Tuesday, June 7, 2016

June's Postcard of the Month
Mare and foal.  New life. 

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.  :-)