Thursday, May 23, 2013

Mail Art Zine Update!

I guess it’s been about a month since I sent out the first round of Golden Tickets. I called them golden tickets, which in the long run, caused a lot of confusion. The actual envelop that I sent to people didn’t contain a golden ticket, so when everyone got the envelope they weren’t sure what the project was about.
Altogether, I sent out 42 invites to people. All of them were volunteer, well…almost all of them were. I sent blindly to a couple people but have only received one of these back. To drum up interest, I’ve posted a couple stupid pictures of myself on the IUOMA site to remind people “send that thing in.” Not sure it’s working, but I’m going to ramp up the pressure in the middle of June. I can foresee someone not making the zine and then sending their submission well after I created the whole thing.
Right now I have a total of 19 cards back from people, which I’m pretty stoked about. And thankfully they’re not all from the US. I’ve got a UK in there, Ireland, Greece, France, and Australia, which I’m happy about. Sending those back to people at the end of summer is going to be kind of expensive. That’s why I’m sending everything out at one time, to cut down on shipping costs and time. Not sure how I’m going to put this together…I’ll figure that out later.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Send Lots of Mail...See Lots of Mail Land.

Sent to Wisconsin, Iowa, New York, California, Massachusetts, Hungary, Greece, and Germany. I sent out twenty-four cards at one time. Most of these cards are from that huge pile.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

About two weeks ago I had a panic attack. All of my usual shops where I find all of the magazines I like to rip up had run dry. There was no more Look Magazines, Vogue’s, or the standby Life’s from the 1950’s and 60’s that are almost everywhere. Everyone must have had a subscription to life at some point considering how many of them around. Actually, it wasn’t that I couldn’t find any of these older magazines; it was they were getting too expensive. Each one of them was running around three or four dollars at the cheapest. I was worried that I wouldn’t have a cheap supply of them in the future when I had finally run out. I could swing three or four dollars a magazine but I didn’t want to. To combat all of this, I found myself buying a lot of newer magazines and books. The new ones just suck, they don’t rip well and my colors aren’t like I like them. I like my art with dust on it, no matter the genre, and I like my art supplies to have the same requisite dust…or basement mildew in most cases.
And then I saw them, a big pile of mostly Life Magazines (what a surprise) at my local consignment store, the one that has the strange auctions on Tuesdays. I like placing silent bids and then waiting for them to call me in their folksy tone, telling me that I had won something that doubted anyone would actually buy. I ended up with fifteen or so of the things for less than ten dollars, which will keep me in business for a little while. Actually the other magazines hadn’t been completely used up, but I was starting to worry…I like my old magazines. This summer I’m going to make a lot of bigger items and try and send as many postcards as I possibly can. Some of these magazines pictured will end up in places all over the world.