Done Beats Perfect . . . Hmmmm . . .

It's been one of those weekends. I looked at the calendar and realized that I needed to get three sets of ATC's done and in the mail RFN¹ if I was going to swap them. Trouble is, two were 6/6 and one was 3/3.

So . . . as I was chasing my tailfeathers and throwing together backgrounds I started thinking. Always a bad sign.

On the one hand, it's good to have some tricks up your sleeve for times when your muse is off having coffee and the well's dry. Good to have motifs and methods that you own because you've done them over and over again.

But at what point does it stop being "your special thing" and start being just a bag of tricks?

I do backgrounds like no one's business. I have five-six methods for getting marks and color on paper to use for backgrounds that I can do in my sleep. Like here--faux batik.



The swap theme is "Fortune Cookies," so the use of a preprint is ok. It needed something to give it more weight, hence the torn paper background. It's diagonal because it's a cheap way to get a feeling of movement going. (And because I hate to have to line things up just perfectly and true. On a slant can be a smidge off and still look good.)

And here--a haiku swap. As an English major, I can bang out seventeen syllables on the QT. Sometimes they even make sense. And the rhythm of a haiku lends weight to even banal statements, the same way that Yoda-speak, in its foreign flavor, personality imbues the little green handsock with.



And yes, woven backgrounds are one of my go-to's. These colors are so cute and lively, they have kind of a Japanese feeling to me. I like the way this set cut up--the eyes were placed just right to be looking vaguely at the words.

I tried something a little new to me, using coloring book images and searching for backgrounds --realistic backgrounds to place them with.



You can see I gave up on the last picture and used a standard Spike layout--torn scrap art paper placed diagonally (leftover bits of batik) with a central image (the pelican stamp) and a touch of whimsy (the hat sticker).

I was going to send this one:



But I'm not sure if the story reads. I was aiming for "the robin has a red breast because he neglected to use his SUNBLOCK, even though he had it with him." I tend to be a person of the WORD (duh, English major!!) I find myself groping a lot for my visual vocabulary, and wondering if I'm just shouting "Radish transmissions frammitz the tractor, buttercup! Briefcase, booger, buttocks!" Only, in pictures. So it makes even less sense.

Or am I being silly? While some things I do may be just like Kinkaid and his sunbeams, is that such a bad thing? Is "commercial" really a synonym for "overexposed" and "lowest common denomenator"?

Confuscius say:



Hmmmmm.

Spike


1 Right Freakin' NOW