It’s been a quiet holiday on the blog front. Typically when I cap off a semester at school, I find the time to think about art outside of the limitations of my education. This year, however, I spend much of my free time using my hands — something I’ve purposely axed within my academic career in exchange for lots of reading and even more writing.
As I am living on a student’s budget, all of my gifts this year (with a couple of small exceptions) were handmade. I thought I’d share the calendars and cards that I made for my family and friends.
I made about 10 sets of cards that varied in medium, design and size. I picked up a watercolour circle motif and ran with it, since it was relatively easy to produce while still having an organic, pretty feel to it. I also made small runs of cards with my photos and cards with other graphical designs on them.
These 3.5″ x 5″ cards were packaged into sets of three and sets of five and included warm, cool and neutral palettes. I also made 5″ x 7″ versions of the cards with five circles instead of three.
I then used the same circle motif to create simple paintings that I framed. I made a couple of them that had multiple circles, like the cards above, but I also made some that had one larger circle. I liked the large ones because they had more texture.
I had been wanting to make a series of five calendars, but I was having trouble establishing an idea that wouldn’t be too pain-staking or frustrating to execute. By no means am I an artist or illustrator, so I had to come up with something that a) I could realistically do, and b) looked good. I wanted to stay away from using photographs because printing them would be too costly, and I also preferred to make something that looked more handmade than polished. Following a revelatory moment, (and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner,) I made desk calendars using the same circle motif in a 7 x 5 grid, using colours for each month that reflected the season.
I bought black easels from a dollar store to stand the calendars on, and packaged the calendar pages with ribbon and transparent envelopes. The calendars were made in an edition of five and each page is roughly 4.5″ x 6.5″.
Once all of my multiples were done, there were only a few people left on my list. I made small painting of chairs and shoes, the latter of which I don’t seem to have any photographs of.
And that concludes the holiday crafting season. I start a new semester at school tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be back on the posting wagon soon.
One Comment
I have one of your shoe paintings from forever ago. I always meant to have it framed. It’s still tucked in to the Christmas card it came in, in my correspondence box. I should get to framing it this year!