60 postcards to make for Legato shareholders

As part of my ‘art share’ offer to raise money for our trip to Italy, for the Legato exhibition, I have to make 60 postcards. These will be mailed back to shareholders once we reach Cassino. I am working on heavy weight watercolour postcards; they come in a little silver tin and the lovely to work with. I have made a digital montage of images of Italy and the Cassino area, the artworks I have created for the four men I am honoring, photos of the men, and words about the trip like Italy, Legato, WWII, peace and the men’s names. I’ve printed multiple copies of this A4 montage.

I decided to work in two batches of 30 postcards each. I put a very light wash of Nickel Azo Yellow on the postcards then quickly blotted with a paper towel to get some texture. Once that was dry I added splashes of Cadmium red medium and again left them to dry. Once they were really dry I added runs of the same red, quite dilute, as I had done on the original artworks; it brings a sense of blood without being too obvious. Once they had dried, I tore the digital collage sheets into strips and have adhered a strip on each one that is about a 1/3 of the width of the postcard.

What comes next? Tomorrow I’m going to hand-cut a stencil of the main lines of two different poppies, using acetate and a tiny soldering iron.  In the meantime, here’s the digital collage I made.