Vermillion + Real Mail in Your Mailbox

Back into the studio this week! After being out for a bit in the garden, I took a detour into printing envelopes and collage papers on the gel plate. I noticed I’m reaching for colors I’d set aside for a while, bright, saturated, summer colors. One of my favorites is Vermillion: the only tube orange I can really stand to use. It’s redder, more alive than something like Cadmium Orange, and it has a transparency that works especially well on the gel plate.

Your Way Is the Only Way It Works

There’s a particular kind of doubt that creeps in when you sit down to make something after watching too many videos of other people making things. Suddenly your setup looks wrong. Your technique looks wrong. Everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing – and always has the perfect result to show for it.

Gel plate printing is such a forgiving medium: you don’t need a lot of technique to make something beautiful. But that ease is a double-edged thing. It makes the videos feel more authoritative, not less. You watch enough of them and the comparison creeps in and quietly kills the joy of creating. Not true, by the way. Nobody in those videos knows some secret you don’t. They’re improvising too – they just edited that part out.

There is no one right way to create. Your path is yours, and honestly, it’s the only path you can take to make work that comes from your actual creative spirit. Permission given.

The Wild Mail Co. – Something Real in Your Mailbox

I’ve been wanting to tell you about this for a while, and I suppose it’s time…nervous, but time.

I think about you when I’m in my studio. Not in a vague, “my audience” way. I mean I think about the woman who used to make things and somewhere set it down. The one who makes things now but keeps them to herself. The one who suspects that creativity might be something that belongs to other people – people with credentials and a coherent body of work and a style they can name.

I want you to find your way back. I genuinely, deeply want that.

So every month I pack up an envelope from my worktable and send it to you – gel prints, blotter papers, handmade things from the actual ongoing life of this studio. Evidence that making things is something a regular human does every day. Nothing in it is precious. It’s all meant to move and be used.

Something from my hands to yours – in your actual mailbox. Not a notification, not a download, not a carefully curated feed. Just mail, the old-fashioned way.

$12/month.

→  Join The Wild Mail Co.  (about what a pad of fancy paper runs)

What Else in the Studio

While I was printing those envelopes, I filmed a few passes on the plate, unedited and real. This isn’t a tutorial – it’s one minute of watching what The Wild Mail Co. looks like in the making: paint on the plate, papers pulled, envelopes packed full of studio ephemera. The kind of thing that ends up in your mailbox.

→  Watch: Gel Plate Printed Envelopes

Hit reply: what would you want to find in your actual mailbox? I read every one and I write back.

Be Bright,

Monette

PS – The Wild Mail Co. is $12/month and puts something real in your actual mailbox every month – blotter papers, gel prints, handmade things from this studio. →  https://www.patreon.com/16114906/join

PPS – That Vermillion - don’t you love it? It’s exactly the right color for coming back to something. Not cautious. Not careful. Just – alive.