I cut the pieces down to 4x6ish and lightly sanded anything glossy. The “backs” got gesso and in some cases white paint to create a blank writing space and cover any if the previous mail markings. The fronts got gesso and paint according to whatever decoration experiment I felt like playing with. I had planned for the original junk aspect to be somewhat visible, although it ended up more covered in most of them. Then I added stenciling/stamping, a focal image, and some exaggerated outlining.
And here’s the less involved early tester I did to send to my brother, just to confirm that a) the post office wouldn’t reject them outright and b) the machines wouldn’t somehow catch the earlier postal coding and freak out. Here you can see a lot of the original junk base .
These turned out so cool! Before I read about your process (thanks for sharing it!), I thought you were getting some cool junk mail with images of the stars or yesteryear and I wondered how to get that instead of stock photos and leering politicians.
I wish! Even campaign ads for that time Lucy and Ethel ran against each other for women’s club president would be better.
This was the only project concept that sparked for me, but I really, really didn’t want to end up in a situation where I had to redo multiple swap items because I went too far out there for the PO .
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AIMR
(Linda -2026 time to regroup and renew :us:)
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I love those! I catch a rerun of old shows now and then because they were so slapstick and plain goofy, but sometimes I need that!
Great idea doing a test run! I would hate to see original work get rejected by the PO and languish in the dead letter piles!
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