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Controversy! The title of "First Great Comic of 2016" is hotly contested this year!

Yesterday I delivered some new greeting cards to a local shop who carries my art and knitting (A Cottage Affair on Fair Oaks Blvd in Lyon Village, Sacramento, CA.).

I needed to box them up, or something. So I decided to be stylish and pulled out one of my cool Edwardian hat box cases (which I bought at Hold Everything, ages ago.)



I managed to carefully squish them all in, just. The little pocket in the lid was perfect for the notecards. Yay!


Here they are, unsquished a bit. There are several dozen all totalled, of all different designs.



I thought I'd share a little bit about how I make my cards. The ways to make a greeting card are endless of course. There are whole books written about making cards, for goodness sakes!
But the most basic elements of a traditional one-fold, image on front card are the same. You can go to town embellishing and having fun. But here's what I do for my most simple ones.

First I get some card stock with matching envelopes. I often buy these in bulk from a crafts store (Michaels, JoAnns, Beverlys, etc.). I also like to use Strathmore's special cardstock which comes in a variety of sizes and styles (some with a deckled edge, some notecard size, some with a colored edge, etc.) You can also make your own out of any kind of paper, of course. You can also buy envelopes (or make them if you're really industrious.)

This is a pack of ivory colored basic 5 x 7 card stock with the fold already scored, and matching envelopes.


You'll also need some supplies: mat knife, tape, a burnishing tool...


I love this tape they make now for scrapbooking that comes on a roller. You can get permanent, repositionable, archival, refillable, etc. It just depends on what you want.


You also need your images! I do sometimes print my images directly onto good card stock, but I've found that a lot of my work looks better printed on glossy photo paper. So I usually print up a bunch of images on that (at the right size ~ somewhat smaller than the 5 x 7 card size, or whatever) and then cut them out and tape them neatly and cleanly to the front of the card.
No jaggedy edges or scuffed image or crooked taping is allowed! It has to be PERFECT.


Then there's the back side. You always want to put your name or contact information on there somehow (at least I do). And maybe the title of the art, your copyright notice, company name, whatever you think is important.
Sometimes, if I'm doing a really small amount of cards, I'll set up a file in Photoshop and print the back side of each card. But doing it this way is very time consuming, because you have to feed each card through the printer one, at, a, time. (Same thing goes if you're printing the image directly onto the card stock.) It can make you crazy, especially if you have a big order. BUT. If you're doing something special, and its the only way to do it right, you just have to do it.


What I usually do for the backs now is print up a sheet of labels, and use one of those on the back. I love these ~ Avery #8667. They're small, and CLEAR, so if you burnish them down onto the card, they kind of disappear. They work well if you have colored card stock and don't want to stick a big white label on the back (tacky).
I just format them in Word (Office), its super easy. You can fuss with the typeface, make them be in color, whatever.


Then I always put my cards in a plastic bag. It keeps your card clean and protected and looks soooo much more professional.


Clear Bags makes about a jillion different kinds of bags for everything you can think of. There are probably other places to get them, but I've always used Clear Bags and have always been happy with them.


I also print up a page of "Card Inside" blurbs. I do a lot of blank cards, but sometimes there are "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hannukah" ones or whatever. When you have the card sealed in a bag, the buyer can't open it up to see what it says inside. So you have to put a little note with it. I just cut these up and pop one in the bag with the card, on the back side.


So here's what one looks like all packaged up.
Front ~


And back ~


And that's it!
It always takes way more time to put these together than I think it will. Even though I know that, I still think I'm going to just whip 'em out. And I don't. You have to print out the images, cut them, adhere them to the card stock, fold the card stock and press the edge with the burnisher to get a nice crease, print out the labels for the backs and then stick them on, then put them in bags with the 'inside message' blurb, and seal them up. It can get very tedious.
I'm just saying.

It does help to have studio mates to keep you company and cheer you on ~

Things that happened in Tucson:
I felt in love with a saguaro. It stood tall and valiant, enduring the fiery sun without complain. When I saw it for the first time my heart was taken.
I was a USBBY opener speaker. Afterwards I was declared a skin shedder, like the Tucson lizards and snakes.

Things I saw in Tucson:

Liborio, tattooed skin, big shoulders small legs, unshaved face, jumping into the ocean waters as shown in the picture book Un Hombre De Mar written by Rodolfo Castro, illustrated by Manuel Monroy, an IBBY Honour Book. A most poetic sight.
The story in Spanish reads something like this: “Liborio has sea water inside his veins. Waters from the seven legendary seas. With little fish and everything, with vastness, shipwrecks, tides, and swells.”
And here is Liborio on the cover of his book, a man who doesn’t want to be good or bad, but only be like the sea.

Ah, Liborio, I think he could be my uncle.

MARK: Today I had help from Lucy, age 8, with today’s update. I asked her to talk about our stays in Bryan and Austin, TX while I typed what she said. Full disclosure – I took what she said and changed the order of some sentences so that it goes in chronological order. Otherwise, though, this is what she said. Her comments are in the larger font.

LUCY: When we came into Texas, we were listening to a song named "After Breakfast Let’s Go to Texas.” My mom and dad are in a band that’s called the Church Ladies and it's their song.

We went to Bryan, Texas and stayed with Petey, my mom’s friend. Petey is a really nice man. We walked around Texas A and M. It was really hot out and I liked it a lot. Petey told us about butterflies and Texas Rangers and trees.



MARK: For the Texas A&M football team, there is great importance given to "The Twelveth Man." Here's Karen with her hand on the thigh of that hallowed player.



Also, in Bryan we finally got our antenna fixed! Yay! Here's a picture with Daniel from the Honda dealer.  Such a nice guy!



LUCY: We went to a restaurant. It was my dad’s birthday. It was a Mexican restaurant and I tried Sopapillas and I loved them. In the Sopapillas we put a candle and sang Happy Birthday to my dad.



Another day we went to Aunt Pat and Uncle Frank’s house in Austin, Texas. We saw Suzanne and Stephen my second cousins and Francesco, which is a baby, my new cousin. Francesco was 3 months old when I met him. He was really cute. I love the way that he holded on to my finger.

MARK: Here's Zoe with lovely Francesco, and then my family:



MARK: While we were at in Austin, Lucy decided to play with my aunt’s weight set and promptly dropped a 5lb weight hard on her left ring finger. It then proceeded to turn purple and swell up. It’s still purple and swelled, but a bit better now. And she can move it around, so we’ve decided it must be okay. Yet another adventure with Lucy.

(I have a picture of Lucy's finger but Karen seems to have hidden the camera and she's asleep right now -- the nerve! -- so I can't download it.  But I'll put it up here soon)

LUCY: We went to lots of bookstores and me and Zoe got these little stuffed animals and my brother got a hat. We went in the kids section and played with the trains.



MARK: We loved the beautiful state capital building -- where we arrived just in time for an amazing tour. And we remembered the Alamo...



We visited an amazing independent bookstore in Autsin called Book People. They were very kind to us!


At a Barnes and Noble in Austin we had an unlikely encounter too strange for fiction: I was standing there talking with a bookseller when I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “Mark? Mark Hughes, is that you?” I turned around and there, out of the blue, stood a familiar face from Rhode Island. Beverly Pettine is a friend of the family who used to work with my mother. Beverly doesn’t live down here in Texas--it was just a strange coincidence that she just happened to be visiting her sister in Austin (who knew?) and just happened to be in exactly the right the bookstore with her sister and niece when she saw a sign announcing that I was going to be appearing here. She looked at the time and my appearance just happened to be exactly when she was here. If I were to put that in a story, no one would believe it. Yet, here’s the proof: Here I am with Beverly in front of our car in Austin, TX, of all places. Whoda thunk? :-)

 

We also had a very nice afternoon with friends of friends. Our neighbor, Jay, grew up in the Dallas area so we were very pleased to meet Brad, Holly, Katie, and Grace, who live in Austin. Lovely people and our new friends in Texas. :-)



LUCY: Yesterday we went to Stephen and Jonathan’s house and they have five dogs. Their names were Max, Casey, Billy, Toby, and Lloyd. They were cute. I loved to pick Max up. He was the littlest but he was 31 years old. We went in Stephen and Jonathan’s pool and swam. Stephen and my dad and mom threw us in. It was really fun.

Right now my brother and sister are filling their stomachs with Cheetos. We’re driving to Dallas, Texas. We’re going to stay with Gigi. We were just listening to High School Musical in the car.

MARK: A sad note: I just got some terribly disappointing news from NPR – they are not going to air the road-trip stories after all. Given their already busy line up and the fact that the producer working with me will be away in Alaska for a month starting this week, they made their decision not to go forward with the road-trip stories. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am about this. I sent out the message about NPRs decision earlier this morning and was truly touched by the many, many the kind emails people sent in reply. I’m grateful to have such a supportive network.

On the other hand, I’ve already learned a great deal from working with NPR so far, and the experience has been a lot of fun. Perhaps after the summer is over I’ll submit some commentaries in the style of the first one, where I talked about quitting my job. We’ll see.

In any case, this is so far the only significant set-back in an otherwise successful and happy road trip/book tour. And I’m determined to get over it before we reach Dallas. :-)

I appreciate your friendship.
-- Mark

LEMONADE MOUTH (Delacorte Press, 2007)
I AM THE WALLPAPER (Delacorte Press, 2005)
www.markpeterhughes.com

Good Morning:

I started my day with a cool and rainy 3 mile walk. Now that's a great way to start a fresh new day, if you ask me!

I've been looking over some of my past posts this morning, and I think I need to make it clear that I AM NOT AN ENTOMOLOGIST!! Wow, I can't believe how many posts I have that focus on insects. Mantis, Ladybugs, Walking Sticks.... and I admit, I have the creepy-crawlies just like so many others. Because my kids have learned outside of school since the beginning, I have always had cool projects going on all the time. It just so happens that there are lots of cool Science projects on the market for the "common folk". When my boys were younger, the insect projects were what they always chose. So, through the years, we just became "friendly" with bugs.

This post will focus on the release of my many hundreds of baby Praying Mantis, and that should be it for bug posts. At least for awhile anyway!

We released my babies late yesterday evening in my garden. They have voracious appetites and eat thousands of aphids and small insects each day. Being that they eat aphids, we released most of them on and around my roses. The egg sacs were still productive, so we hid them under the roses. After we released them, we managed to get some very good pictures of them in their natural environment:

Praying Mantis on Yellow Rose



Praying Mantis Egg Sac



Praying Mantis Close-Up



Now that most of you are probably thoroughly creeped out, I would like to thank you for being so patient and kind enough to continue to read my blog.

Now...here's my two newest collage prints listed in My Etsy Shop.

5" x 7" collage print entitled: "Ghostly Gert's Tucson Patio Party". This collage is what I like to call "story art". Most of my larger than ACEO size collages are story art. Here's Ghostly Gert's story:

This is poor ol' Ghostly Gert, revisiting the most exciting yet tragic day of her "life". Oh the happenings on that lovely desert patio. It goes like this: August 13, 1910, a sweltering hot day in Tucson, Arizona. It was Gert's 11th birthday and she was having a big party. Hundreds of friends and family members were swarming in. The food was delicious and the cake, oh the cake. It was 4 layers high. It was such an extravagent party. Everyone was laughing and dancing. Gert and the other children were playing games. Hopscotch, Tag, Croquet. Then, before anyone could do anything to stop it, tragedy struck...

Now, you get to fill in the blank. The end of the story belongs to you.



The second print that I listed this morning is an ACEO entitled: "Song Series: Inspired by Stairway To Heaven". This one is for all of you Led Zeppelin fans out there!!



Thanks so much for stopping by my blog today.

Until Tomorrow:
Kim
Garden Painter Art
gnarly-dolls