Staycation Art #7: Sharing What You Make is Good for You and Others / May Day Card Making

This week, make an English Cottage Garden Card to deliver in traditional May Day fashion. Surprise and delight a neighbor with your thoughtfulness while you learn new skills. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the first of May when your card is delivered: The lesson will still work.

Why would you do this?

• Showing and sharing your work is part of a healthy creative cycle. This is a chance to practice. Even if you think your work isn’t up to snuff, sharing it is good for your creativity, and a card is an easy way to start “putting your work out there”.
• You’ll make someone feel good and build community.
• “Copying the masters” is a traditional method of learning to draw and paint. This is your week to give it a try.

To begin, look at references of English cottage gardens in photos or in paintings. I recommend Helen Allingham (1848 – 1926) an English watercolor painter and illustrator. Take your time selecting what to use for inspiration. Wait until an image attracts you the way that a flower attracts a bee.

Once you have chosen the art work that you are going to copy, make sketches of it on scrap paper while you analyze the composition. Decide how much of the image you want to include. Follow your intuition in making this decision. That’s why you’re making sketches — you get a chance to try out ideas before making a commitment (like dating before marriage).

Next, take a heavy piece of paper and fold it in half. On the front, draw the composition that you chose while sketching.

Don’t worry about messing up. Get in the habit of drawing something over and over. It’s a process — enjoy it. In painting my basket card this week, I worked on each part MANY times over … refining, changing, and evolving the image. Adding and taking away. Some of the redoing went in the wrong direction. Some of it helped. That’s just the way it is.

You only need a pencil and paper for all the Staycation lessons, but if you do have color, it will add to the appeal of the card. If you don’t have paint, try food coloring, items from your make-up bag, tea staining, crayons … or just use the elegant simplicity of graphite on paper.

Take a photo of your card. Email or text your photo with greetings to cheer others. Include me in your list — I’d love to see what you make!

And finally — out the door to deliver the card.

When I was growing up, my Mother would oversee the three of us girls as we rolled cone baskets from wallpaper samples. Once filled with flowers, we hung them on elderly neighbors door knobs, knocked, and scampered away. The trick was (and still is) to do it anonymously. Although it never is. It always felt like the ancient and magical ritual that it is. May Day has been celebrated since Pagan times with baskets and May Poles and Queens. Do it up!

Your card will make someone happier and you will be braided into the wreathe of connections in the circle of community.

The circle goes around in unexpected ways: I brought some of my cotton tablecloths to my friend, Liz Markowski. Now they are protecting people from the virus as part of the masks that she’s been sewing (178 of them when I last asked). When I show up at her house with my compost, her chickens run to greet me. They eat my table scraps and turn them into eggs. Our mayor, Jeff Fritz, and his husband Andrew, use the eggs (remember they are made up partly of my table scraps) in the cookies that they bake to go into the free children’s lunches. Then I take the chicken’s poo to fertilize the flowers that will model for my paintings. Liz put together the raffle for the Sheldon Museum’s general fund for which I painted the basket. So I painted an old timey portrait of her. Of course, I included the chickens and the eggs… round and round the connections go.

We can’t shake hands, but we’re all connected, and I feel stitched and painted and baked into the community.