A hand made book to display ATC / ACEO art cards

Recently I won a "winner takes all" competition in a group on Flickr. What to do with the artist trading cards, on the theme of birds, which flew in through the letter box over the following couple of weeks. Aha!! Eureka!. I thought about my recent glue book projects and decided that I would bravely stick the ATC's into a hand-made book. Sacrilige, I hear you say? Well no I don't think so, I will always want to keep them as a set and so this seemed like a great idea.

This is the cover, One of my entries. The pages for this book were plain brown card, with green covers which had been stamped all over to give a background pattern. the lettering was cut from a newspaper and stuck down, Artful Ideas is the name of the group.

I added a ripped piece of craft paper to run across each page and stamped "twirly" designs on the page prior to glueing down the  ATC on each page. the following images are more of the completed pages.

I am quite proud of the result and will, I am sure, cherish the book as a momento into my old age. Who am I kidding, into my old age? I start to draw my Old Age Pension in a few months, I am there already, LOL

I have included this as one of the techniques for displaying artist trading cards in your collection on my Squidoo lens ( lens = a single page web site focusing on a niche topic), Collecting and Displaying Artist Trading Cards. Check out the lens for more ideas, some of them garnered from around the web.

Collage and its place in fine art.

I have always been a little bothered by collage , in respect to its place in the fine arts. Yes I know its evertywhere, and lots of artists use it but I have always kept it separate from my paintings. It has always been something that I felt I had to apologise to friends about. I don't know why but it just didn't seem to be "quite" the thing for an artist to be involved with.

"Clothes To Die For", my first ever collage and was 20 x 16 inches, see a larger version on my Flickr account. I was involved with an art group which held special subject evenings and at a collage evening I was presented with a pile of magazines - this was the result. The variation in styles was something I had never conceived of.. But after this it was a very long time before I was to do another collage.

"We Will RememberThem", the next collage was a result two things. One: I had begun to take notice of ACEO collages on Ebay and Two: I had found a stash of family photos which I never knew existed. Putting these two together I made this collage. the three service men were three brothers of my mother who had all been in a different service. from the front, army, air-force and navy. they were fine at the end of the war but putting this together I couldn't help putting this title to the work. Once I had done this, I was grabbed by collage and it gradually became a more and more important part of my art work.

But still it bothered me!

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I needed to sort out my feelings with respect to collage, and so did some research into its history and its place in Fine art. The result is a Squidoo lens ( a single page web-site focusing on a niche topic.) it is called, not surprisingly, "Collage In Fine Art". This has eased my fears that it is not quite art and I found that it has a long history in the fine arts dating back to the days of cubbism when Picasso and Braques started to use ephemera to add interest and texture. I found a new hero in the shape of Kurt Schwitters and his work with found objects and of course there is so much collage and collages with other media in modern art that there can be no question of its right to be considered REAL ART.

I have run workshops for my art group in collage,

These are two collages, approximately 10x 8 inches; "Indulgence" and  "A Weekend In Prague" were both created using modern ephemera and again larger versions can be seen on Flickr. Indulgence was made using magazine images and A weekend in Prague uses tickets, ephemera, coins and photographs collected on a weekend in Prague - where else?

This actually raises another question. Why is vintage ephemera considered such a major item for much of the more craftier side of collage. And yes, I know I am falling into subjective use of the terms again. I think I will start a one man crusade for a fairer representation of modern ephemera, anybody feel like joining?

Why not take a look at the lens, "Collage In Fine Art" and let me know what you think. thanks for reading this far.

Great April Giveaway

No, not me but its even better, you may have seen a previous post where I detailed the contents of a goodie box from Kim Newberg , this one on PDA (Paper, Digital Art and Images by Kim).

Kim has now got a giveaway on her blog, Art and ImagesbyKim which promises to be even better. Do yourself a favour by browsing over and making a comment, extra entries for simple tasks/promotions.

The draw will be at the end of April - don't miss this opportunity or you will be kicking yourself in May.