Let Me Out!

I'd been working on the prototypes for a doorway swap over at ATCards for almost a month before I hit on this design this weekend. The only things of which I was certain was that I didn't want to do a literal rendition of the theme and that my cards would open. Doors are nice. Some doors are very pretty. Doors in and of themselves, however, are boring. I like doors because they represent boundaries, transgression, transformation, freedom, privacy, insanity, and all sorts of other things discussed in Lit 101.

An aside: I also love the word "liminal" in all its poncey, lit-crit, Foucaultian glory.

My initial ideas for the swap were interesting but I think that they merit a larger canvas. Watch this space for my initial associations with doorways? One already has a title: "It's not love without a paper trail." It's an ode to immmigration.

This is one of the cards I'll be sending in for the swap. The top scan is of the ATC closed and the bottom is what it looks like when it's open. I had initially wanted to use pages from my thrift store engineering manual but I couldn't find it, so I settled for using pages from a Russian law dictionary an acquaintance and lawyer-to-be sent me when I was in undergrad. The doorknobs are brads. The inside of the card are bare trees in watercolours and pencil.

The concept is pretty wankerish. I did earnestly try to come up with a poncey title for the cards but although I love some poncey things, I'm neither poncey enough to come up with something suitably poncey nor clever enough to come up with something suitably faux-poncey (wink wink). I settled for "Let Me Out!"

Taking a cue from Miss Fish (who has some fabulous little cards available for trade on ATCards at the moment), I decided to make an extra card for my own collection because I almost always lament only ever owning my own cards in scan form. I'd always resisted this because I usually don't want to make the second and third cards needed for themed swaps, how would I ever force myself to make a fourth card? I had images of my art table strewn with incomplete cards for my own records. I don't know why this horrified me in light of the natural state of my art table. Any excuse, I suppose. The fourth card wasn't so difficult. Hmph. This is it to the right. Instead of using a dictionary page for the outside, I used part of a map from a calendar. Everything else is the same.