There’s something magical about getting a piece of real, handmade correspondence in the mail, especially these days. This year, I’ve been trying to make mail art on a regular basis, so when I heard about the MailArt 365 project, I immediately signed up to create one piece of postal art a day for a year. The project officially began in December, but they’ve extended the deadline so that we latecomers can participate.
For my very first Mailart 365 project, I used an old audio card that I found in a thrift store to make a piece for a music-loving fellow with whom I recently collaborated on a very challenging web development project. He only knows me in a work-related context, so this’ll have an element of surprise.
The audio cards were apparently part of the 1979 “Audiotronics Tutorette System,” which seems to have been a reading program similar to “Hooked on Phonics.” (Here’s a fantastic video of unorthodox creative Audiotronics use.) I particularly like the audio magnetic stripe along the bottom and the prancing puppy illustration. I added two old 45 single covers to the front and back of the piece, and collaged in some old lighting gels from another thrift store.
I used craft glue to adhere the gels to the card, but was a little dubious that the layers of plastic would make it during their postal journey. I used a foam brush to paint a few coats of matte medium over the front side of the piece to hold everything together. We’ll see how it looks when it arrives. The experimentation and transformation of the art as it passes from one place to the next is actually part of the fun.
More about mail art (warning: may result in hours of image perusal):
1 comment
kirthi says:
Mar 25, 2011
love it! you are a creative inspiration erika, thank you! love the dog…there is also a dog making an appearance on youtube/facebook…one also making music, this one at a piano.