There’s just a week to go before I finally start my extended diploma in art and design course at Leicester College, and I must admit looking forward to it. We were set a summer assignment to create an A5 size postcard, with the front being a collage describing ourselves, and the reverse carrying the college address and a description of what we’d been doing over the summer.

I started work on it last week, and yesterday I finished my submission:

The base is an A5 size piece of 5mm foam board. Each of the main titles (aside from the depression label) was cut from stiff yardstick on Cricut machine using the Opposites cartridge. The ‘fit to length’ option was used so that the words interlocked within the spaces left to them. I cheated a bit with ‘jobs’ leaving a bit more space between each letter. Between 1-3 layers of letters were stuck down to give a variable height to each word. For the depression lettering, I drew round the Cricut cut letters and then carved them into the foam board with my craft knife.

Photos and pictures relevant to each theme were printed out on a colour laser printer and collaged using matte multi medium. Printing them out allowed me to adjust sizes to fit. Using laser printer allowed the use of water-based media without the colours running, which I have found occurs with my colour inkjet printouts. A final coat of matte multi-medium was painted over to seal.

I then tried several ways of highlighting the letters – dry brushing with gesso was meant to give a bleached out effect, but I wasn’t happy with that. I then contemplated painting just the letters with watered down acrylics, but decided that was too fiddly. Eventually, I settled on using distress ink pads as a direct to paper technique, and allowed the ink to dry overnight before spraying with water-based gloss varnish (which did reactivate the distress ink in places).

On the reverse (not shown) I printed a stamp and postmark onto a sheet of A5 white card, complete with the address lines and a centre dividing line for that authentic postcard appearance. I also created a date postmark in Word, using WordArt and shapes, to read ‘hand delivered by the artist’ and the hand in date. Where the postcard description would be I put the following text: ‘Hand built from foam board, creative juices, printouts, multi-medium and other crafty goodness. No paintbrushes were permanently harmed in the making of this card’.

Overall, I’m pleased with the results, and it bears a good likeness with my original concept sketched in my ideas book. Apparently it is to be used as an icebreaker when we all meet up for our induction next week.