Greening It Up

The combination of green and black make me think of "The Shrinking of Treehorn." Now that is one delightfully off-kilter kid's book.

In light of the fact that these had been a bookworm's smorgasbord (literally - you can see the pages they chomped on), this encyclopedia is headed for greener pastures. I cut out some pages for use in my own projects, and realized, several volumes later, there is no way I will humanly ever use this many images of single cell life-forms. In light of the fact, I've been making up packs of these for Etsy where I can hopefully reduce the embarrassingly large quantity of paper ephemera surrounding me.

Wrapped

Paper and Paste

New business cards, freshly sliced and glued. I went the DIY route and printed these myself, then added elements like fabric and thread.

They're pretty snappy. I almost hate to give them away, but that would sort of defeat the purpose.

New France and New Boards

Those new ACEO blanks from Strathmore? Super nice. I tried out the illustration board variety and liked the texture and heft quite a bit. Two thumbs up.

*****

Every time I visit Québec I want to return home a little less.

Oh, and Café Dépôt, Cote de la Fabrique makes the best cafe mochas I have ever had. Anywhere. I couldn't not immortalize that breathtaking foam cap.

Illustration Friday - Impatience

For this week's Illustration Friday subject, Impatience.

But you won't let those robots defeat me...

My niece turns three this week. The only thing she wanted (and has wanted for months) is a pink robot dress. I was only too happy to accommodate.

The dress I bought, the robots are a linoleum block print I carved.

And away it went in the mail today.

Cleaning House

I bought an external hard drive recently. I'm backing up files because in addition to frequent nightmares involving insects and invading armies, I dream about computer failure. Anyhow, in the process I'm finding images I'd forgotten about, like the whale above. I'm also finding I have quite a bit of music which I cannot possibly begin to defend owning.

I'm a big fan of the Soft-Kut printing blocks. Super easy to cut, I had some kicking around the house. Add one old t-shirt, green paint and voila, slightly more wearable garment. Over at SouleMama there's a great post on using the same blocks if you're interested. I've had some, er, mishaps using linoleum blocks in the past, so like using a block that limits my chances of significant bodily damage. And if you want even more information, both Lena Corwin's "Printing by Hand" and Lotta Jansdotter's "Lotta Prints" are stellar resources.

The only problem with the whole thing is the temptation now to cover everything that stands still with green flowers.