So do you even know what an ephemera background is? What a word right?
Ephemera means as seen in Wikipedia "written or printed matter not meant to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day".
These include any junk mail, receipts, old letters, lists, tickets, posters, letters and in this case cleaners tickets.
When you get into mixed media you come across lots of artists using ephemera so there was this gathering of a pile of cleaners tickets in our car that our cleaners never asks for.
One day as I came out of the cleaners and noticed all of these yellow tickets I said to myself, "Hey, here is my ephemera, I'll bet I can make some art out of this" ...and so I did.
- I first covered a piece of 11x14 bristol board with matte medium.
- I laid all the cleaners tickets that I had over the whole paper, overlapping many of them.
- I then sat around for a while trying to figure out what to do next. I often wait a day or so after starting a piece to figure out what I want to do. (I know I'm supposed to be really spontaneous in mixed media and create without thinking but, that doesn't always work. sometimes I just HAVE to think. (sorry 😉
- I figured that I probably should do something with clothing as they were cleaners tickets, so I decided to make small wire hangers out of some picture wire I had. After I made those, I cut out some simple pieces of clothing out of some fabric I had and glued them to the hangers.
- At that time I was working on adding quotes to pieces so I decided this needed a quote, but had a really hard time finding one that fit.
- I kept googling things like cleaning and ironing and there was not too much around. I then came across the one I have now and decided that I'd go with it which is a bit cutesy.
- For the words themselves, I found some scrapbooking letters that I had in my stash and chose to make them very non symmetric. There are hundreds of scrapbooking letters you can find online, you just need to decide on the style you want for your piece.
- I then sealed the piece with a gloss medium
Pinnable image below
Any questions please ask below.