10 Handmade Holiday Postcards

My family hasn't had a proper big holiday with all of us together in years!  Life I guess has got in the way with each of us doing things with our partners or friends.   This year, we felt the need to change this and booked a big house in Turuc, Turkey for all of us to bring our partners as well.  Never done before, to have all of us for so long under one roof but it was a success and I can see it happening again soon!

Being the illustrator I am, it's always strange for me to not be drawing, painting or printing in my spare time so the idea of a two week holiday away from what I love doing was a bit daunting.  To balance it out, and not put any pressure on myself to work on certain projects or ideas I simply packed up my watercolour travel kit with the idea that I'd paint a few postcards.

It's great because you don't have to bring anything extra back with you - simply pop them in the post to send to friends and family!

I take my watercolour travel kit pretty much everywhere with me.  It's fab, and I add to it or keep it minimal depending on the journey.  I love it so much that I've put together a kit that you can purchase through my online shops - hurrah!  It includes a book of blank watercolour postcards, watercolour travel paints + mini brush, mechanical pencil, jar for your water and all comes in a lovely case sewed by myself and my Mum.  Fab.

You can find this in my Etsy shop : www.charlottevallance.etsy.com


Do you love to send postcards too?  Do you paint your own or seek out lovely ones from local shops?

Floral Alphabet

Being creative in nature means I'm constantly thinking up fun/amazing/beautiful/inspiring new projects to do, either by myself or as little collaborations with fellow creatives.  This particular one was dreamt up between myself and Kate Bufton of Book Transformations.  The idea was to send each other postcards, each time with the next letter of the alphabet on with illustrations on a set theme.

As with most projects we got distracted with real work and got bogged down with the details - it took us a good few months to decide on a theme and even then if didn't get started so we (I) scratched that theme.  I send quite a few letters to my Gran and knowing she likes flowers I got her input and help with finding different flowers/plants for each letter of the alphabet.

These three floral alphabet cards will be going out to Kate, my Gran, and my friend Lou (who wanted to send more post this year).  But then this little project is going to finish here.  I might take up a different approach to the illustrations that makes it less demanding, and probably start again with that idea!  But not for a little while.

30 Postcards in 30 Days!

The 30 Days of Creativity in June with Create Stuff is now over and I feel a definite sense of achievement.  You can read here a little about the start of this project for me.  But all in all I illustrated a postcard a day every day in June.  Quite a task!  But I managed it, and even managed to nearly write and send them all by the 30th June as well.  Somehow writing them was an equal task to illustrating them - I've never sent so many postcards in such a short period of time!

Here are a few of my favourites, the rest will follow soon :

 Day 1 - Crepes for breakfast in Paris

 Day 2 - happy findings wandering around in Paris

 Day 11 - Out for dinner with my Dad

 Day 15 - Buying things for the flat

Day 25 - Laura Marling gig

Join me over on my Facebook page 'Charlotte Vallance Illustration & Design' to see photos of postcards that people have taken when they've received them!

You can see my 30 Days of Creativity for 2012 on my Down Your Street blog here.

30 Days of Creativity

We're well into June now and that means I'm totally stocked up on postcards!  Throughout June I've pledged to 'Create Stuff' that I will be creative everyday in June.  There are no rules, and in fact when I first did this in 2011 I had no structure to my creativeness!  But last year and this year I decided to set myself a little project.  2012 saw me illustrating a building a day in a cute little watercolour Moleskin sketchbook.  This year I'm illustrating a postcard a day!  This falls in line with my personal task of the year-not buying any cards, greeting cards,postcards...none!

Here's a little peak at my progress along the way.  Ill be posting these off to friends and family over the month - but if you'd like one then just shout out,send me your details and ill pop one in the post.  

You'll notice quite a Parisian theme going on with the first week and that's because I was in Paris when I started the project!  Perfect timing as I'm always tempted to buy a million postcards when I'm travelling - this project saved me from doing so!

                                  

Have you pledged to 'Create Stuff' everyday in June too?  Share a link to your progress!