Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.

William Bentley, quoted in Snowflake Bentley

Into December

It is time for the next postcard prompt, and, strangely, I can’t get past the snow of it. Winter is coming, but I don’t live somewhere where I will see snow. It has been many years since I’ve seen snow. For people who have never lived in an area that gets no snow, it may seem hard to comprehend going years and years without either the beauty or the inconvenience. I miss snow. I miss the idea of snow.

When my oldest was born, there was snow in surrounding areas. Snow is so unlikely here that even the hint of snow on that day more than twenty years ago was enough to create family lore. For years, we crafted, cradled, and repeated a story about a little boy who lived on a hill, and on the day he was born, there was snow in the mountains around the city. It is the kind of story that, as soon as you begin saying the words, feels imbued with the magic of a fairy tale.

I can’t remember the last time I saw snow.

I have grown into my appreciation of November as a gratitude-themed month and a month of intentionally looking for and tracking light, but December has a magic all its own.

My enjoyment of December is often rooted in light, sometimes catching the early sunset as the days shorten, but also artificial light. Some of my favorite things are related to Christmas lights. There are lights on the tree and on the bookcases. We used to have lights around the windows and across the shelves in the office.

Ornaments are my other favorite thing in December. Ornaments are often shiny and whimsical containers of memory, quiet little portals to the past. Drawing ornaments has often been a way to center myself and anchor creative habit in December. There are some ornaments I draw again and again, returning to them each year, using them as touchstones to the past.

Last year, I took a nutcracker diversion.

I think devising our own nutcrackers would be a lot of fun for illustrated postcards. I considered it, but I didn’t want to do a prompt for this month that is locked into Christmas. So I went to that thing which we don’t have, snow.

A Focus on Snow – Postcard No. 3

How do you do a postcard about snow?

How do you think about connecting the dots between years and people and memory and personal history and the passage of time…with snow?

You get really close.

You think about snowflakes. You think about individual snowflakes in their frozen latticework, in their fragility and beauty and singularity. You think about crystallization and symmetry.

You think back to when you were a kid, or to some point when you interacted with a child, or to when you were an adult and, on a lark, you grabbed paper and scissors and tried, once again, to make a snowflake. It really shouldn’t be so hard. It’s just the folding of paper and then cutting along the folded edge.

Making snowflakes…I don’t remember doing that as a kid. I’m sure I must have. I don’t specifically remember doing it with my children. I’m sure we must have. But I do remember doing it somewhere along the way, especially as an adult. I remember the anticipation of delicate, lacy, paper creations and the reality that they often come out large and clunky.

I remember that they came out more square than they should. I remember that my hand cut snowflakes don’t offer a lot in the way of whimsy. I remember paper snowflakes as a bit of a disappointment.

Maybe it’s been my technique. I think there’s a very good chance that I’ve never folded the paper correctly, that from the beginning, I had the wrong shape. In looking at directions today, because how hard can it be?, I see over and over again the foundation of a cone-shaped structure. I am fairly sure I’ve never used that kind of triangular base. Did we just fold the paper into rectangles and make block-shaped snowflakes? Surely not. Maybe we stopped one step short of the cone, cutting shapes from a larger, less refined triangle? No wonder they were disappointing. No wonder my memories of paper snowflakes are of something fairly square.)

I would say cutting a snowflake is worth a try again. I would say it’s probably worth using the scissors that shouldn’t be used to cut paper. I would say we should get past caring if we use our scissors to cut paper. I would say we should use smaller paper because we’re older and wiser, and we realize that the full sheet of printer paper is not going to yield a delicate snowflake. I would say we should be bold and use really sharp scissors that can make tiny cuts.

You may or may not be or aspire to be a delicate snowflake, and yet there is beauty in making a delicate snowflake. This is not Minecraft. We don’t need block-level snowflakes. We don’t need 8-bit images plotted out on graph paper. We can follow curves and dip in and out of spaces. We can play with the geometry of shape and form.

So what do you do on a postcard if a single snowflake is your objective? You think about symmetry. You think about branching and hexagonal designs. While it may be fun and intriguing to draw snowflakes with a large number of branches (or arms), the familiar snowflake has six branches that radiate from the center. It’s all about chemistry:

“The six-sided shape of a snowflake can be attributed to the molecular structure of water and the unique formation process of snow crystals. Snowflakes form when water vapour condenses on tiny ice nuclei in cold, supersaturated air. As the water vapour freezes, it arranges itself into a hexagonal lattice due to the hydrogen bonds between water molecules.” – IET

From each of the six arms, a unique symmetry evolves, each arm mirroring the others:

“…while different snow crystals follow different paths through the clouds, the six branches of a single crystal travel together. They all experience the same growth history, so they grow in synchrony. The end result is a snow crystal that is both complex and symmetrical… and often quite stunning.” – Kenneth Libbrecht, The Art of the Snowflake

It is often said that every snowflake is different, that no two are alike. The infinite scope of this singularity, the possibility of this lack of repetition in formation, is part of the magic of snowflakes. We may cling to this story of individuality, but there are actually a number of different types of snowflakes. The classification of snowflakes seems to be something on which scientists differ, but many use a system that includes 35 different types:

A Bit of Snowy History

Wilson A. Bentley, known as Snowflake Bentley, spent much of his life examining, documenting, and photographing snowflakes using a photomicrographic technique. (He succeeded in first photographing a single snow crystal in 1855.) Bentley photographed thousands of snowflakes and, famously, never found two that were alike.

In 1931, Snow Crystals, a collection of his photographs, was published. (Bentley died shortly after the publication.)

Snowflake photos taken by Wilson Bentley. Source: Jericho Historical Society.

And here comes the snow,
A language in which no word is ever repeated.

William Matthews, “Spring Snow”

Send a Postcard

On your postcard this month do something related to snow. Draw a snowflake or two. Play with tessellation. Look up snowflake photography and draw something based on real snowflake structures, or play with the simplification of the snowflake as a symbol.

Drawing a snowflake is similar to the process of drawing a mandala. It can be symmetrical and mindful. It can be geometric. It can be precise and structured and measured and calculated, or it can be freeform.

I encourage you to cut a snowflake first. You can then use it as a model to draw, a visual aid as you think about the shape of snow. You might even use it as a stencil and play with negative space, adding a splash of color to a postcard and creating a mosaic from the spaces between.

I tried again before writing today’s prompt, and I still didn’t have much luck. After laughing at one of my attempts, my son suggested that solving part of the problem (the fact that it didn’t have distinct branches and was circular) required cutting off parts of the top at opposite angles. I did that, and as I opened it back up, I was enchanted to find I had unwittingly created rabbits. (I couldn’t not see rabbits.)

The additional cuts helped, giving the snowflake some semblance of branches rather than the appearance of a circular doily, but it still wasn’t satisfying. The rest of the snowflake is still disappointing.

(I had to laugh to see Martha Stewart talk about kids happily occupying themselves cutting dozens of snowflakes.)

The Challenge

This month, I am suggesting you cut one, or, really, draw one.

You don’t have time because December is busy? Really? That might be exactly why you need to slow down and cut or draw a snowflake. It can be a mindful practice.

This month, consider drawing your own snowflake or snowflakes, one or many, on a postcard. Snowflakes embody individuality and singularity, and something crisp and fragile, something icy and prismatic. Snowflakes are often said to represent hope.

Snowflakes are very quiet.
Be like a snowflake.

Related Resources

Here are some directions you can use to cut a snowflake. (These directions also include instructions for how to make a vertical mobile or “curtain” out of paper snowflakes.)

Video inspiration for drawing snowflakes:

• How to draw snowflakes (LethalChris Drawing)
• How to draw a snowflake (Crafty Nica)

A Year of Postcard Connections

This is the third in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. The first two prompts involved Halloween memories and spirals of gratitude.

Feel free to jump in. Even if you don’t literally make a postcard and apply a stamp, you might at least think through your response to the prompt and do it in your illustrated journal or sketchbook.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author, except where otherwise noted.

The post Connecting Dots: Send a Snowflake appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Shatter

My wife and I were traveling in Japan when this word got assigned. I was seeing a lot of sake vessels and their silhouettes were always striking in simplicity—inspiration supplied. In order to know something is shattered, you have to know what it was whole.

Craig Frazier

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I used to make cards as a child. Birthdays, holidays, apologies, I would make cards for the occasion.

I loved going to the craft store and selecting fibrous, frayed paper and my parents kept me in a dizzying stock of scalloped pinking shears. My favorite type of card to make was one that involved pressing fresh flowers between the pages of Oxford dictionaries or Bibles that were stocked on my family’s bookshelves. After weeks, I would open the books and discover flowers that were crisp and fragile, their own kind of paper.

I would arrange the flowers on the thick cardstock from the store and then brush a glaze over the flowers that sealed them to the page, gave the flowers a cast and sheen that pleased me in such specific ways—the crags of the sealant, the flash-frozen color of the florals, the soft and rough-hewn edges of the paper that left a fuzzy feeling on my skin.

As I got older, after special occasions I would pin whole bouquets of flowers on my walls, some hanging for so long and getting so old they would disintegrate shard by shard until the realities of vacuuming became too much. Even now, I have flowers in all states from fresh and dying and dead in their vase on the living room table because I will not part with them because I love their pink and green and violet vibrance in the heart of the room.

I do not know where all the cards I made are anymore—I am sure my mother has some saved in her memory boxes—but I do have one particular card saved in memory.

It was a holiday card I made for a friend of mine who I found unbearably cool—cool in the way that I wanted to be: effortless, unfettered, wearer of cream turtlenecks (while I wore black). I labored over the card with particular care, choosing the best flowers, the heaviest book to press them in, the most thoughtful application of glaze. When I gave it to her she was kind: exclaimed over it in the type of way that I had hoped.

But an hour later, what did I find?

I was in the washroom across from my friend’s bedroom when I saw the card I spent so much time on tossed into the waste basket. This was years ago. I think I was likely eleven? or twelve? but I still remember the feeling of seeing the card as a discarded object. A thing that was given now thrown aside.

I pulled the card out of the bin and looked at the flowers I had preserved and carefully arranged before sealing for further longevity. There was the sharpness of rejection—unavoidable—but mostly, there was a sudden weight in my limbs, which I conflated with the feeling of being adult. It felt grown to me to understand that there is no real way for any of us to truly know what one thing really means to another, that even if we tell someone what it means, they might not feel it, that sometimes this gap between what something means and what someone else feels is a chasm that whole relationships fall into. When I left the washroom, I left the card in the bin, just as I had found it.

I love floral arrangements, I am sure that is clear by now. It is the pleasure of beauty, the insouciance of blooms whose very purpose is to allure more life. It is also simply the heartstrike of joy I feel when I walk into a room and the living brilliance of flowers greets me. It feels like a personal greeting, all warm and bright and lush.

I want to follow that kind of invitation anywhere; I want to offer it in as many forms as I can to the ones that I love. I think it is why I will keep flowers for as long as I can, for as long as their forms hold. And I think it is why I loved preserving the flowers and turning them into lovenotes as a child. This is not the same for others, of course. Others do not want fresh flowers in the house.

They’re dying, they say and I always think: well, yes, but they’re beautiful.

I know this is all a little sentimental. I know the flowers are always meant to be let go—I found the card I made where it was always going to be—it is just that I always want to hold on a little longer. Don’t we all in some way?

What we save is often so different from each other, but we all do it. One friend: playing cards found on kerbs; the other: old punk records; still another: miniatures of ordinary objects. One more: notes in her wallet that no one knows she’s kept. The earth moves to a pull that none of us can affect. Still, we tend to the flowers, hoping that they will last.

*

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post I’m Wondering: Do You Display Dead Flowers? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Wind

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The post Two Craigs: 25/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Wood

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 24/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Time …

after Time

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Our gratitude is individual. Like the lines and whorls on our fingers, our relationship with gratitude is unique.

Gratitude doesn’t have to be about big things. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Our gratitude can be most sustaining and most profound when things are falling apart. We can be grateful for things that are vast, things that are ineffable, but we can also be grateful for small things, for a favorite coffee cup, a soft pillow, the flash of a bird in the tree.

Finding gratitude in the quotidian can help center you, can help you find perspective, and can make a difference in how you experience the world around you.

Talking about gratitude is more commonplace now than it was a handful of years ago, or maybe it feels that way simply because I struggled with gratitude. I struggled to find my footing in gratitude as a mindset and a practice at a time when it seemed like things were falling apart.

I was a late-comer to the gratitude table, or, in my case, hilltop. I found my way there not as things got better but as things started to dissolve. When I first talked out loud about gratitude, I got emotional. I remember feeling like I was shedding my surface as I admitted that what I thought I needed was to focus on gratitude. It didn’t make sense to me, but my discomfort, and even my resistance, seemed important. I struggled with my sense that gratitude was a superficial practice, something that blurred or elided reality. I remember feeling silly. I might as well have been admitting I was going looking for unicorns in the park.

That was a beginning. I was struggling with fear and anxiety and worry over ongoing health issues in my house. I was feeling like there was no bottom to bottom, like I didn’t know where “bottom” was, but I recognized that something was increasingly hollow in me. Almost instinctively, I reached for something shiny, something I thought might be powerful. I reached for gratitude.

The next year, in November, I did 30 days of gratitude writing and recording. I found myself standing at the top of the hill, the literal hill on which I live, at sunset most days, and looking out, a point that lets me see the ocean and the bay, a point that puts the sky in motion overhead. I can turn in a circle and see the whole world. That’s how it feels, the moon over the bay, the sun dropping into the ocean, rose light warming the faces of the houses on the street. November has the best light.

That year, I gave myself over to the top of the hill, to my appreciation for all that was right then, for having that beauty within the distance of a short walk of our senior rescue. I noticed the colors of paint on houses after rain. I wrote about memory, about all that I don’t remember. I wrote about being present, being aware of things we take for granted, and appreciating things that are within reach.

I try to keep gratitude in mind all year long, but November is always a reset point, a month steeped in a gratitude mindset. I no longer cry when I talk about gratitude.3 Like most things, with practice, we get over our resistance, find our own patterns, move past the things that hurt, and find comfort in the routine.

I’ve done a number of November gratitude projects now, both written and drawn. I’ve tracked November light, the barest of diagrams showing the bands of the sky when I first walk into the kitchen and see the light over the bay in the distance. I’ve added gratitudes to daily planners and my Notion dashboard. There is really no wrong way to approach it. One year I did a series of portraits of people in one of my online communities. Two years in a row, I did large drawings to which I added a simple drawing each day of a concrete thing for which I was grateful. (Those projects are favorites.)

It may feel silly to focus on daily gratitude and on gratitude for small things, the favorite coffee cup, the favorite pencil, the familiar quilt, the cozy sweater from a loved one who has passed, but the practice is powerful. It is deceptively simple, but it can make a dramatic difference in how you feel. All that is wrong doesn’t go away. That remains the tension with gratitude. It isn’t an eraser. But something happens in the process of paying more attention, focusing, and looking around with intention and naming and recognizing our gratitude.

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

John Greene, Turtles All The Way Down

Snail Mail – November Postcard Prompt

This month’s postcard prompt is gratitude-infused, but on the concrete level, the prompt is a spiral.

A spiral is a winding path, one that either moves in on itself or radiates from the center out. In walking, tracing, or drawing a spiral, literally or figuratively, there is mindfulness, the coiling or unfurling of thought, the chance to see what sits or stands or dances at other points of the spiral as you pass again and again.

Mathematically speaking, there are a number of different types of spirals, including: the Archimedean spiral, the hyperbolic spiral, Fermat’s spiral, the logarithmic spiral, the lituus spiral, the Cornu spiral, the spiral of Theodorus, the Fibonacci spiral (also called the golden spiral), conical spirals, whorls, and the involute of a circle.

These quick line drawings (not mathematically precise) show some of the spirals listed above.

This elongated spiral doesn’t show up in the list, but we know this model from the world around us:

To multiply the fun, consider the triskelion (or triskele):

We can think about spirals in terms of galaxies (look up “barred spiral”), snails, pinecones, succulents, pineapples, and the horn of a goat. The list goes on.

As a metaphor, we can use the spiral as a path for mindfulness. We can walk the spiral in or out. We can wind our way around and back like a labyrinth.

For this month’s postcard, integrate a spiral and, if you are bold, let gratitude be your guide.

You may want to simply play with the spiral as an image. You might think about cinnamon rolls or the Fibonacci sequence or snails. Or you may want to use the spiral as the form of the writing, starting from the center and writing your message in a spiral. Maybe you choose a special quote or poem. Maybe you express your gratitude to the recipient. Maybe you simply write a letter as a spiral, something the reader will have to slowly spin to read.

There is mindfulness in the reading, too.

Primary or secondary, either way, gratitude is part of the November prompt. If the spiral isn’t of interest, you might use your postcard to document daily gratitudes (one a day). You might draw a series of icons of things for which you are grateful.

Gratitude Quotes

Here are a few gratitude quotes to get you started thinking and appreciating in November:

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.” — Rumi

“Gratitude bestows reverence…changing forever how we experience life and the world.” — John Milton

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” — A.A. Milne

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.” — Walt Whitman

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is the true prosperity.” — Eckhart Tolle

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

If you made and sent an October card, we would love to see what you did with the costume-themed prompt. If you share in social media, please tag me and use #PostcardPrompts.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author.

The post Connecting Dots: Tracking Gratitude in Snail Mail appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

*

Every morning for the last five or so years of my teaching practice, I have asked students a question that they answer as part of their attendance roll call. Ideally, the questions are generated by the students, but often, I pepper in questions of mine. It is a routine that has never ceased to be interesting to me, to see through the portals of these questions into the nooks and crannies of students’ lives. I have heard so many stories that stay with me…. a few most memorably include a pair of magical fish, a grilled roadside snake, and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing in an attic.

This ritual is borne from my belief that questions, especially slant or searching or deep questions, connect us to each other in radiant and unexpected ways. 

The questions, as much as the answers, reveal us to one another.

*

Last year, at the beginning of May, on Instagram, my friend Shira (who writes a deeply beautiful Substack called Freer Form that you can read here) invited followers to join her in a month of questioning. The task was simply to notice the questions we ask and collect them in some way. I kept track of my wondering in a digital note called MAY I?

Some of my questions were mundane—Where did I put my phone? What time is my next scheduled ‘let’s hop on a call?’ How much cheese is too much?—but many of my other questions were surprising in the way that the world is when we stop to really look at it.

I discovered so many small mysteries littered in the track of my everyday life: What exactly is an email? (what is a byte??) Why does my toaster fling the bread a foot into the air after it’s finished? Is that failure or exuberance? Does it have to be one or the other? Why do I add the numbers of license plates together? How do I not know what 9 + 7 is without counting on my fingers? Why is a vase of fresh flowers something I delight in every time I see it? Is delight so SIMPLE?!

And there were so many bigger, deeper questions that began to stack up: What places does love make for you? What is your strangest encounter? What part of your body does sadness find first? What do you save? How does it feel to be you? Who is the last person you messaged? What is the most used emoji in your phone? What do you think about on an airplane during terrible turbulence? What is the earliest thing you can recall? What always makes you smile? What is your ugliest belief?

*

Of course, in the classroom, there’s never any sure way to predict how anything will go, and so I never know which morning attendance questions will generate a lot of conversation.

I, for one, did not think that asking What is the best bird? would create as much debate as it did. There were staunch supporters of penguins, of finches, of blue jays, of toucans. Others stood for birds I didn’t know, birds I had to look up and see for the first time: their dappled gray chests, their hard red eyes.

*

By the end of MAY I? I had so many questions written down that I would spend the rest of the year pairing the questions with photographs and sending them out to my corner of Instagram. As people answered, I realized the bounty of their responses—beautiful, heart-opening, often sad, often funny, often both at the same time.

Some answers, in particular, I wrote down and carried with me from the bed to the shower to the car to the highway and back again, carried them with me and showed them the parts of my life that they spoke to:

Here, here is the road he drove the wrong way down not once, but twice.

Here, here is the river freezing over.

Here, here is the corner store where the owner never makes anything quickly.

*

For myself, I believe the best bird is the demoiselle crane, so named by Marie Antoinette who was charmed by the crane’s small stature (the smallest of the crane species) and the graceful black feathers adorning its chest which stand in sharp contrast to the trailing ivory feather plumes that stretch from the eye over the head.

This crane, however, is only delicate in appearance. It is, in fact, the only bird whose long loop migration takes it over the Himalayas in the winter. Indeed, demoiselle cranes have been filmed flying far above the 8,848-meter peak of Mount Everest as they move from the steppes of Rajasthan in India to reach the softer grasslands of Mongolia to breed and raise their young.

It is an incredibly long and arduous migration and many cranes die of exhaustion. Yet, every year, those that survive begin to fly beyond the most towering peaks in the world in order to reach an unseen almost impossible land. I would tell you what this bird reveals to you about me but I already have.

*

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Header photo: Demoiselle cranes in Khichan near Bikaner. CC 4.0

The post I’m Wondering: What’s The Best Bird? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see their thought process as they translate each prompt through photography and illustration.

Small

Something is only small in relation to something larger—scale. If I wanted the figure to be small, I needed to diminish it in relation to its environment.

Craig Frazier

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The post Two Craigs: 21/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Angle

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The post Two Craigs: 20/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Spin

I couldn’t resist riffing on Craig’s spinning top in his ‘balance’ photo. After drawing the little graphic top, I realized that it felt static—not spinning. So I made it into a diagram by adding a little cut paper arrow.

Craig Frazier

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The post Two Craigs: 19/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Coffee

It wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t explore the cup. I love drawing a cup. But what says coffee first thing in the morning is our Bialetti coffee maker—and the smell. It’s a gorgeous object and gorgeous to draw.

Craig Frazier

One of my favorite books showcases the commercial work of the great Czech photographer Josef Sudek. He created this work between 1920 – 1930 and was inspirational for this week’s word. It was important for me to create this image in one shot.

Craig Cutler

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The post Two Craigs: 18/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When was the last time you sent a postcard? When was the last time you carried up a stack of mail and found a small card, glossy photo on one side, handwritten note on the other, tucked in among the circulars and bills? Wish you were here!

There is something unique about a postcard. It is small and compact. It may be thin, bordering on flimsy, and yet with a corner stamp in place, it is designed to make it through the system.

How many words can you fit in the split panel on the back? Do you need words? What happens to the narrative if you send drawings? Portraits? A selfie? A sketch of your morning coffee, your pet, or from your favorite cafe? What happens if you swatch your palette (ink or paint or colored pencils) each month on a postcard and mail it to someone?

What if you record thumbnails of morning light every day for a week? What happens if you write how you really feel in that blank space and send it off?

If I look out my window and draw the shape of the tree and write the colors of the sky and, later, drop it in the mail, how will you reply? If I do it once a month for a year, what will I capture? What record will the postcards hold? What will it mean to the recipient?

Intimate and Exposed

A postcard feels intimate, a whisper in the wind, and yet its intimacy is undone by the fact that its contents are not hidden. It is not concealed. It is a message that is out there for anyone to read. Saying just enough is part of the allure, part of the puzzle, part of the dance. Maybe your words are cryptic or abbreviated or written in a shorthand that will only make sense to the recipient. Or, maybe you write plainly, hold nothing back. Maybe you have nothing to hide.

An Unassuming Substrate

As a surface, a postcard is a simple and beautiful container, a glorified index card, often with a photograph or art on one side, that we intentionally compose, address, stamp, and send on a journey to connect.

Other than the annual jury duty summons, very little real or important mail arrives as a postcard. Postcards, for the most part, are personal. They are from or to someone you know. They have been selected with specificity.

Maybe we are somewhere special, or on vacation, and are sending a note to someone to let them know that we are thinking of them. Maybe it’s a bit of a flex, a throwback to days before social media: “Look where I am.”

Maybe we simply have to share that bridge or that view of sunset or that hillside in the mist. Maybe we are enjoying ourselves so much that the desire to send someone evidence of our adventure is irresistible. We don’t really mean to brag, but we want someone to know, someone to witness our journey.

Or maybe our postcards are more humble. Maybe we are sending words from home, a note carefully tucked into the small space and a favorite art series on the other side. Maybe we have the Pantone postcards. Maybe we’ve selected a specific color. Does it reflect our mood? The sky? The color we think of when we think of the recipient?

Will you send national monuments or falling leaves, paint brushes or sunsets or roosters or cats or photos of chairs or bridges or lighthouses or quilts or children’s book illustrations? Will you send photos of works by favorite artists (like Hopper, Matisse, Van Gogh)? Will you send photos of hot sauces or birds or rainbows, stacks of books or spine art, Studio Ghibli scenes, New Yorker covers, national parks, or coffee cups?

The art is part of the equation, and then there is the flip side. You only have a small space in which to write (or illustrate) your note. What will you say?

Postcard Prompts

In a series of monthly prompts, we will create a set of postcards, each one responding to a simple nudge. You can use existing postcards, focusing on filling the blank side. This is the easiest approach. Or, you can use blank cards, your responses filling both sides.

Month by month, you will develop a set of postcards, a series of epistolary art. You might choose to work in the same medium or style or palette each month or work with repeated elements that help tie the cards together. Or you may view each postcard as a standalone piece, disconnected from others, and let the prompt guide your choices.

Simple and Mindful

The prompts will not be difficult. 

These are prompts you may have done before. But we will do them in this monthly format together as the world changes over the next year, as our lives change, and as we process whatever we are going through, highs and lows, celebrations and milestones, personal journeys, and the quest for meaning.

Who will you have in mind as you create your postcards? Will you mail them?

A Postcard from Your Journal

One of the projects that I run and that I encourage others to consider is the keeping of an illustrated journal that documents life with a combination of art and words. I use a weekly format because I particularly enjoy the ways in which taking things a week at a time allows for fluidity across a span of days. There is no pressure to finish pages or drawings every day. Instead, I work on spreads that can be built and shaped and filled in over the course of a week. It’s mindful. It’s flexible. Every Sunday, I start a new week.

Many of the postcard series prompts could easily be done in an illustrated journal or sketchbook or in the margins of a bullet journal or planner, but I hope you will consider the postcard as a format. The postcard presupposes a recipient, a reader, a viewer.

Postcard Logistics

To qualify for the postcard stamp, a postcard needs to be roughly 4×6 or smaller. The USPS lists the following specifications:

• Rectangular in shape (not square)
• At least 3-1/2 x 5 inches and at least 0.007 inch thick
• No more than 4-1/4 x 6 inches and no more than 0.016 inches thick

If using traditional, preprinted postcards, you will want to make sure the cards meet the size requirements (or plan to use a letter stamp for oversized postcards). If you are going to DIY your postcards, you can buy readymade blank postcards (plain or watercolor), use heavyweight index cards, or cut your cards from heavy cardstock, Bristol board, or watercolor paper.

Using preprinted cards minimizes the work. You’ll be sharing a photograph or piece of art you like and your own art and/or writing on the other. This is also a great way to use up postcards you may already have.

If it’s been a really long time since you saw a postcard in person, remember that on one side, you’ll need to put the address on the right and the stamp in the upper right corner. Also, be aware that the postal bar code will be added along the bottom edge. If you write or draw in that space, just know it will most likely be obscured during the mailing process.

Postcard stamps are slightly less expensive than letter stamps, but there aren’t a lot of options. Currently, postcard stamps feature sailboat art by illustrator Libby VanderPloeg. If you have old stamps floating around that aren’t enough for current first-class mail (and aren’t Forever stamps), using them on your postcards can be a good option. Just make sure they meet or exceed the postcard stamp in value.

Slowing Down

A postcard series almost sounds quaint, other than the fact that there are thousands of people writing postcards these days to encourage people to vote. Beyond that, sending almost anything with a stamp might feel just a bit old-fashioned.

As a creative project, thinking about a postcard series is exciting. I imagine postcards filled with lists, or data visualization (a la the Dear Data project), with drawings, portraits, quotes, poems, and more. I am hoping that we can push the envelope on this envelopeless space to create personal series that are unique, bold, quiet, honest, authentic, and visually awesome.

I hope we create postcards that, through their line and composition, through their art as much as their words, have something to say. I hope we send our postcards and reach someone.

An October Postcard

Not every postcard (or every piece of art) has to be deep or soul-baring or complicated. A lot of postcards just say something like “Wish you were here!” or “Wanted to let you know you’re on my mind.”

To kick off this postcard series, let’s focus on something that is relatively simple and can be tied to memory or not. It’s October, and Halloween will be coming around.

Your challenge for this month is to create a postcard (with a recipient in mind) and document a costume.

Maybe it is a costume that you remember from when you were a kid. Maybe it is a costume from your children’s Halloween years. Or maybe Halloween isn’t something that was ever a big deal for you, and you think about what kind of costume you might choose now or wish you had chosen then.

You don’t have to particularly like Halloween or be a dress-up person to do this prompt. I don’t, and I’m not. But I still find it interesting to think about my history with Halloween, most of which I don’t remember, and some of the characters that stand out for me from my parenting years, from comic books, and the world of cosplay.

You may want to separate the prompt from Halloween and think about the whole concept of dressing up (whether you do or don’t), the performative aspect of that, and even the ways in which dressing up can be used to flaunt or conceal. Maybe you are a fan of Chappell Roan and sometimes think about what it might be like to wear costumes like that. Maybe you loved Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the Joker. Maybe you love theater or anime. Or maybe you just have a soft spot for clever costumes, sewn at home or made from cardboard boxes.

So what will you put on a postcard?

I don’t dress up, but one of my favorite costumes that I’ve seen in the last few years, something that seems really “doable,” is Waldo (from Where’s Waldo), with his round glasses, red and white striped shirt, and striped hat with a red pompom. It’s an incredibly simple costume. It’s cute and clever. It looks like it would be fun. (The corresponding Wenda costume tends to involve a very short blue skirt. I would opt for Waldo. No question.)

I am also a fan of the Pantone color swatch costume. I love this idea even though it’s potentially an overthinker’s nightmare. What color would you choose?

Crayon. Alice. Rabbit. Harry Potter. Obi-Wan. Dorothy. The Tin Man. Banana. No. 2 Pencil.

Commemorate a costume on a postcard. You can draw your costume, or diagram it, or make a collage, or write it out in words. You might write the memory of a specific costume, a specific Halloween, or turn it into a poem. What does the costume say? Why this costume?

Have fun!

Notes: links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links. You can find postcards at your local souvenir stands, museums, and other shops. You can find postcard-making materials at your favorite art store or by scavenging paper products you already have.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Header image: Assorted postcards. A. Cowen 2024

The post Connecting Dots: A Creative Postcard Challenge appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Chair

You can draw a chair with three lines—the challenge is making the lines interesting.

Craig Frazier

The only thing that could make a Hans Wegner Papa Bear chair look even better would be a Vizsla.

Craig Cutler

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Light

No two matches create the same flame pattern when ignited. I thought a four panel grid would be a great way to show just how unique each flame really was. I used the frame burst mode on my Leica SL2 to capture that split second moment.

Craig Cutler

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how they set about translating the prompt through photography and illustration.

Stretch

I could not help myself. I had a childhood flashback on this word. I like Gumby damn it! I received a few disturbing stares from passengers on my plane while retouching the image.

Craig Cutler, photographer

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Check out the first five prompts and keep up with the continuing series here.

Layered

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Fork

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Glass

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Paper

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Wavy

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Contain

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Round

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Fly

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Balance

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We have no idea what we are doing.

And, well, we’ll be damned if that’s not one of the most concise and accurate descriptions of the creative process at large. Because in those eight words, the photographer and illustrator, respectively, strike at the heart of the joy that can be found within it—the beauty of experiment, and the brilliant chaos of creative play.

It’s something that’s utterly on display in their new project, aptly dubbed “2Craigs.” 

The mission is simple: 

“1 word, 2 Craigs, 2 solutions, 1 week. Post and repeat for 52 weeks.”

In preparation for the project, the two Craigs each sent 52 words to an unbiased third party. Every week, that person pulls one word and sends it back to them—and the Craigs then independently get to work, with the award-winning Cutler and the award-winning Frazier turning out an image for the website.

So far, the juxtaposed results are delightful. At times, curiously complementary. And on the whole: A weekly surprise and moment of design Zen, which we’re delighted to feature going forward every week under a thematic header of “Opposites Attract.” 

Stay tuned. Because we have no clue what they’ll turn out, or how it’ll turn out.

And neither do they.

And, well, that’s the magic of it—and creativity at large.

The post 1 Prompt, 2 Craigs, 52 Weeks of Stirring Illustration and Photography appeared first on PRINT Magazine.