Skip to main content

Postcards - A Recipe

For the last couple of weeks, I've fallen into a bit of an analog art hole (#TitleOfMySextape) and didn't do a whole lot of digital art stuff. Instead, I started doing more watercolor stickers, which I really like but have zero idea how to price or market, and then when I stumbled on a super-cheap glass plate at Carla, I got back to doing something I loved to do back in school: Monotypes!

Looking back, it's not really surprising how hard I fell for monotypes back when my arts teacher showed it to us the first time: It's a technique that combines artistic intention and skill with, well, a certain amount of physical unpredictability and randomness. It's kinda like traditional media glitchart. It even has that "You're using tools wrong." feel, I mean, a non-reproducible printmaking technique? Drawing, but in a super-round-about way? Painting, but evil?

It's very me.

So I did that a lot and after I had the basic technique figured out again, I figured ... I can make stickers with this, right? Of course I can! It's a messy process and there's still a lot of things that could be improved: For example, while I have shifted from masking tape towards using a mask for monotypes-on-stickerpaper, which means less danger of ripping the paper, positioning the sheet on the mask is still extremely annoying, But still, it's fun and I like quite a few of the results. (It's a bit like I do my glitchart: Throwing loads of stuff at the proverbial wall and seeing what sticks,)

But aaaaaaanyway, this blog post is not actually about any of that. Or at least only marginally, It's about something that has been bothering me for a while and that I have now found a solution for that I like:

Postcards

For context: I have a deep and abiding appreciation for all things analog and postal: Letters, postcards, the act of sending physical objects around the world, imagining them being handed over from post company to post company and person to person, ...

It fucking rocks!

Now, obviously I'm also a very digital person (#TerminallyOnline), but the internet can't replace the postal service, it just can't. (Miss me with digital postcards and NFT stamps, I hate it and everybody who thought that was a valid way for the post office to stay relevent in the 21st century.) So basically since I started doing glitchart and the whole wider glitchart-but-as-physical-artifact project of Glitchbooks, I looked at letters and postcards and how I can put my stuff on there.

And, in a way,it's super easy ... and super hard. Getting postcards printed is as easy as googling "custom postcards" and finding the nearest printer that doesn't look overly sketchy. They are, generally, pretty cheap, pretty ok quality and absurdly fast, really. I mean, for less than 40ct a piece I can order 300 professionally printed postcards and have them delivered in less than a week. That's, actually, kinda bonkers, when you think about it.

Buuuuut, it comes with a couple of issues: All those postcards would have the same motive on them. Wanna do another design? That's another order. Wanna do 300 different postcards? Better go to moo.com and be willing to spend much more than that. (Never mind that either method needs a substantial up-front investment.) That was, for the most part, never really an option.

So that left doing my own postcards, which comes with a different set of issues. Foremost, the question of material. To actually work as a postcard, ie. both fulfill the emotional, haptic role and the purely functional of "survives transport", a postcard needs to be thick and tough enough. Most postcards you find out there will have paper weights between 250g and 350g per square meter and most are foiled/laminated/laquered on top of that. Getting something like that through most home printers is somewhere between difficult and impossible. (Mine can theoretically do 200g, but for the most part tops out at 160g.) Even the professional laser printers you find in copyshops tend to struggle with paper above 300g, if they take it at all.

So the longest time I had just ... kinda given up on making glitchy postcards.

Read more…

Meta 0003 - Ko-Fi Shop and Future Stuff

I finally got motivated enough to open up my Ko-Fi shop and make one (1!) mastodon post about it. A week ago. m)

(Marketing your stuff is, like, really hard!)

For now, you can only buy a single product: A random collection of my stickers, for 10€. For that price, you get between 10 and 20 stickers, depending on size, and a wide mix of my various sticker designs and experiements.

colourful glitchart stickers of various sizes spreat out on a cutting

If you're interested, you can buy the sticker packs here.

Beyond that one product, which, if I'm being honest, comes mostly from me trying to self-hack my way out of procrastinating this shop thing, I have a bunch of other stuff in the works that should appear in the shop Some Time Soon™.

Sticker Albums

Remember those things? Collecting (and trading) stickers used to be the Hot Shit when I was a kid and sticker booklets, with their foiled/waxed pages to allow easy removal of stickers, were everywhere. While I'm sure they still exist out there, it's been a while since I've seen them sold somewhere...

My sticker making process leaves me with many sheets of backing paper from the cold laminate I use and, since it has sticky cold laminate on it, it's foiled to allow easy removal of sticky things, just like those sticker booklets! So I tried taking these scrap sheets and bind them into scrap booklets and it worked!

My fingers, holding a tiny sticker album with a colorful glitchart cover

Right now, the plan is to use all the scrap backing paper I collected and make a few sticker albums/booklets, sized appropriately for my sticker sized and with pretty glitchart stickers, and put them in the shop.

Three different sizes of sticker album bookles, stacked on top of each other.

I'm not sure what to price them yet. On one hand, the material is literally scap, on the other hand, cutting and hand-binding those is a shitload of work, so ... uuuuuuuuuuugh. Dunno, we'll see.

For now I'm just excited to do something more bookbind-y again. ^^

More sticker collections

At this point, there are a couple of collections I can make that I feel are "shop-ready", ie. that I could see myself charging money for without completely feeling like I'm trying to rip somebody off.

(I doubt the feeling of "Oh no, I tricked somebody into giving me money for my crap, what a fraud and terrible person I am!" will every go away completely, but one can hope, right?)

I think the collection that will appear in the shop first is "Be a glitch...":

A loose pile of stickers with "Be a glitch in the Cistem" on it.

Originally designed as my pride march banner and printed in A3, these motives make for great stickers as well. (Very useful for sticking over shitty funi-christian pasteups.)

Showing queer pride and glitch pride at the same time. <3

Olde Glitch Stuff

Various printed glitch art stuff spread out on a bisexual pride flag

Beyond the current stuff I make, I also still have a bunch of glitchart/glitchbook stuff I made at the old copyjob and that I never sold, so now I'm (very, very) slowly writing copy for them to eventually put them into the Ko-Fi Shop as well.

Minor Website Updates:

This website has a favicon now. Not terribly happy with it, but I felt that particular combination of "highly motivated" and "terribly uninspired", so... *shrug*

meta 0002

A small update for today:

  1. NEW GALLERY! Glitchbot, the project that kinda-sorta started this whole thing now has its own gallery with some of the example glitches the bog has done in the past that I really liked.
    TBH, I could probably write a whole bunch of posts about the bot, how it works and how it fits into the greater glitch(book) project, but that will have to wait for some other time.
  2. I added some more images I like to the Tarot and Pride galleries.

Coming soon-ish:

  1. I plan to open up my Ko-Fi shop in the near future, startin with both older remaining stock from half-assed Etsy experiment and some new mini-sticker sets.
  2. I have at least two more mostly-coherent subprojects I plan to put into galleries: One for my growing collection of glitched-to-complete-formlessness images, one for my foray into old-timey japanese woodcut porn. :3

So, stay tuned!

meta 001

I have a website now!

This took ages, primarily because I really, really hate doing webstuff. If I could afford it, outsourcing everything to do with it, from webdev to writing copy, would be the first thing! Alas, I'm poor.

But still, now I have something to put in my business cards that is not some leftover domain from 15+ years ago when I thought about trying to build an Austrian indie rpg community. I intend to use this page as a repository for glitch art related stuff I do. It will almost certainly not be exhaustive, since I very much prefer shortform mastodon toots over longform blog posts, but it's a start.

Since the SSG I use here doesn't seem to do RSS for galleries (AFAICT), I'll try to do a blog post when I add something substantial.

Glitched Mutant Standard

I love the Mutant Standard emoji set and playing with it is a lot of fun. I've been meaning to make a set of stickers using some of the resulting designs, but since I couldn't sell them under the license it comes with, it's been on the backburner for a while. I keep meaning to talk to the creator about it, but since I don't actually have the budget to pay for any hypothetical commercial license, it's been moot so far.

Whatever, look at the cool glitchy emojis!

Glitch Pride

What is better than making glitch art? Making queer glitch art and stealing from some corporation while doing so! #BeGayDoCrimes

These images served as the basis for a series of buttons I made and gifted to friends and some strangers and I keep meaning to make some more. I really like my glitch pride stuff, especially the glitchy pronouns.

Tarot Glitches

As people who know me know, I love randomness in all its form: Procedural Generation, dice, cards, coin toss, it's all good. Combining the randomness of picking cards with the free association capabilities of the brain is what makes the (completely non-magical) magic of the Tarot happen and I really like it.

What makes these images so awesome is the basis in the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, here in the non-colorized line-art version, and adding the glitchy æsthetic to it using code.

Longterm, I really hope to actually make a full tarot deck using this process sometime, but that's a lot of work and getting those printed is absurdly expensive.