Travel back with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear! Back to a time when only ad agencies could afford a Macintosh! Back when a number 11 X-acto blade was your best friend! Back to the early to middle ’90s!
This is a birthday card Tina made for me back before we worried about pixels and megahertz. She would sketch a rough idea and then exhaustively measure, plan, size, pick retro clip-art and colors, keeping copious notes and wearing out a few proportional scales in the process. She would then head to shops with decent, self-service photocopy machines and make her copies. Back at her apartment, the razor blades and glue sticks went to work. She assembled her illustration, and then it was back out to one of the shops that still did photo-stats. She got film positives shot, and, once again, it was back to her apartment to paint the reverse side with gouache. When the paint was dry, she assembled the card as a bookmaker would a book. Color paper was wrapped around and adhered to chipboard. The stats were wrapped around these pieces with the color paper providing a background for the painted work (kind of like an animation cell.) Not only was it a lot of hand and leg work, it was expensive, too!
This is the inside of the card. At the time I was obsessed with a television commercial that sold VHS instructional tapes for learning the dance craze that had already swept the nation – The Macarena! At the end of the commercial, a wide-eyed blond proclaimed that it was fun and easy to learn the Macarena! Of course, I brayed like a jackass laughing at that. Tina learned early on that if she needed an idea for a card, pay attention to my current obsession!
The original was scanned for the blog. That’s why some of the black photographic image is casting a shadow. The original was on a thick chipboard and bound with a shoelace.
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