Postcard art: watercolor rainbow, painted paper collage

For the past several years, my neighborhood art supply store, Wet Paint, has done a Summer Postcard Project. "Friends and fans" of Wet Paint are encouraged to create an original piece of art on a postcard and mail it to the store, and they display all of the postcards in the store windows. I've thought about participating several times, but either I forgot about it, or I wasn't sure what to make, or I didn't really think of myself as an artist. You know. Well I decided that this year I was finally going to create at least one postcard for this project. And last week I made -- and mailed! Don't forget that part -- two postcards! They're bright and colorful, and I love how they turned out.

This first one was inspired by artist Josie Lewis, whose art is filled with rainbows and bright colors. I follow Josie on Instagram, and she issued an "assignment" to create a piece using washi tape and watercolors. I really liked the painting Josie made as her example of washi and watercolor, so I used that as my inspiration.

I used the skinniest washi tape I have and applied it around the edges of the postcard to create a border. Then I added five more strips radiating out from the bottom right corner. Once that was ready to go, I used my sampler watercolor pallet from Beam Paints and a flat brush to paint all the colors in my rainbow. (The postcard is made with watercolor paper, so it can hold up to the paint.)

I wanted to add a little sparkle, so before I pulled off the washi tape, I used my gold watercolor (also from Beam Paints) to add some shiny splatters. Once everything was mostly dry (I used my heat tool to speed up the process), I carefully peeled off the washit tape. I was worried that the paint got under the tape in a few spots because it wasn't sticking very well, but all the lines came out pretty clean. So happy!

My second postcard was a tribute to children's book author and illustrator Eric Carle, who passed away a few weeks ago. Having worked in childcare for nine years, I read many of Eric Carle's books many, many times, and they were always class favorites. So when another artist I follow on Instagram, Lauren Blair, announced that she was going to be doing a live follow-along workshop creating painted paper collages in honor of Eric Carle, I knew that was my next postcard.

I pulled out some of my acrylic paints and several sheets of lightweight card stock and started painting. I did try mixing colors on several of the sheets to create texture and interest, but I ended up blending them too much. Oh, well.

While the painted pages dried, I worked on the background of my postcard. Using a pencil and ruler I lightly drew lines across the postcard, and then I used a black Micron pen to write out the names of some of Eric Carle's books. When I filled up the paper, I went back and erased the pencil lines.

Once the paint was dry, I started cutting out shapes to create my butterfly. I played around with the arrangement and then started gluing everything onto the postcard. The placement of my butterfly was a little higher than I had wanted, to I cut out a few tiny butterflies to fill up some of the open space.

Before I mailed the postcards, I sprayed both of them with a matte sealer to help them hold up in the mail. (They don't have to go very far, so I'm not too concerned.) Now I need to walk by the store to see if they made it and are on display -- and I might just make one or two more!

Thanks for stopping by!