Old and New

One major subject of this blog is what I loosely refer to as "inspiration"--- those things in everyday life that I see, remember, and interpret in my cards and prints. It's something I also like to call a "visual vocabulary"--- those things you've seen, whether in art or in life, that stick in your mind and that you connect with and continue to use in your work.

A lot of people (including myself) have described my aesthetic as vintage or Victorian, and it certainly is. Even from a small age, I really connected with things that are old (blame it on Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, or the fact that my grandmother gave me free rein of her attic).

I wanted to show here, though, what I take from both old and new. The vintage postcards shown above are from my own collection. I love the sweet chicks and quirky use of items like the hat and mirror. However, I think that the overall scenes in the postcards are a little too sweet, even for my taste, so I like to make some adjustments when creating my own work. I love the colors used in the originals, and that chick yellow and the green on the brim of the hat serve as similar, but simplified, backgrounds in my own cards. I chose scalloped edges to give the cards some interest, but I tempered that with printing the image in brown. I also like the overall quirkiness of animal behavior in the originals--- I connected with a similar vintage image when I found the rabbits and jumping frogs. I added the text myself, which I think gives it a little more humor--- that we know that the picture is pretty, but silly.

Like my modern take? The cards are available in my Etsy shop.