Hodgepodge Vendor

My application to sell greeting cards at Hodgepodge Coffee on Mooreland Ave for the next five months has been accepted! Camelot Collective is selling cards and pins with drawings of our most charismatic dogs.

Update from February 2017

We’ve added a series of cards and stickers with our houseplants on them. Succulents seem especially trendy at the moment and I am happy to jump on the bandwagon. I am pleased with how well my first order of stickers turned out.

Update from March 2017

We’ve added another new series of cards: five portraits of lesser-known women activists. Inspired by the recent presidential election, we pledged to donate half the profits from our cards to Planned Parenthood.

On the Manufacturing of Cards

Thanks to a loan from my wonderful aunt, I bought an Epson Artisan Inkjet Printer so that I could print test batches of cards with different color settings and sizes. I’m now printing my cards on Inkpress Rag Warm Tone 200gsm Inkjet paper and hand-folding them on a scoring board. While the profit on these cards is minimal, I am now satisfied with the quality of the final product.

The following is our artist statement for Hodgepodge, one of the more difficult kinds of statements one can make:

Camelot Collective consists of two artists originally from Virginia, Alex Volpert and Carolyn Ayers. When Carolyn was working on her Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology at Emory, she invited Alex, a burned-out software developer working in Washington D.C., to rent an extra room in her house in colorful Tucker, Georgia. Together we set up an art collective —Alex draws the portraits, often from one of Carolyn’s photographs, and Carolyn digitally edits and arranges them to be printed on greeting cards, stickers, pins, or notecards.

Our intention is to make cheerful portraits inspired by the plants, animals, and history around us. Carolyn runs a dog photography/daycare business and our first series of work centers around the momentary passions of our favorite dogs. Our work tries to capture the personalities of her clients —their emotional range, their aspirations, their squabbles, or crushes —in graphic ink portraits.

We also made a series of bright, abstract succulent portraits. We are inspired by the challenge of depicting their hidden lives. We wanted our portraits to show the range of peaceful to frenzied energy that the contours of succulents can excite. We hope that the viewer finds our succulent collection, available both in sticker form and as a stationery set, aesthetically nourishing.

Finally we are both very interested in lost or hidden stories and want to draw attention to the history of activism in the United States. In particular, we want to create artwork that celebrates the legacy of lesser-known women activists. Our latest work is a set of cards with five portraits of women who have made significant contributions to social justice over the past century. We believe in the importance of sharing this history, especially in the current political climate, and are proud to live in a city with a rich civil rights heritage.