I wrapped up a Postcard Project on Patreon in August of last year. This is one of the postcards from the project, which ran from August ‘22 to August ‘24. In total, I made 60 postcards, most of them floral. This is the only one with a title: We'll Make It Through The Storm. It’s a line from a song by Salt Wave, a Toronto band I saw at Houndstooth on College Street about a year ago. With a spot at the bar, I pulled out my art supplies and got into the flow of trying to capture the feeling of live music in a drawing.
It’s a perfect line for this decade. I decided to make it into a postcard so I can remember it when I most need it and then say it like a mantra. There are days when I don’t believe we’ll make it through the storm, but the line has become a reminder for me to always return to making art.
I made drawings of flowers starting in the spring of 2020 as a way to calm myself through the COVID-19 chaos when nothing made sense to me. It was good to have a wholesome distraction. The postcards were like a self-care project that gave me a path and a list of tasks to help keep me on track. The process is still reorganizing and healing my brain. This is the last one I sent out. I discovered how much I love doing collage.
Drawing and eventually making the postcards became more soothing than thinking about lockdown, mask and vaccine mandates and the division that was tearing friends and family apart. Instead, I could think about the project: which drawings to turn into postcards; what design to put on the back of the postcard; how to crop the drawings and where to do the printing. After a while, it became like clockwork. I included a poem and a small creative prompt with each postcard.
Along the way, I experimented with risograph printing — like the one above. Risograph uses transparent inks which are more environmentally friendly than the standard printer inks. The colours are intense and even neon colours reproduce beautifully, which isn’t possible with a traditional commercial printer — unless you do a large print run.
After five attempts at risograph, I bailed. My riso postcards ended up washed out and sad looking. I’ve since learned it’s easier to work with a digital drawing and essential to have a proper scan with good colour separation — the colours print one layer at a time. I managed to fix them with some hand-colouring, turning the process into a meditation — I felt like a kid with a colouring book. The core of my creative practice is to make art like a kid and not complicate it with big-adult-art-goals.
By the way, Houndstooth is an amazing live music venue. It has a gorgeous interior, old-fashioned booths, a pool table and a big beautiful wooden table in the front when the band isn’t playing. They open for coffee and croissants at 10 am, offer rehearsal space by the hour, local bands play Wednesday night at 9 pm and there’s never a cover. When I talked to the owner of Houndstooth, he told me his vision was to make a music venue to honour the live music tradition in Toronto. Somehow they survived the COVID policies that shuttered so many small businesses.
Here’s the poem I sent out with this postcard back in Dec 2023. I wanted it to be like a NYE party invite with a drunken, black-out poem. It’s a mantra too, and even if the poem flies in the face of all the chaos in the world, I say it out loud and dance to it just to insert a different message into the universe. It might even turn into a song.
I send out a creative prompt once a week on Patreon in case you need a gentle reminder to return to your creative practice. These days I’m thinking about the interruption of our phones in trying to stay connected to art making. You can see the phone-face drawing I posted last week. It’s a self-portrait.
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This is how the black-out poem started…
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