This one was a postcard that I did a lot more to, but it didnt’ turn out as well. I took the time to cut this bird image off of a piece of art paper I have, and I pasted it down on the blue background, and then I embossed the image of the map overtop of it. I also use the same map stamp on the backside. It doesn’t seem very cohesive. But hey, it will function as a postcard, so there’s that.

I used as the base of this a beautiful piece of 12″ x12″ paper that I got from a big pack during my annual craft glut at Thanksgiving. I love this paper. It’s nicely heavy cardstock (not heavy enough for this, but not a bad start) that has a gorgeous design on both side. It’s already collaged and color coordinated, it just needed a little bit of help.

On one corner of this paper (not shown) there was a goldfish rendered in detailed black and white. I liked the idea of the fish, so I cut this out of some other paper I have. I also used the faint green stamp of the sleeping woman’s face. Before I mailed it, I ended up sketching some other lines on it, and a little bit of text. (And a lot of text on the back, obviously.) I also doubled it up with another sheet from the same piece of paper, because I wanted it thicker.

This isn’t much of a postcard, I mean, I didn’t do any of the art. The front looked that beautiful just because that’s how the paper looked, and all I did on the back was add the line of fleur-de-lis to demarcate the address side from the text side. But still, my goal in making these postcards was to make as many fast, functional, and pretty postcards as possible in a two day period, and I succeeded. Sometimes it’s okay to piggyback on something that’s already beautiful.

These images are unusually clear, because I used my flatbed scanner to copy them instead of photographing them. I had intended to do all of them this way, but it’s a horrid nuisance. It’s not fast AT ALL, and I had a big stack of postcards, so I gave up after these two.

In a way, this series of postcards is like a series of quick sketches. What do they call them, when you do sketches of one and two minutes poses? Can’t remember. Anyway, I decided I wanted to send more postcards to my friends, especially my sister-in-law, Beth, and my brother Rick. Postcards are expensive, so I had to make some. I wanted them to be fairly sturdy, and they can’t have anything that sticks out, and they have to be less than 6 x 4.1/2″ or you have to pay extra postage (this is actually two cents too few, but it arrived anyway. Shhh).

This has been constructed out of scrapbooking paper and rubber stamps that I own. I looked for images that fit the theme, and combined them together so that it looked different from the original background.