Lupines
and Poppies
and motorcycles (June being when Laconia Bike Week happens), Oh My!
These are what June mostly evokes for me.
And I have this nice little motorcycle rubber stamp:
So, what I'd thought I'd do was an homage to motorcycles.
I'd done a Lupine postcard last June:
and Poppies the 3 Junes before that...
I liked this motorcycle collage:
that I'd made for a friend's father well enough,
but I've not been so pleased with some of my other motorcycle collages.*
So, I ended up not pursuing a motorcycle theme.
And then, suddenly, the month was almost over,
and I had NO (other than a pale yellow foreground**...) inspirations! :-/
But!
I remembered this rubber stamp***
which I'd given to friend/neighbor/Town Clerk, Jessica, last spring,
upon the birth of her Friesian foal, Xephyr:
So... I contacted Jessica, asked to borrow this stamp,
and lo and behold, she came over with not just one horse stamp!****
But also a HUGE bag of goodies!
Wasps' nest, bee comb, birch bark. :)
June's prototype:*****
(most of)
The Fixin's
(I added the music and grass in the lower left later in the process)
Production Steps: The Movie
The Steps
(a mere 25 this month!)
Horses!******
I got to this point and thought it was sweet, but rather boring.
So, I decided it needed some interest down in the lower left:
Better, but I still wasn't altogether satisfied with this month's card...
Panel of 21 of June's postcards:
I always like seeing them all repeated like this.
The foreground of yellows makes me think more of desert than lush VT in the Spring.
Once again, I think these might have worked better with a more green palette...
Fin.
*e.g. these 2, done for a couple of Mule's birthdays.
**The inspiration for this pale yellow foreground came from an abstract painting that was prominently featured in several episodes of the (dark) Finnish series, "Easy Living" - https://www.netflix.com/title/80097785, that I was watching last month on Netflix.
I tried to get a photo, but...
***Despite living in a densely horse-populated town, and having a horse-crazy sister, horses are not really a part of my life. This is Mary-Dana a few years ago, riding Skippy.
M-D was Vermont's Green Mountain Hunter-Jumper Assoc.'s champion in 2012.
****Jessica was at one time an avid stamper/embosser, and has a museum's-worth of rubber stamps!
I used 4 of her fab frog stamps for last year's July card:
which I think might be my favorite of the 50+ monthly postcards so far. :-)
*****The actual paper colors are much truer here (I scanned it instead of taking a photo).
******I again employed the technique of stamping onto thin white tissue paper instead of directly onto the layers of paper that were already laid down.
Addendum: Bird, Butterfly, Bees and Beekeeper
Mule on his way up from the hive
where he'd caught a few bees to sting my hurting knee. :-)
Here's a link if you want to check out bee venom therapy:
This was why we original got bees (@10 yrs. ago). The honey's just a sweet (haha) bonus. :-)
