Summertime travels lend themselves to postcards - short narratives about your adventures to send to a friend. And postcards offer a wonderful tiny canvas to paint an image from your travels.
I cut large pieces of 140# watercolor paper into roughly 4" x 6" pieces and tucked them into a plastic bag in my backpack.
This basket of flowers was hanging over a porch I recently visited. I started with a loose ink sketch, used a white Crayola crayon to keep a few spots white, then laid in a lot of wet-in-wet greens, blues and purples.
Other great subjects for postcard art:
clouds
tiny, simplified landscapes
a flower
a pet
a doorway into a cathedral, museum or other place you visited
your tent on a camp-out
a bird
a butterfly
your favorite sunhat
Postcards take less time to create, feel less imposing and more playful, and force you to simplify more complex scenes. That gorgeous lake view you admired while canoeing becomes less confusing when you break it down to basic shapes, values and colors and fit it into a 5"x 7" space.
And in the end, if you don't like what you create (because no artist loves everything they make), you can always flip it over and write a grocery list on the back!
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