Thought Bubbles

Hey there blog readers,

As part of my recent letter-project to N, this week I sent a normal sort of letter, but on thoughtful sorts of paper.

I had a silly idea, playing on the idea of "thought bubbles".

I packaged all of my Thought Bubbles in a little square envelope:

I wrote the letter itself on the backs of seven different bubbles... and I added a bunch of fishes for good measure.

Here are a few of the individual bubbles -

Cards: Diamonds

Halloo all!

I've been hard at work on the other suits for my deck of cards. First, I spent a while just brainstorming for the additional three suits. I hadn't really thought about the others when I settled on sparrows for the spade cards. So I did some doodling and a handful of sketches and finally decided that I didn't want to draw birds for every suit. Instead I settled on two sets of birds and two sets of mammals. I've been doodling foxes in my sketchbook for a while now, so I thought, why not a foxy royal family?

This time around, I did all of the number cards first. I already had quick templates, so it was easy to sub in diamonds and flip around the colors.

Once I was done with the number cards, I moved on to the Ace, using the design for the Ace of Spades as a jumping off point.

Followed quickly by my Jack, who I imagined to be a wily, mischievous sort of character.

The Queen was a wistful, almost sad, lady fox.

And finally, the King, a concerned and regal sort of royal.

This time I also took a handful of photos of the actual printed cards -

I packaged them in a handy little case.

And finally, the full suit.

Cards: Spades

Halloo all!

As part of my mail-project to N, I decided to start designing a deck of cards. I've always wanted to make a set, and it's a nice finite sort of project. For my deck, I decided that I wanted to play with the royal cards, and give each suit a different animal. I had been doing quite a few sketches and doodles of birds for an earlier project and arbitrarily assigned them to the spades.

The first thing I did was design the Ace. I needed to get a feel for the overall shape of the suit elements. Was the spade itself rounded, pointy, wide, skinny, elongated...?

After the ace, I did a bunch of the numbers just to play with layout.

And finally, it was time for the fun part, the royal cards -

The Jack, who I imagined to be a self-important, plump little bird.

The Queen, a regal but distant sort of lady bird.

The King, somewhat aloof and irritated, most often by his Jack.

Once I had all of the cards in the suit done, I had a basic sense of the color palette and the overall shapes and feel of the characters, and I was ready to design the back of my deck.

Stay tuned, dear readers. Next week, diamonds!

Mail!

I don't know about the rest of you out there in blog-land, but email just doesn't cut it for me. I like big yellow envelopes and brightly colored stamps and packages that arrive unexpectedly on your doorstep.

Recently an out-of-town friend and I agreed to start sending one another a piece of mail each week. I've been using my weekly letters as an excuse to do a little doodling and goofing around with my art. I started working on my first letter on the train and turned a subway doodle into a little four page book with a pop up letter. (Just a quick note... I didn't want to post any of the art from the letters until N had received my packages, so I made this particular piece about three weeks ago.)

Front page (note the purple tab at the top)

Interior pages (the purple tab is actually the letter!)

Back cover