June Postcard Trade

I participated in a wonderful postcard trade in June. The only guidelines were that the postcards had to be 4“ x 6“ in size and feature bold colours, some doodles and some writing.  Perfect for when you are starting to explore all the lovely goodies in your art supply stash, and also for using up scraps and leftover papers and such.

I chose heavy watercolour paper for mine, and these particular sheets I had done a splatter technique with fabric dyes, not realising that for this particulad dye to be fixed I would have had to soak the paper in soda ash. So my green splatters moved and stained as soon as I tried to paint and draw over them, and for the postcards I toned the green down and also fixed the dye with a thin coat of gesso. You can see how the green moved in the green streaks in the next picture.

Following the Gesso I gave my paper a nice coating with Gelatos, an item in my stash I am now using more often in my pictures. I first smudge them more even with my fingers and then go over them with thin white acrylic paint.

I think I also used my brayer and white acrylics in my layering process and I ended up with some nice soft but still bold colours. Next I sketched random flower outlines on my cards and filled them in wih thinned white acrylics again, They looked a little ghostly to me and I really liked how they turned out so I decided not to paint them any more but instead I tried to enhance them with a coat of matt black.

Now they looked even ghostlier, if that is even a proper expression. But I think you can see what I mean.

And next I did my doodles and outlines with black and white paint pens.

During this process it turned out that a few more people were participating in the postcard swap than I had anticipated, and also I had falled in love with one of my own cards (making it impossible to send it to someone else) so I had to gesso and prepare another sheet of watercolour paper and make some additional cards. Then lastly they all got a protective coating because I wanted to make sure none of the Gelatos smudged in transit, you can see all my cards in the next picture. The late stragglers I made are still missing some doodled decoration but I figured the paint pen could stick to the coating and would be safe on the journey.

And this is my favourite card I kept. Well, I didn‘t really keep it at first, I mailed it off with all the other ones just adressed to myself. I also had one additional card left over and I mailed that one to my Mom (Hi, Mom...), she had mentioned that she never gets any nice mail at all...