The images above? Designs for 15 new seed packets in the Hudson Valley Seed Library's annual Art Pack Program for which it commissions artists country wide to create package covers. I'm one of the artists, chosen from a field of 400 or so, to design one of the 2016 Art Packs.
Mine is No. 14, and tells the story of how archeologists discovered that snow peas were planted in prehistoric times. The variety: Giant Swiss Snow Peas.
For the collage, I used an antique map of Switzerland to create the mountains, layered vintage wrapping papers with cut-out snowflakes for the sky, dug up an antique engraving of an archeological expedition for the bottom, as well as snow pea "fossils" created from antique engravings, and - finally - vintage images for the vivid flowers of the pea vine, and I ended up designing the peas using a vintage illustration as my inspiration (yes, I try to use original paper only in my work, but had to improvise
for this because I could not find enough snow peas in different sizes to use).
It's exciting to be selected, because years ago I wrote about the program on the old blog. Love the idea of the company continuing the tradition of great seed catalog/packet art that thrived in the Victorian/Edwardian eras, the heyday of chromolithographed catalogs now coveted by collectors.
The packets and catalog will be available Nov. 1, 2015. There's a vote on through Friday Oct. 9 to pick one of the designs for the 2016 catalog cover. Just sayin.'
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