Every once in awhile I clear a few hours of my schedule and dig into to my collection of scraps to make mail art note cards. Though I’ve got a stack of pre-printed thank you notes, this past weekend I made my own—one for each of the people who sent me greetings on my birthday.

As I was making the cards, I started thinking about the process I go through to make my own mail art. I always find that I’m not so fond of the first few cards I make; perhaps I need to warm up and get into a creative mindset or something. After that, though, I start having ideas at such a rapid rate that I can hardly keep up with them. Sometimes, the ideas I get as I dig through my color-coded scrap binder don’t fit with the theme I’m working on (in this case, thank you notes) and I detour to make other cards that I’ll use at another time. This weekend, I ended up making three other cards that didn’t fit in with what I was working on, but I really like how they turned out.

For a long time, I used to make scrap cards where I’d tear small pieces of paper off to build collages by color, but I seem to have moved away from that as of late. I really, truly loved some of the work I made when I was creating the torn scrap cards, but I just haven’t felt that inspiration lately. Instead, I seem to be gravitating toward concrete images that I’ve saved, which I often pair with words I’ve trimmed from the pages of magazines. I’ve also been gravitating more toward bright, bold colors lately as well. It’s funny how our creativity works.

Do you make your own cards? What drives your creativity when you make mail art?

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