Spring Is Almost Here

I first started sketching ducks and ducklings after watching an episode of BBC's Planet Earth depicting baby Mandarin ducks leaping out of their nest in the tree.  I am still working on the ducklings, but the duck led me to create this greeting card.

The bright colors will hopefully make you think of spring, even it is still snowing or sleating outside.

A Little Late Night Screenprinting

Here is a preview of the little sea shell cards I have just screen printed.  More photos to come when my SLR is back from the shop. 

Winter Flowers and Owl Matryoshkas

In the last three years, I have been making greeting cards by hand. I had a great time learning how to make linocut prints and trying out screen printing. Yet the experience shows that the precious month between Thanksgiving and Christmas might not be the right time to try out any new techniques. Combining the usual holiday time crunch with my hopeless tendency to procrastinate results in lots of stress and less then perfect product.

This year I chose to curb my urge to do some screen printing. Instead I am digitizing my designs and printing them out on my inkjet. Delegating to the printer gave me a bit more time to bring my designs to completion sooner.  The current themes seem to include owls in the shape of matryoshkas (those nested Russian dolls), largely inspired by burrowing owls, and patterns--both are now available in my Etsy shop.  The plan is to work on nested owls next.

Reeds in the Back Bay Fens

The Back Bay Fens is a beautiful park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead to be part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system. Olmstead turned saltwater marshes and swamp into a beautiful green park that surrounds meandering Muddy River.

In many areas of the park, the river banks are overgrown with reeds. While plans exist to remove these non-native, invasive phragmites next year, today they are still swinging high in the wind, providing refuge for a variety of birds, animals, and occasionally homeless people.

Green in spring and golden in the fall, they whisper gently in the wind and always shine brightly against the sky. I realize that they need to be removed, but still I find them majestic.

A few greeting cards with my attempts to capture the beauty of these tall grasses are now available in my Etsy store.

Fields

Every winter my husband and I visit Walla Walla--a small town in Eastern Washington, known for its sweet onions and more recently for its wineries. The town is surrounded by fields, everywhere as far as the eye can see. Mostly wheat fields.

Nick and I love to drive out into the fields. We get out of the car at the top of a hill, look around, breath in the icy fresh air. It is a bit idylic really.

I love the multitude of lines that transform the baren farm fields into patterns. I finally tried to capture those patterns. First my fields were snowy.

Then I went back to Walla Walla in July, and the fields were green with ripening wheat. Now my fields are green too.

Trees

I decided to explore silk screen printing. As a first attempt, I cut out a little tree design from regular paper, and taped the paper to the screen. Then I screen printed a few greeting cards.


Lessons learned:

• Regular printer paper is too thin--the paint started seeping through it very quickly. Next time I will use freezer paper instead.
• I really should have fixed the placement of the screen on the card (just a few pencil marks would have been enough) before I started printing. Centering the screen on paper was very difficult.

Little Flower Cards

Last weekend I stumbled across some blank card stock still left over from our wedding stationery. Oh, the beautiful soft textured deckle-edged Fabriano paper--I just could not let it go to waste. So I printed the cards using a small linoblock I cut back in December. I decided that these single cards would make perfect Thank You notes for all the gifts I received during the holidays. Coming soon to my Etsh shop.

Swirly Buffalo Is Back

This is the design I made for our personal holiday cards last year. The buffalo was very relevant at the time because we were getting ready to visit Yellowstone National Park for New Years. Looking at the swirly buffalo now makes me think about our trip.

Cards with this buffalo holiday design will be available in my store as soon as more card stock I ordered arrives in the mail.

Little Red Rooster

A software developer by day and an aspiring artist by night, I decided to make my crafts available to you. I would like to see what you think.

I just listed my first item--Little Red Rooster greeting cards. Each card is a linoleum block print, a medium I just recently decided to try out.

I have no good explanation of what inspired me to make a rooster, other then my several-year-old dream to embroider red roosters on our white kitchen curtains. To my husband’s delight our kitchen curtains are still plain white, but at least I got my wish to make little red roosters.

One bird inspires another, inspires another… So look forward to more birds coming to the shop soon.