Mailart 365 has moved

As a postcard fanatic, I own far too many postcards that I'm "supposed to send" and often buy bundles of cards which often contain stuff that's just rubbish.

One aim of this project was to get through some of these and inject some life into these cards which nobody really wants to get.



This is one example of the sort of thing I mean. This card was part of a bundle and was from the now-defunct Athena chain. It's titled "Tracy Mills II", so I tried to google for who the person is, but could find nothing.

So obviously, this card would probably appeal to a grand total of nobody in the world. Hopefully, now with a little watercolour and fineliner enhancement, I hope that the new lease of life will make it a little more appealing to the 2 new recipients.

Today is the beginning of my 365 reboot and begins with this rework of a John Hindes Studio work, photographed by Edmund Nagele.



This new 365 project has been inspired by 365er Stripygoose, who we recently visited on Bird Migration day. Having completed all 365, Stripygoose invited Elenatgeezer, me and Positivelypostal over to her place and posted them all on one day in the same postbox, after which everyone present made a pact to do a full 365 all over again.

After some thought on themes, I decided to indulge my passion for postcard halfs, so I aim to make 365 pieces based on original postcards, where I cut them in half and do something creative with the other half. This pic is of somewhere in Cornwall and has been reworked in watercolour with Fineliner.

Obviously, as I am working with 2 sets of 2 halfs, then technically I'll be making 2 365s, but I didn't think that was fair, so will count both sides as a single piece, labelled a and b for simplicity.



As the blog posts come, I'll be expanding on the rationale behind the theme a little more, so watch this space.

Another piece inspired by the news. This time it's about Camilla Batmanghelidjh, the former CeO of Kids Company, who apparently didn't do anything dodgy to get the £3 million grant from the government before her business went bankrupt. Honest.

Watercolour and fineliner version of the front page of the Evening Standard from the day of the London Mayoral Election result

This one is going back to the estate agents. Yes it's the same poxy estate agent! They send a letter to every single flat in the building and these all end up in the bin, so I fish them out and draw on them to send them back.

The artwork comes from The Saga of the Swamp Thing book 2, by Alan Moore, Totleben and Bisette, which I am re-reading after about 8 years. It is just as good as I remember it, but these days, with an understanding of art, I can really revel in the artwork as well as just Moore's storytelling

In keeping with my idea of sending mailart for free this year, this one is going out to an eBay buyer, who has bought some quilling magazines from Elena on our eBay shop. The envelope art comes as a bonus and is something that I've been doing for a few years now


Linework was done by me from a stencil, but Elena is the colour master in our house so she finished it off with all colour work

I was really pleased with the way that the envelope framed this piece. It was a standard airmail envelope bought in Hanoi with a picture of Hoan Kiem lake on the front

Vietnamese uses a modified Latin script for it's writing system, and has 12 vowels which, along with 6 tone markers creates 72 distinct vowel sounds. This is before we even start looking at dipthongs and triphongs.

Luckily for me, I find most of the vowel sounds quite natural to tell apart as I spoke Vietnamese when I was very young, but many foreigners find it almost impossible to hear the differences.

This letter, ă is pronounced like the a in the English word "am". For me it's really easy to remember as it makes up my favourite verb "ăn" which I use every day, meaning "to eat". That's one of the primary reasons I came to Vietnam!

It is Tết (Vietnamese New Year) here in Hanoi and this year this marks the start of the year of the horse. I went into horse drawing mode today and here's the first. I found this piece really hard as the sleek lines of the horses legs are quite hard to get right. I went through lots of points where I thought "GAH! HORRIBLE!", but I had to silence the internal critic long enough to complete it. It was only when I added the dust lines that I can say I was really happy with it.

One of the best things about travelling for me is the quirky cultural differences and points of view that people have in different countries.

This is even more fascinating for me being in Hanoi at the moment, as my parents are Vietnamese, so the differences I see in the Vietnamese are a glimpse of what I could have been, had I not been born in London.

One of the things we couldn't get over when we came out to Vietnam on our honeymoon, was the strange compliments that Elena got from the locals, which went something like "You're so lucky - you are so fat!" as they admired her size 10 figure.

We also recently found out that it's almost impossible to get hold of any moisturizing cream or body lotion that doesn't contain "whitener" as light skin is seen as beautiful here.

Both of these traits I had already read about before I got here, but recently we discovered another thing that the Vietnamese find beautiful.

One of our friends, who is naturally quite pretty, recently started putting up the strangest profile pictures on facebook. When she came over to our house, Elena asked her why she had been putting up pictures that made her look so funny

"Ahh yes, I've been trying to take pictures with my eyes as wide as possible" she said, "I look great right! Everyone has been saying how big my eyes are!"

Since then, I've started noticing lots of pictures on facebook of people trying hard to look like owls.

Now that we realise this, we see "eye-widening" procedures everywhere. In opticians, they have glasses and contact lenses designed to make you appear like you have bigger, rounder eyes, and procedures you can have that make your eyes bigger.

All in the name of beauty.

Tonights piece is the envelope for Usagi and the Artist.

I really loved how this came out and how it complemented the original piece, which is inside.  I only used medium Fineliner, which is quite thick, and I'm really pleased with how the bold lines make me look like a confident artist. I would usually be rather shy with my lines, using the thinnest fineliner possible. I think that the bolder lines look much more, well, bold.

This piece comes from a story called "On the brink of life and death"  I managed to miss another day yesterday and today I almost missed another but dragged this one out by skipping a few details and going for black and white after making a mess of the flowers in the foreground.  Part of the 365 discipline is learning to accept that every day you can't be perfect, but when it comes to art you rarely are. The more you make the more perfect ones you will make

Another favourite manga of mine is Deathnote by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata.

This is the investigator, the mysterious L. He's my favourite character.

Yesterday, 2 people mentioned L to me, and I decided that this must be a sign and I drew him. We organised an art making meetup at our house this evening and this was made while chatting and eating with some of our new Vietnamese friends. Nothing like making art with company

Elena and I are both huge fans of Hayao Miyazaki and I've not drawn much of his stuff. Tonight we were going through the Studio Ghibli facebook page and were totally inspired to do a series of watercolour images. As I've mentioned before, she does all the colours and I do the lines in this partnership, so my 365 piece for today is the lines of Totoro. Tomorrow We should see this baby coloured in!

By now you'll already know that I'm a huge fan of Stan Sakai and his Usagi Yojimbo character, who he has been drawing for more than 25 years. I was really sad to hear online that his wife is ill. The comics community has pulled together and are holding an auction to help raise funds for her care. Some of the major players in the comics universe have donated pieces and this one was donated by a fan. Some of the pieces of fan-art really showed the character in a different light and I was intrigued to see fan interpretations. This one ramped up the realism a touch, but was still really true to the original lines that Sakai draws, so I felt it was a good one to have a go at

I decided at the start of the year that 2014 would be the year I learn to code. Having tried and failed to learn to code in the past, I decided to get a little group together. Nothing like a little positive peer pressure to get me through a task. Something like Mailart 365 really... I expected that there wouldn't be a lot of interest in this. I mean a meetup to learn how to code in Python?! Really!?

So imagine my surprise when 20 people signed up to take part!

Where I initially thought that I'd easily be able to fit 5 people in my kitchen for weekly geek practice, I ended up having to ask a Hanoi startup, Codelovers, if we could borrow their offices and they kindly agreed, so last week we had our initial code study group and it was a huge success! It turned out that the combination of learning English and coding was a great mix. There was a mixture of beginner coders and code ninjas, as well as a good mix of fluent English and learners, who all worked together to get through the first of the 12 weeks of the course.

This postcard was made for one of my co-hosts, Tùng. The other co-host is actually Seahorse The initial suggestion to study Python on Udacity was Tùng's and he's already taken the course and is a Python expert as well as a huge fan of learning, so he came along to help out and has been an absolute champ!

On another note, since coming to Hanoi, my relationship with mailart has changed. Where before I considered mailart to be any piece of art that can get through the post, since getting here I have had to come to terms with the fact that the postal service isn't very reliable. As a result, I've taken to giving postcards to people in person, and now feel that the spirit of mailart is in the giving of art. Since getting to Hanoi, I've been talking about mailart to people and have noticed a marked increase in people giving art to each other as a result of talking to me. It's great!

This session of 365 I want to take a few more chances and draw a few pieces by artists I "don't think I can do". The first of these artists is the manga artist Goseki Kojima, whose work with the writer Kazuo Koike on the seminal "Lone Wolf and Cub" is one of my favourite stories ever.  His artwork is so precise, so perfect and so filled with emotion that I never even dared to try and draw his work.  But with 365 pieces to make, it makes sense to try things that may not be exactly perfect, so here's my first attempt at a Goseki Kojima piece.  This scene comes from the final battle field, where we see Daigoro, the cub standing on the battefield with his fathers sword and in the ground alongside that of his archnemesis. The swords in the ground are a warriors promise that the battle would resume. Only one warrior would walk away.  The final battle scene is I think the longest in comics history and is exquisitely crafted, both by the writer and the artist. Every frame is electric. I hope that I've managed to capture even a tiny bit of the essence of Goseki Kojima's exquisite brushwork

The 11th of January and I've already fallen behind. This one feels a little incomplete but is very pretty. I'm torn between leaving as is and adding more detail. What do you reckon?

Tonight I started work on my 365 piece at about 10PM. I have just started following Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi Yojimbo on facebook, and was delighted to see new Usagi pages in his photos. I was blown away by this one though, and had to start drawing it. I'll be doing various versions of it this week.

 

I've only been in Hanoi for about 4 months, but it seems that many folk in Hanoi know that I rather like postcards. This is no surprise as I presented a Pecha Kucha talk on my REAL wall project about a month after I landed, and it seems that every English-speaking person in Hanoi went to that talk.

At about midnight, after I'd lain down the pencil lines and was ready to start inking it in fineliner, I got a notification on facebook from one of my new Vietnamese friends. An announcement had been made on the facebook Hanoi Massive group, that read:

"If anyone's looking for something to give them that warm fuzzy feeling - A friend of a friend has a terminally ill daughter in Paris who loves receiving postcards from all around the world. If you feel like doing something super wonderful yet super easy, write a friendly message (NOT with any reference to sickness! Just something like "Hello Sohane! We're sending you big hugs and kisses from [where + your name]").

Her name and address:
Sohane Azzouz
31 rue des Messiers
95100
Argenteuil
France

Not silly internet rubbish, it's all true, my friend is connected with her family.
Cheers Y'all. X"

and I had been tagged to draw my attention to it. As I hadn't lain down the ink yet, I figured, shucks why not, and changed the names to bring a smile to a stranger. That's what mailart is about after all. So this one is going to Sohane.

If you have nobody to send to today, why not make someone's day today and send Sohane a postcard too.