my very first cards. Simple collaging with straight lines.

I made this argyle-style card for Father's Day a few years ago. It would've been better had I had a circle cutter for the little circles. I have a hard time coming up with "manly" designs for cards for my dad, and argyle was my go at that. Not so sure how well that worked out, but luckily he's my dad so he had to like it.

As I said, my sister can knit a mean dog bandana!