Eventually, I figure, it will come. I will discover the secret to just making stuff up and designing it and planning out the production. Jen will get more phone calls or e-mails from me begging to borrow her love of repetitive, tedious projects. And Oomphasis will churn out lots of stuff. To go in the shop, which is incredibly fun to say. Eventually, every few weekends will be like last weekend, when we sat down for a few short hours and made Valentines. (Which will be in the shop as soon as I remember to photograph them by the daylight.)

If you’re thinking that it looks like something designed under the intense pressure of a loyal helper’s eagerness to get crafty, spontaneously, within about five minutes, well then that’s because it was designed spontaneously, within about five minutes, under the intense pressure of my loyal helper’s eagerness to get crafty.

I had a pile of eucalyptus leaves left over from some flower arranging I had done earlier. Eucalyptus leaves are a bit pointy at the ends, and fairly round otherwise. As it turns out, they make excellent little hearts, which, naturally, make excellent, un-red, un-pink, Valentine cards. I like it that way: un-red and such.

I was cutting the stem end off. Jen cut them from the other side and we ended up with a bunch of little leaf heart “balloons.” Silly me; as everyone knows, stems make for far more endearing leaf hearts.

And if you’re thinking that it looks like I still haven’t taken down my Christmas tree, here, over a month past Christmas, I implore you to look again.

Because a Valentine tree might look uncannily similar to a Christmas tree at first glance, but as everyone knows, they’re completely different.

I’ve been quietly and steadily working on some new print designs for a few weeks now. Today I pulled the first proof! I put it behind a black mat to get a better idea of what the finished print might look like.

The idea came from wanting to play with the quality of light linocuts create — how the black ink on white paper causes the light areas to almost glow. Somehow my brainstorming led me to the halos I see in the car at night when I’m being blinded by headlights, and so the whole series is based the patterns of line that appear when I squint directly into various sources of light. I’m not sure I’ve quite gotten what I wanted, but that’s why we do proofs first.

I pulled a two-color proof of the Oh Snap block I started months ago, which gave me the opportunity to test out the metallic ink I picked up recently. And then, well…

I suppose I could say I got bored and started playing with the leftover ink, but instead I’ll say I got creative and we’ll just leave it at that.

Happy birthday to an excellent production assistant, a brilliant common sense consultant, and a spectacular friend.

I love carving linoleum.

It’s so soothing. I could carve, and carve, and carve, and carve all day long, until there was no linoleum left.

But that would be silly. And so eventually it comes time to pull a proof. You know, to see where all that carving has gotten me.

And as much as I love printing — the smell of the ink, the sound of the brayer — I also love having clean hands when it’s all over with.

I love the simple tools.

And I love the first inking. My love for the first inking is second only to my love of carving linoleum.

Most of all, I love it when all my love pays off with a good proof. Even though I don’t think the image is exactly perfect, if you pronouce the words just right, you should get it anyway. (I love puns, too.)

Ready?
That’s all you get to see for now. The idea hit me while I was in the shower — exhausted after a long day, an even longer weekend, and a challenging face-off with the treadmill. After a two or three-month hiatus, I’m working on another linoleum block, for another hand-printed greeting. Why didn’t I think of it before?! Augh! All this time, the idea’s been right in front of my nose!

Every now and then I receive a card that totally knocks my socks off, and reminds me in no uncertain terms that we live in a country full of brilliantly creative and funny people. This one, in particular, is from Jen.

I kind of want it enlarged to poster size and framed to hang on my wall, not only for a daily dose of self-esteem, but because it uses one of my favorite visual humor techniques: using type and imagery that is completely inappropriate for or unrelated to the meaning of the text. Keeps you on your toes. Anyway, it also reminded me of a project I did for one of my graduate courses a while back; wouldn’t it be cool to finally use it for something? (Fathers’ Day IS coming up…)

It just goes to show that in design, as with all creative pursuits, there’s always a way to break the rules to your advantage. All rules — that is — save one: form follows function.

My apologies for my absence from the Oomphasis blog…HAS IT REALLY BEEN (almost) TWO WEEKS?!?

I won’t try to make any excuses because I honestly can’t remember what I’ve been up to that’s kept me away. I’ve been working on designing a wedding invitation for a friend of a friend; I think it looks pretty good, but the proof I printed out isn’t one hundred percent right — as in my printer seems to want to print the file out a few percent larger than its actual size. So some of the elements are closer together than they should be and it’s just making me a little crazy. You’ll see soon.

I was also helping the same friend design a bridal shower invitation for the aforementioned friend of a friend. After some trial-and-error with the printer (always the darn printer!) we printed them out and put all the pieces together, tied it all up with a ribbon and voila! Beautiful bridal shower invitation. You’ll see that soon, too.

What you *can* see now are two greeting cards I designed. One I made specifically for my father-in-law, who was oh-so generous in donating an ENTIRE Sunday to installing light fixtures to drastically improve the lighting in our house, helping fix a pipe that froze and cracked over that HARSH (sarcasm here) winter we had (*rolling eyes*), and installing and setting up a programmable thermostat (now I can see the temperature I’m setting! It’s no longer above my eye level!). Even though I made it with a specific purpose, I think it could still function metaphorically and be given out as a thank-you for other things too. The other is something I’ve had in my sketchbook for a while, and since I was in the card-making mood I figured I’d go ahead and make that one too.

Enjoy! :)

(I just had a thought: this might make a nice postcard, no? Who doesn’t love receiving a postcard?!)