Patience, Tested

For the last little while, I've been starting to wonder if my outgoing mail has been falling into a black hole. Or if the mailman decided to just drop all those annoyingly decorated pieces of mail into a storm drain somewhere. I haven't received anything in return in ages (since Sept. 17, to be exact). And although I don't send mail art for the express purpose of receiving it back in a 1:1 ratio, part of the reason anyone does this sort of thing is so that their own mailbox won't be full of just mass mailings and bills.

But the truth of the matter is that you've gotta be at least a little zen about mail art. Part of the whole process is letting it go. You create something, and you relinquish control of it at your doorstep, the post office, or a corner mail drop. After that, what happens to it has nothing to do with you. It might get torn in sorting, or have ugly cancellation marks put in places you don't like, or bar codes slapped over your art. Maybe the recipient will be disappointed by it and just toss it in a pile, or worse, the trash. Or maybe your piece of mail will brighten the day of postal employees who spend their days processing and delivering envelopes that all look pretty much the same. Maybe you'll bring a smile or break up the monotony of the day for someone who sees it. Maybe your recipient really loves what you send and puts it in a place where they can see it often.

I was really starting to give serious consideration to the idea that someone was stealing my outgoing mail, but I know for sure a few things have arrived at their destinations (mail to Emily, a Postcrossing postcard). As for incoming, well, I'm still waiting for something to turn up.

Anyhow, in the meantime I've toyed around with another tutorial by Carla Sonheim for creating imaginary animals. This one was using a sort of scribble-and-erase technique. She showed the steps for drawing a real animal, but I skipped all of that and went straight for doing something imaginary. This is my result:

It's a sort of cow-capybara-wombat thing. He looks friendly! (And ugh, I just saw that dog hair in the scan. Ignore that - no matter how much I try, dog hair manages to find its way just about everywhere.)

Today, I prepared a care package I'll be sending to Emily tomorrow and sent off number 4 of my mail art 365 project. I'll post about numbers 3 and 4 tomorrow or the next day. Oh, and I just realized I didn't ever post about the last card I got from Postcrossing (Sept. 22 - see, it's been a while since I got any kind of mail at all!).