Happy new year!
2015 is the year of the sheep, and I did a few different versions of sheep for my cards this year.
First, I did a linocut of a sheep and inked the image to several types of papers. While it helped speed the process of making cards, the result was rather rough — I like to call these my kawaii Lascaux cave painting sheep. The first couple are on handmade paper I made at Pyramid in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had to tear the paper and then glue the images onto thicker paper. The following two are the same linocut on regular paper. To help speed the process, and to avoid making the lincut paint run, as it was not waterproof, I spattered the cards with sparkly gold paint.
The last two cards are examples of more traditional etegami cards — painted in sumi and then colored with gansai. The first features a Japanese pun on the phrase “omedetou 2015”, or “happy new year”. The “me” of “omedetou” is highlighted and elongated as “meh” and is painted as coming out of the sheep’s mouth — in Japanese, sheep say “meh”, not “bah.”
etegamist 