What My Friends Are Blogging

You may have noticed that sidebar to the right with a list of other sites to visit when you get bored with my blog. I'd like to highlight two friends who've made the blogosphere plunge in the past year:

I've known Wendy Shang since we lived in neighboring dorm suites our first year of college. (I won't say how long ago ;o) Her first novel The Great Wall Of Lucy Wu is being published next year by Scholastic! She's blogging about the writing life at Skytale and is also a contributor to From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors, a new blog that's starting off with a blast this month by giving away nine books!

I first met Mel Kolstad on-line through the old ATCards site (now ATCs For All), but I now count her as a "real life" friend :D since we also get to meet every month in person to trade ATCs with the Milwaukee Artist Trading Card group. Mel recently made the big plunge of becoming a full-time artist! Her first blog Much Ado About Stuff now has its own spin-off blog Ephemeraology focusing on her love of vintage stuff.

So go check 'em out!

Joseph Cornell Is For The Birds!

The Milwaukee ATC group's June theme is "For the Birds," which solidly trounced "Favorite Artists," the theme I voted for, so I combined the two and made these Artist Trading Cards inspired by Joseph Cornell's Aviary series. The parrots in the first ATC above are the same ones Cornell used in The Caliph of Bagdad and Untitled (Parrot and Butterfly Habitat). You can see these and other Cornell parrot boxes grouped together in this great post at the Kiwi's Angels parrot blog.

For my ATCs I started out with Patti's Parrots Faux Postage from Ten Two Studios and some vintage text glued to some serendipity collage backgrounds. Then I gessoed around the parrots to blend everything together and create the weathered white painted surface that Cornell had in his Aviary boxes. Then I added punchinella (sequin waste) to suggest bits of cage wire. The round things are the plastic labels removed from tabulating machines (a craft supply shared with our ATC group by one of our many generous members), and I also had some old air mail stickers.

To suggest a three-dimensional shadow box, I painted 19th-century newspaper text to look like wood and cut it into strips to outline the card. Then I added shadows around the corners of the box and behind the "props" with a wash of acrylic paints. Definitely need to make some more of these! :D