Postcard Painting

Postcard painting is a technique of sketching and water-coloring of an image on a piece of paper whose dimensions are proportional to postcard size . This is the definition that I compose by myself to refer to the activities of semi-manual postcard creation. With the advent of portable printers and digital camera, now everybody can make postcard easily from their own photographs or drawings or other computer graphic images. Most postcards have photographs on one side of its surfaces. I hardly see postcards that are painted. That's why painted postcards have become the most favorite items among postcard collectors. Selling postcard is not seen as a big business that can yield high earnings to the ones who produce such artworks. But it can be a fascinating way for artists who want to promote their paintings to a large number of people without spending money. Instead, artists can make money from selling postcards where his watercolor painting are printed on them.

My personal experience in selling postcards

I wrote an article about How to make money selling postcard several months ago and it attracts a lot of readers. Selling postcards is a good way to earn money although people don't pay attention to this kind of business. I can see that painted postcards attract more tourists' attention than photographed postcards. Although I say that I sell painted postcards, I don't mean that every postcard has to be manually painted. No! That's not the way I make my postcards. I or my friend can paint one and scan it into my computer and then print it in 100 pieces. These printed postcards, containing my paintings or my friends' drawings can be sold in cheaper and more affordable prices to travelers who want to buy them for their friends and colleagues in their countries.

Tourists like to buy postcards that are unique
People buy postcard when they travel. They buy them for their friends and colleagues back home. Some people who like to collect postcards as their hobbies. The images that we usually see on postcards are usually about beautiful scenery of the island, the beach or the town and the city that we visit. When we buy postcards, we frequently buy more than one. We feel that they are not expensive. We will send them to our loved ones back home while we are still far away, from our country, in a tropical island resort or in a challenging safari adventure in Africa.
 Postcards are beautiful and very cheap souvenirs.

Selling postcards is another way of promoting paintings and drawings from local artists

The paintings in the postcards that I sell in my bookstore are mostly about traditional life of the indigenous people of West Papua that happened some two or three hundred years ago when modern civilization had not entered or influenced the island. The postcards describe scenes of how they hunted animals, dressed in traditional costumes, and performed rituals. Such scenes are not practiced by the indigenous people anymore and can only be visualized through paintings. Painted postcards can show the historical and cultural background of the Papua island where I live to foreign tourists.
For experienced artists, drawing and painting on postcard sized paper are not interesting. Painting artists prefer to express their talents on large size paper or canvas. If the artworks are larger than the postcard 15.3 cm x 10.3 cm (6.05 inch x 4.15 inch), I use my digital camera Sony Cyber-shot DSC W30 and edit the photographs using Adobe Photoshop CS3. I need to resize and crop the photographs to suit the proportion and size of standard postcards before printing them as beautiful souvenirs for tourists. On the backside of the postcard, I wrote some explanations about the painting to give an idea of what the artwork is about. Postcard painting is also a good way of promoting an artist's artworks and at the same time making money from it. If you want to see the paintings that I am talking about, you can visit my other blog paintinganddrawinggallery. I hope that you will enjoy our beautiful artworks there. by Charles Roring