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Tuesday, 08 June 2010 |
 Alma Joyce Hahn shows off some of the many greeting cards she has designed and created using her artistic skills. A longtime former English teacher at Benton High School, she also is a weekly columnist for the Courier. MELISSA WALLS/Courier
But now those doodles are finding their way around the nation as she has been placing her tiny masterpieces on greeting cards.
Hahn, who writes a weekly column for the Courier, enjoyed working with smaller canvases, and she was able to paint on stationary cards.
“They were one of a kind,” Hahn said as she turned the card over to show bleeding paint on the back of the card. “I couldn’t imagine making the same one over and over.”
So she started to have her more favorite ones printed off and sold to those who asked.
What’s interesting about many of Hahn’s creations is the broad nature of her inspiration. Although she has never seen a lighthouse in person, she can’t help but paint them over and over.
“I think they are just so beautiful,” she said. “Maybe sometimes they don’t look so great when I paint them.” She points out one lighthouse that’s off center or one that shows an illusion of a boat nowhere near the water. But for the most part, they show people in Saline County a bit of the northeastern shore.
What Hahn seems to be most proud of is the art that takes her the least time. She calls many of her pieces “10-minute masterpieces.”
“I just sit down and give myself 10 minutes to finish something,” she said. “They are very simple, but they look pretty good, I think. It’s nice to know you can create something in a few minutes.”
Some pieces take a bit longer. Her art showing a locomotive trudging through the snow was one of the hardest things she’s done.
“I had a picture to work from, but those parts on the engine — I didn’t know what those things were,” she said. “That took a long time. And then I had to go over the whole thing and make it look like it was snowing. It was hard.”
But it paid off. A customer is buying a group of those train cards to use at Christmas.
Hahn feels a little bad that she has to charge a bit more for her work. It costs her to transfer the art to cards, thanks to printer Taylor Bellott in Bryant. So her cards may cost a little more, but they have the personal touch.
“It is just something that I love to do,” she said. “It’s nice that other people like them too.”
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