Gallery of past work

Sunday 23 February 2014

Playing with cards and thinking small




Recently, a friend introduced me to Moo Cards and I was enchanted by the tiny pieces of mostly abstract art, so tactile and satisfying and usefully printed on the reverse with her contact details. I had of course seen and received artists' trading cards and printed business cards but these little cards had somehow passed me by.



Having seen them, I set out the other day to have some printed. I spent a pleasurable afternoon, sorting through photographs, enhancing where necessary and cropping in Photoshop and here are some of the results.




I found choosing a selection of small images to represent myself fascinating. It forced me to think about my work and how to represent it in a series of cards measuring 7 by 2.8 cm - tricky - and a very useful exercise as I've never worked this small before.



I often crop and cut pieces and form them into a grid but this was different as I wanted to select only one image of a particular kind and was not putting the small pieces together to make a whole. I really had to think out the essence of things.




As it turned out, some of the cards were much more successful than others, so perhaps I learnt a useful lesson about working small. The most successful were those that were simple, with strong contrast or brightly coloured.

In this post, I must apologise for the strange layout but Blogger just would not let me tile the images as I wanted. It was this or a long string of images one under the other with no possibility of seeing more than one at a time. If anyone can tell me how to achieve tiling in simple layout, I'd be delighted to know ...



6 comments:

  1. Moo cards?? I never did before!! But I love what you've come up with here...what a tantalizing selection from your work. I expect at that size they would make fabulous book marks as well. And possibly inspiration for future work?? What a great idea!

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    1. Moo is a British-based company (I think) with an office in the US - probably why you're not heard of them.
      The cards are perhaps rather small to use as bookmarks ... but as to inspiration for future work, you could have an idea there!

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  2. Moo cards are great arn't they, not that I've used them myself. Love your cropped images they look really good.

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    1. There is something very satisfying about them - but interesting that these images were the best of the bunch and not all worked as well as these did.

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  3. I love MOO cards, especially the small ones. I do agree with you though that simple and with good contrast or bright colours works best - don't ask me how I know!!

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    1. They are delicious aren't they - though I've also seen their postcards and they're great too ... another time perhaps!

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