Two months outta my life.

Today is exactly two months after the deadline for art card orders. To jog your memory I had this brainiac idea to sell 40 art cards in celebration of my fortieth birthday and then to turn around and order a commissioned piece from one of my favorite collage artists. Well apparently I have not acquired wisdom with my age. I ended up getting orders for 51 cards and have spent A LOT of time over the past two months completing them. This weekend I put the finishing touches on the last ones...they are post card style so that pretty much means I did 102 collages although I did make some of them only one sided. For those of you who ordered I am sorry it took so long but I wanted to complete all of them before sending them out and frankly it took me giving up a ton of my free time to get them done this soon as it is.

As you can tell from the picture it was a messy project but I did receive help (luckily cat hair just provides "depth" in a collage). Throughout the project I fluctuated from being inspired to being absolutely so sick of the project that I was gonna send everyone their $2 bucks back but now that it is over I'm happy with the results. These cards were ordered all the way from Portland, Oregon to Maine and are being shipped to New York, Connecticut, Arizona, California, etc.

What struck me at the end of the project is how diverse they all are. Part of that is thanks to the diversity of the requests...pink/sparkles/Hello Kitty for a 4 year old to "art" for someone I didn't know and "busy woman doctor" to "robot." Surprisingly the subject matters that were the furthest away from my comfort zone ended up being my favorite.

I will be mailing the cards out tonight after work. For folks getting more than one to the same address I am mailing one a day to stretch out the pleasure, ha ha. My intention had been to scan each one and post it to my flickr site to show off my work but many of them are 3D so I couldn't get good enough pics to bother with and photographing over fifty cards just wasn't appealing to me. For those of you in town I do have an album that I made with color photocopies of most so you'll be able to get a rough idea of what I did.

Disclaimer: My approach to mail art is to push the envelope. What this means is I often mail things through the mail that gets comments such as "I didn't know you could mail that." Most of the time the items go through but occasionally the machines at the post office eat them or the computers can't read the addresses so they have to be processed by hand which takes longer, etc. Several of the items have 3D effects which might get damaged or fall off in transit. Some might avoid such techniques given the possibility that they don't work but that isn't my style. All I can say is that if you don't get a card you ordered for yourself or a friend/family member doesn't get theirs or is broken just please let me know and I'll send out a replacement.

Thanks to all of you who supported my $2 birthday card project, I hope you enjoy them!