If you watched my YouTube video last week, you’ll know that lovely Angie sent me some pretty mail and she’d used a magazine cutting to decorate the envelope. It reminded me that I love to do this, so today I wanted to share with you a few simple tips for creating mail art using magazines.
Keep it simple
As with everything I like to share here, I’ll begin by reminding you to keep this simple. This is something that we can all do to pretty up a plain envelope, and it can be easy to do.
A clipping can fill the front of an envelope, so there you go, you are all done!
You might then wish to add washi tape, stickers, stamps, doodles or whatever else you fancy doing, but don’t feel you have to, simple will be effective.
Use a range of magazines
If you only have one magazine lying around then that’s fine, just use that one!
However, if you have a few, you will find you can create quite different designs.
For example, you might have specific hobbyist magazines so you could make lots of wildlife envelopes, train envelopes, football envelopes, whatever you have!
Lifestyle, women’s and interiors magazines can be good for gathering together lots of easy to use, general images.
Cut or rip!
This one is entirely up to you, and you might want to try mixing up both options for different looks.
You can keep sharp lines, cut closely around the image, crop bits off, tear the edges, whatever you want to do will be fine!
Get a batch of clippings together
While you have your stack of magazines to hand, do take the opportunity to get a batch of clippings together.
As you flick through, rip out any pages you think could work, cut out any images or wording that you think could come in handy.
These might not be what you are looking to use right now, but you will then have a stash to dip into next time you want to do this.
Anything goes!
This is always the case with absolutely any mail art, anything goes, so just have fun with it. If it’s not fun, don’t do it!
Any clipping works, large or small, any theme, any colours, and embellishments.
If you like how it looks, then it works.
You can see me going through the process over on YouTube this week, rambling on as I put a few fun envelopes together.
I always enjoy doing this, thanks very much to Angie for reminding me about it.
Hopefully this post has reminded some of you to have fun with it again, or inspired some of you to try this. If you have no-one to mail to, then check out my Why Have A Pen Pal post and get yourself one!
If you do create mail art with magazines, do pop over to the Bring Back Paper Facebook group and share it with us!
Are you off to get creative now?
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