Nine New Art Cards
I was making some more art cards this week. Lately I’ve been working steady on my cartoon art cards for my “Drifting and Dreaming” Sunday strip. I have 80 out of 104 of them done and I’m happy with that number. I’ve been getting ten a week of those done so it’ll only be a couple of more weeks until I have a year’s worth of them finished.
Yesterday I turned my attention to getting some of the regular art cards done rather than the cartoon art cards. What’s the difference you ask? The cartoon ones have writing on them. They’re the ones that have drawing of a person on them with a word balloon above their heads with some writing in the balloon. A regular art card can be any piece of art as long as it’s done on a 2.5×3.5 inch piece of paper. Hopefully some paper with some stiffness to it and not just a piece of plain letter paper.
I usually use Bristol board for my art cards. It’s the same two-ply Bristol that I use for most of my drawing. A lot of my drawing is done on 11×17 inch Bristol but I buy that paper in 14×17 inch pads. That means that I cut a strip of paper off the side that’s 3×17 inches.
For most of the 1990s I generally threw that strip of paper away. It always annoyed me a little bit to do that but I could think of no use for it. I occasionally drew a long thin drawing on that paper but it mostly went into the recycle bin.
Then in the early 2000s I heard about art cards. A woman, whose name I don’t know, started making baseball card size pieces of art and trading them or selling them online. The idea went viral among artists. That’s when I decided to make my own.
After that I always took the 3×17 inch strip of Bristol, cut a half an inch off the length of it, and then cut it into four art cards plus an extra short piece. Now it’s a nice little bonus to get that 3×17 inch strip of paper. I’ve made around 3000 art cards since I started.
A funny thing happened earlier this year when I bought some new pads of Bristol board. For most of my Bristol board buying life you could not buy 11×17 inch Bristol. 14×17 inches was the standard size. That’s what I always bought it. But then sometime a couple of decades ago some paper companies started making 11×17 inch Bristol board aimed at comic book artists. Often it had blue line comic book production markings on it and it was little more expensive.
Back to earlier in the year when I was buying paper. I saw some pads of Bristol online and they had a good piece on them. I ordered a few pads to stock up. It turns out the paper I ordered was 11×17. I thought I ordered 14×17 but I didn’t. My usual paper doesn’t even come in 11×17 so I somehow didn’t even notice the size discrepancy online.
So I’ve been using that 11×17 inch paper all year. It’s convenient since I don’t have to get my paper cutter out and cut it to size but at 20 sheets per pad I’ve lost out on 240 sheets of art card paper! I just ran out of that 11×17 inch paper and now am back to cutting 14×17 inch paper to size. As a matter of fact I have to order more. I only have about 30 sheets of p[aper left. I’ll make sure I order 14×17 inch paper.
These days they ever sell tiny pads of art card paper. I have two small pads of it to try out. One is hot press watercolor paper and the other is cold press. The strange thing is that the paper is actually 2.5×3.75 inches. There is an extra quarter inch of height. That’s actually no good since it makes the paper harder to fit into cards sleeves. I’m going to have to trim that quarter inch off.
It was yesterday that I made some art cards. I usually make them in batches of ten and it takes me most of the day to get ten of them done. I always think I can get them done faster than that but it never seems to work out that way.
The first thing I have to do when making an art card is to figure out what to make them with. Do I want to use pencils, pen, paint, or markers? Can I think of anything else to make them with? I’m always looking for new methods.
I came to rest on a way that I have made some cards in the past but not a ton of them. One of my favorite color markers is a Tahitian Blue marker from Copic. It’s actually the first Copic Marker I ever bought and it’s over a decade old. I just checked and I bought it in 2010 so it’s 14 years old. So old that its plastic cap and barrell are starting to disintegrate.
The technique is that first I draw with the blue marker using it as an underdrawing and then I draw on top of that with a black marker. I like how the combo of colors looks in the final drawing. I also decided to use a could have other colors but with different brands of markers.
The second marker that I used was an orange click marker from Sharpie. I bought this one when Sharpie first came out with them (Five years ago? Seven? I don’t know.) and I’ve always liked it. It’s a Sharpie that doesn’t have a normal Sharpie cap but the tip retracts into the barrel. I’ve always meant to get more of these but never have. The orange and black make a good color combination.
The third marker I used came in an art supply sample pack. It’s a yellow marker from a company called Lyra. It’s a brush marker but it also has a bullet tip on the other size. Usually I like brush tips but for these art cards I used the bullet tip.
So I spent my day working with those markers and a couple of black ones. I got the ten art cards done and I think they came out well. I have twenty five more of those ones to go. I’ll get ‘em done.