Gone Postal!

I purchased a lot of bulk stamps last year for some of my artwork and one particular batch of 10,000 stamps came in a box totally worthy of them. I felt I had to take pictures of it before I chop it up today to try to get the stamps off of it. The seller did an amazing job on this box covering almost every inch of it in stamps!

Postage Stamps of the Week!

I'm finally back with 'Stamps of the Week' for 2010. Of course one of my lofty goals is to get these out EVERY week for 2010, even though it's taken me 2 weeks to get out the first small set... Well here are some recent finds from my larger general collection.

I like the pink stamp with a soldier- you just don't see that every day.



This bird looks like he's in charge. I love the black and white, and it's a bird. So you can't really go wrong with this stamp...



Great design!



The French have some of THE best all-time stamps and this one is no exception.



Some of favorite stamps are triangle stamps and ship stamps- I have smaller collections of both. Now which collection to put this one into??!



More stamps next week- I may do some large stamp sheets which I have floating around in my studio.

New Years Resolution?

Well, I had thought about making a resolution to blog more. But here we are and it took me a full 8 days to get my first blog post in! So, my New Years resolution is to blog twice as much this year as I did last year, which means about every 2-3 days. I think I can do this- even if no one is reading it. I really like being able to put my thoughts down and send them out to the world. It holds me more accountable for getting things done.

I bought a video camera just before the holidays and I was so excited because I thought it meant that I could take lots of short videos for my blog. But alas, the video cam software and Blogger don't work all that well together and you really can't post a video unless it is less than 3 minutes or so long. Nonetheless, my resolution IS to blog LOTS more this year, AND to include video as I can- because I think it's more interesting. Next video will be of my overall stamp collection.

Some of my goals for the coming year:

Explore new art mediums
Write more (including on my blog!)
Spend less time on the computer and more time doing (doing everything I love to do!)
Focus on getting my art out into the world

And hubdude and I are trying to have another 'buy nothing new' year, which is a challenge, but a worthwhile challenge. We did this 2 years ago and it really reduced our overall consumption and forced us to be creative in finding ways to get things done and to get what we need. I highly recommend trying it. The only caveats were that we COULD buy new socks and underwear, because, well ewwww if we didn't buy those new....

Happy New Year!
Andrea

DIY Light Box Tutorial

I finally re-shot the video for a DIY Light Box. I know the video is a little dark, but I think you'll still be able to understand how to make this easy, economical light box. I built a large box like this about 2 weeks and it has made an amazing difference in the photos I've taken for my vintage shop (you can see the photos here). Here are 3 short videos showing how to make the light box (the videos are about 6 minutes total combined- I used Flip video and you can only download very short videos to blogger- sorry!):








Materials:

1 box (I would recommend minimum size of 12" x 12" or 30cm x 30cm)
1 poster board
tissue paper or other light-filtering material
scissors
box cutter
tape
double-sided tape (or you can use regular tape and make loops with sticky part on outside)
2 small lights

Instructions:

1. Tape one end of box closed
2. Cut off top and bottom flaps from end of box that is open
3. Cut out windows in both sides and top of box leaving a border (ie: if using 12" x 12" box, cut 11" x 11" window in each side of box- the 1" borders are approximate)
4. Cover each window with tissue paper or some other type of light-filtering paper
5. Cut a piece of poster board that is the width of your box
6. Put double-sided tape (or loops of regular tape) on one end of the poster board and attach poster board to inside top of box- poster board will then curve down the inside back and floor of box
7. Cut off any excess poster board hanging over the bottom edge of the box
8. Set up a small light on each side of the box and turn on
9. Voila! You have a light box!
   

Experimenting with Monotype Printing

I've always loved monotype prints. They often present stark objects in a soft, muted way, but with impact.

I decided to start experimenting with this technique on my own because I'd like to incorporate printing in my artwork. I had a small piece of glass laying around so I put a little paint on the glass and pulled two prints. It was surprisingly easy and I like the scratchy effect. These are the first two that I did. Now I'm looking for a larger piece of glass in order to do some larger prints with different types of paint.

Window Farms

Yes- you read that right. Window farm. I ran across this website recently which is all about this movement to create indoor window vegetable farms. They have plans and pictures and it looks amazing.

I think I've mentioned before that I recently went back to school to get my Ecology degree and I'm a plant nerd, so the idea of a window farm is thrilling! And I have almost a month off starting in a few days so this is my winter break project. I love that this is a D-I-Y project and the site has some great How-To manuals which should be really helpful in getting me sorted out on how to build this little farm. I miss gardening in the winter so this is the perfect solution. We live in a really old house with tall narrow windows that will be great for a window farm. Unfortunately none of them are south facing, but they do get lots of direct light in the summer so I may just need to supplement the light a little bit for part of the winter.

Now I just have to do the following:

• Design the farm
• Pick the plants (if only there were a way to grow coffee beans to support my habit...)
• Collect used plastic bottles
• Get seeds
• Get other stuff
• Put it all together

Simple! Maybe. Ok, probably not.

I'll be documenting the farm building progress here on my blog so stay tuned...