JOURNAL
documenting
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discovering joyful things
Mail art: four assorted
I only have four mail-art packages to share this week. The cylindrical one at the bottom was quite a challenge to create and paint, but a lot of fun as well. Selise told me she loved marigolds, so I was determined to give it my best effort. Want to know what was inside? Cereal boxes!
Painting this botanical series (more 
On self doubt
Oh hey. I have illustrated a children's book! It's called Grandad and the Baby Dolphin, and was written by the very talented Wendy Milner. The book will come out in November this year, and you can find out more (or pre-order a copy) here.
I am simultaneously proud and embarrassed to share these pictures with you.
Self doubt is a funny thing, isn't it. You do your very best and at some level (an important level!) you are proud of what you have done. And then on the other hand you look at your own work and then you look at what everyone else is doing and suddenly you feel like a complete fraud. Not to mention a failure.
Sound familiar? I feel like maybe crippling self-doubt is the default position of creatives. And by "creatives" I mean anyone who steps out into the public with something they have made: writers, artists, entrepreneurs, researchers... you name it. We all question ourselves, our abilities, our capacity, all the time but especially at the eleventh hour.
I have to fight my self-deprecating instincts as I share these illustrations with you. I hold myself up against the pantheon of talented, experienced illustrators in the children's book-publishing world and frankly I feel absurd.
Last week when Wendy said "We are finished!" and sent me a digital proof of the book, I vibrated with pride all evening. I kept looking through the images and reading them alongside her wonderful story and I felt as though together, we had created something really special.
That lasted for several hours, until I went to bed.
Then I closed my eyes and, immediately in my imagination, the whole world sat in a stadium, me alone and spotlit on a field way below, and everybody bellowed "WHO ARE YOU to think you could illustrate ANYTHING?" I am a writer, not an artist, and my sleepy self knew it. So did everybody else. "DERIVATIVE," the World shouted from the stands, "NAIVE." And "BORING" and "UNIMAGINATIVE" and "AMATEUR."
But do you know what? Get thee behind me, Naomi's Imagination World. I, like so many creative people before me and so many more to come, am going to own what I have made, and own it with pride. Wendy's prose is flawless. Her story is beautiful, and engaging, and entertaining, in all the right parts. I told it to my children for the first time a little while ago, holding up my paintings as I went along, and their simple response at the end was, "Again?"
And I am an illustrator. There, I will say it. I am a children's book illustrator, and I am lucky enough that my first book illustration project was for something as special as this beautifully-written tale of love and family and caring and joy.
I bet you are creative, too. Do you struggle to own it, trust it, believe in it? What should you be proud of today?
Wild strawberries
This was the outside of the mail I sent for the Secret Pen Pal Scavenger Hunt. Sadly, it hasn't arrived at its destination yet. I feel pretty bad about that. I hope it gets there very soon!
Mail art - 9 new ones
So far none of these packages have come back to me, so fingers crossed they made it to their destinations!
I especially enjoyed making the mail for Emmy. She is in her first year away at college and her mother asked me to write to her - Emmy's mother said the two of them read my blog, and that was just the nicest thing to hear. Such a lovely mental picture it gave me! Hugs to you Emmy, and Emmy's mum!
Lauren's and Akira's mail-art envelopes were experiments in leaving more white space (or in this case brown space) in the pictures. I kind of like them, but then there is something about covering the whole envelope with paint and incorporating the address more fully into the illustration that I do enjoy.
I actually think the mail for Barbara, that last one, is my favourite, even though no matter how hard I try, I can never draw hands. Despite the wonky hands I still feel like I got the "comfort factor" I was going for right.
Spent last night making more zines and envelopes at the Snail Mail Social Club, so I'll be making and sending more mail soon!
ps. have you heard about my new letter-writing and mail-art e-course?
Over four weeks, I will guide you through multiple methods of making beautiful mail-art and creative, handmade stationery; teach you the art of writing and storytelling; help you forge personal connections in your letters and find pen-pals if you want them; and share time-management tips so even the busiest people can enjoy sending and receiving letters. Register your place or find out more information right here.
Mail art - a lot of cat stamps and other lessons in mail-art
A lesson I learned over the New Year* was that when making mail, measure each package up before wrapping it in kraft paper... because if it is even a just couple of millimetres over the standard size, the price goes up. A LOT. Thankfully I had several sheets of 70c cat stamps left over from when I purchased stamps for my father's birthday invitation mail-art (because I am not the brightest and purchased enough for every person invited rather than every household. Duh).
You can't see them in these pictures, but the backs of these parcels are literally covered in cat stamps. Here is a picture that Elaine shared on her Instagram, of all the cat stamps on the back.
For only the second time ever, I had a couple of the parcels in this set returned. The castle above came back, with notes from the postie written on the left to the tune of "ADDRESS UNCLEAR. WHAT COUNTRY?" This made me groan slightly, since, if you live in Australia, an address in North Gosford, NSW, is quite evidently also in Australia. But then to be fair, I had run out of Airmail stickers when I photographed these, and later put all the stickers on at the post office. Because this was the only local letter, I also accidentally put an Airmail sticker on it too, so I guess that could have caused some confusion.
Look how pretty and clean the letter looked (above) when I first sent it to Melina! And this is what it looked like when I popped it back into the mail last week...
Then a few days later the letter to Ashley also came back. There were no marks on the envelope and the stamps hadn't been cancelled, so I don't know what was going on there. I thought maybe they didn't see the country so I drew a box around "United States" to draw attention to it, and slipped it back into the box. Time will tell if Ashley gets her mail!
Meanwhile, when I ran out of cat stamps, I busted out all the other leftover stamps I could find and made the "building blocks" mail-art below, which I think is one of my favourites, ever.
*Actually I think I might have "learned" that lesson before, and even shared it on here, but clearly nothing much sinks in. Is there a moratorium on how long you can blame "baby brain" for just being really absent-minded?
ps. have you heard about my new letter-writing and mail-art e-course?
Over four weeks, I will guide you through multiple methods of making beautiful mail-art and creative, handmade stationery; teach you the art of writing and storytelling; help you forge personal connections in your letters and find pen-pals if you want them; and share time-management tips so even the busiest people can enjoy sending and receiving letters. Register your place or find out more information right here.
Match-box conversation hearts
Oh hello! *waves in enthusiastic and dorky manner* Remember me? I am so busy finishing my book that sometimes I don't get time for writing in this blog, but I have so many posts in the wings that I can't wait to share with you. Hopefully I'll get my time-management act together and can revisit this tiny and lovely community that is You Folks a lot more often. I really love this space. I love how comfortable it feels, how like-minded we all feel, even when actually we are quite different and diverse and opinionated and creative and quirky (because how boring would things be if we weren't), but on the MAIN THINGS (kindness, openness, encouragement, friendship) we are all on the same page, I think.
NEWS ALERT. Oh my goodness HOW EXCITING are the updates on the Serial podcast lately? If you listened to Season 1 but then kind of dropped back off, drop back in!! After almost 16 years, a new hearing on Adnan Syed's case is happening in Baltimore RIGHT NOW and you can follow what is going on each day on Serial. It is crazily compelling.
In the meantime, I have been having some fun lately jumping on the "decorate old matchboxes" bandwagon, creating decorated little boxes for homemade "conversation heart" lollies (from a lolly shop in Maldon, more on that soon to come), to send to folks all over the world. If you'd like to replicate this idea for Valentine's Day, it's super easy. Just wrap some paper around a matchbox to get the size right, trace the outline, then unwind it and draw/paint/paste whatever image you like before pasting it properly back onto your matchbox. I lined my boxes with paper doilies but you could also use tissue paper, cloth, foil or anything else that inspires you.
On another matter, conversation hearts! How great are they? So much vintage fun.
Are you waiting on mail from me?
I’m working on it, I promise! Please refer to the above picture, taken early this morning, as evidence.
It’s been a long time since I made a link post, so I thought I’d share some lovely discoveries from around and about the Internet today.
* Chicken lays an egg * People switch on light bulbs * Hobbit houses! * Books in a car * Man talks to himself, across decades * Beautiful plant vessels * New York in the 1980s * Are we there yet? * Loving this haunting song * Another homemade white bread recipe * Ice cream crawl! Anyone want to do one of these with me in Melbourne?
Creative project: Grandad stories
I have some exciting news to share. I have been invited to illustrate a children's book! I'm collaborating with the incredibly talented Wendy Milner, a professional writer who has just completed her first piece of children's fiction.
It is a beautiful (and true!) story called "Grandad and the Baby Dolphin." The Grandad of the story, Wendy's father, was a cray-fisherman off the Western Australian coast. While out at sea one day, he came across a baby dolphin in trouble. The dolphin was tangled in ropes and was slowly sinking beneath the salt waves. Grandad and his fellow fishermen were determined to rescue the baby dolphin, but what happened next amazed them all…
These are some sneak peeks and close-ups of my work-in-progress on the illustrations. If you'd like to know more about this lovely story (and others to come), Wendy has built a website for us, which you can find at Grandad Stories. You can also read her personal blog at Blink Blackburn.
Have you been working on anything new? I'd love to hear about it!
A week of creative snail-mail: 10 mail-art parcels
Each of these brown-paper packages was no bigger than a greeting card, but I made the mistake of filling them with a few too many things, making them a few too many millimetres too fat. Four millimetres, in fact, less than half a centimetre, but that was all the difference it took to kick each of these packages into the $18+ category for the international ones (which was most of them). I had already covered them in stamps, but when I discovered the true cost at the post office, I had to admit defeat. Not only would 10 parcels at $18+ each put rather a strain on the budget, there simply wasn't the room for any more stamps (the backs of these parcels, which you don't see here, are mostly covered in more stamps)! I had to come home, slit open one edge of the parcels, and slide out one of the gifts I'd hoped to enclose. The moral to this story is, oi vey, Australia Post. Please don't complain about the decline in people using the post when you want to charge almost $20 for a greeting-card-sized (and weighted) letter, just because it's a few millimetres thicker than usual. Or, as one of my snail-mail friends suggested, how about a "frequent user" discount? Just a thought…
ps. have you heard about my new letter-writing and mail-art e-course?
Over four weeks, I will guide you through multiple methods of making beautiful mail-art and creative, handmade stationery; teach you the art of writing and storytelling; help you forge personal connections in your letters and find pen-pals if you want them; and share time-management tips so even the busiest people can enjoy sending and receiving letters. Register your place or find out more information right here.