Art Cards....And Funeral Planning??

It's Saturday!

Hello There!

I'm doing my Saturday morning norm, slept in, dilly dallying a few hours away and then "maybe" getting a few chores done around here..... maybe.

Most evenings during the week, after work, I do whatever little chores need doing, feed myself and sometimes take a power nap, before going over to my art table, putting on some art videos from youtube on my TV through my firestick and play around with whatever I'm into at the moment.

I made this little 5x7 on canvas board this week. It's quite happy I think. The right side being mostly a flat, backwards L shape that has many layers of color from a paper where I cleaned my roller off while creating other things. I call them blotty papers and sometimes they make the neatest collage papers quite accidentally. It seemed a shame not to capture all that layered goodness, so I included it in this piece. The left side however is a tower or jumble bumble...LOL! It pulls out the pinks as you can see with a random cascade of complementary colors and shapes. I kind of like that jumble bumble look.

It's that time of year where lots of artists are beginning the 100 day challenge. I of course am not. 100 days is just WAY too long for me to make a commitment too and since I know it would start feeling like a chore to me WAY before it was over, I am true to myself and just say no.

That doesn't mean I don't like to see what other folks are doing and the creative things they come up with to do. If I understand it correctly, it wasn't meant for someone to try to do a big masterpiece every day, but smaller things of different kinds. For the folks that participate in it every year, some of them have gotten really good at choosing what they will use that will make this year's challenge, different from their past years.

One artist has chosen to use playing cards as the item they will use this year to create their little pieces of art on. They will put the art on the back of the card and leave the front of the card where you can see it on the back of the art. I believe they expect to use them as their artist trading cards and I thought that was a neat idea. Turns out, other artists have used playing cards for art trading, but this was the first time I saw it.

I remember I had an old deck of cards, so I pulled out my small toy box, thinking they might be there. There WERE cards there, but not the normal old pack that I was picturing in my mind. I can't imagine having thrown them out at some point, but for the time being, they were nowhere to be found. I did find these however, a jumbo pack of playing cards and 3 smaller type cards of children's games. I immediately thought the children's cards should go to my Mom's where once in a while the Great-Grandkids come by and maybe they'd like to play with them.

So... in making the best of it, I decided to play around with the pack of jumbo cards. For real, if you were doing 100 days of art, collage, painting or mixed media, it would be a very cheap backing to use, the price of two pack of cards, especially if you were going to adopt the idea of using them as artist trading cards or even of putting them in a sealed sleeve and leaving them at random places in public for others to find.

One thing about them though is that their surface is slick. I gesso'd (primed) a half dozen to play with to try to make sure whatever I put on them would stick to them.

Then several nights this week, I made small collages with a few.

I'm curious how they might hold up over time though, not that anyone would get one and really expect it to last forever, but on the one below on the far left, the biggest piece of paper that I used for the background had torn edges that didn't quite cover all the sides of the card. That didn't bother me really, but I decided to put a little yellow-orange paint around the edges before putting the papers on, just to make it look a little more finished. Even though I had primed it several days before, when the gesso got wet from the paint, it wanted to clump up in places where maybe I did an extra brush stroke or two too many. I hadn't expected that at all, so now I am suspicious about it as a primer for such things, but for now, I'll just make a mental note for later and carry on.

Since these are the jumbo playing cards, they are a little bigger than what it appears a lot of artist use for trading cards. I don't care for now though. I have some other things from the past, very small art on canvases where I played with some paint pours that I thought way back then, would be good for leaving as "Easter Eggs" for others to find. That never happened, but now I think I will want to get a small box for all the little stuff and possibly make that a "thing" for me when I go out and start planting some fun finds out in my community. We'll see what happens... right?

Funeral Planning! Have you planned your own funeral? I turned 68 in January of this year. At this moment, I have no known diseases diagnosed, but still, I do have diabetes and complications from that can show up fast and slap you out at any given moment. LOL... that made me laugh to type it, but even without that, there are many folks that check out in their 60s, so although at any moment, at any age, in any life, you know you are not promised another minute, the knowledge of that seems to magnify the older you get.

I have meant to plan and pay for my own funeral for 2 or 3 years, each year announcing to myself only, that this would be the year I got all that sort of stuff in order "just in case". I don't have children and no current husband, so arrangements and all the other stuff that comes with someone checking out of this world would likely fall on my siblings. Of course they wouldn't HAVE too, but I know them and they would. ANYWAY! It seems if I were a good sister, I would take care of everything I could and get everything in order so there would not be so much for someone else to do.

This week I have decided to make some final decisions on that, get with the "parlor" and get it all paid for and completed. Really, the only thing that needs to happen is for me to make up my dang mind! I detest going to funerals and last October, I almost took care of this and when I was privately bouncing this off of my older sister, stating I was trying to make it minimal, simple, easy and also mentioned I detest going to funerals, she quipped "well, don't have one!" LOL.... so of course I laughed and immediately admitted that the thought of not having one had not crossed my mind! Brilliant ! If I don't like to go, I could make it where nobody had to make that decision about mine. I really love that idea. I thought I would have the info already completed and submitted by now, but that didn't happen this week, but I do expect it to happen by the end of the coming week.

I know thinking about and talking about funerals is normally a bummer, but fortunately, I don't have that kind of feelings about getting it done, although I admit, many years back when I thought about it, although I am not particularly superstitious about such things, in humor I always thought I wouldn't plan mine and pay for it as then if I perished soon there after, people would be wondering if I had a premonition or something. I guess that would make a good story, but back then, I wasn't wanting to tempt the universe. 🤣

Ok.... I've colored you up and bummed you out all in the same post, so my job is done here!

I hope you all are having a good weekend and that your hearts are happy.

Love you! Mean it!

Jacey