Posted by Annalee Beer on Mar 7, 2018 in Blog | 3 comments

Hi everyone! It has been a little while since I’ve posted. Last time I wrote here it was a couple of months ago and I mentioned a project I was starting about printing up postcards with linework of Brisbane City. Its been a good project so far! I had the linework of the city printed up. I aim to colour in at least one a day. Most days I leave the house and I place them somewhere in Southbank. There was a week or so in there where I was very depressed and leaving the house was difficult, but I was still making the cards, so I have a little backlog of them now, which is comfortable. I have distributed 22 cards so far, and I have approximately 10 more competed.

I’m going to post about my first five cards here:

This is the first image in the series. It was coloured with acrylic paint. As the caption suggests I was feeling incredibly depressed that day. I had plans to do this project quite some time before I made the first one. So I sat down on the balcony and took in the view, and some combination of my lack of motivation and the lighting of the day made this view, which should by all rights be a beautiful scene into something that was just… uninspiring and bland? It was genuinely difficult to tell how much this was actually true, and how much my mood was impacting my impression of the view.

This image was created with oil pastels and a little marker to add some definition. Again the caption explores my mood of the day, and how my mood was colouring my impression of the landscape. Some days the sadness just weighs me down and it is hard to do much of anything. It was a struggle to get the motivation to create this one.

This one was a better day mood wise. The day was overcast, there was not a lot of colour in the view. If I remember correctly the colour for the river was a good amount of titanium white, black, burnt umber and a green. There was a feeling of satisfaction when I got the colour right. The Brisbane river is famously muddy, and I really did feel that this piece captures an essence of the city. The caption is humorous, but accurate. It was the sort of sentiment I thought that locals might enjoy.

This fouth picture was created using coloured pencils with acrylic paint. I was looking at the river when I started this piece with the coloured pencils, though afterwards I took the postcard away from the balcony to add the acrylic paint, adding some fantasy to the image. I enjoyed the pink highlights, and I added some green and blue into the river, I enjoyed the look of the thing.

I wanted to put some beadwork into one of these images, as beadwork is one of my primary mediums, and is genuinely important to me. I started the piece with coloured pencil and then embroidered beadwork onto the card. Of the approximately 30 cards that I have made so far, this has been the only one which uses beadwork. Going back and looking at this piece makes me feel that I should be doing more of these cards with beadwork, so, that is something that I’m going to do.

I’ve been leaving the cards around southbank, for people to pick up and take home with them. Its been a great project so far. I’ve been really pleased with how it is going.

I’ve been taking photographs of each work and turning them into prints. They’re being made available on my Etsy store as prints on beautiful ethically sourced sustainable canadian wood. A goal of this project is to create widely varied work from the same base image, where the body of work still resonates with my ‘voice’ as an artist.

Here is a link to the section of my Etsy store with my Brisbane City wood prints.