Sending Watercolour Postcards : Does Size Matter?

The general answer is yes but the specific answer is not really!

Postcards and Christmas cards have fairly well established dimensions. For most postcards it is 4 by 6 inches, or roughly 10 by 15 centimetres. However, postcards are not exclusively this size but generally close and our Australian post office machinery for sorting mail handles this size easily. Assuming you card is stiff enough, 200gsm plus, you just need to put a stamp on the back with the address, don’t forget the postcode, and post.

Christmas cards typically have a variety of sizes, but 5 by 7 inch, or roughly12.5 by 17.5 cms, is a popular size. These cards are designed to be sent in a suitably sized envelope, which are usually supplied with the cards. Such larger envelopes by themselves can be hard to find and it might be best to find the envelopes first before embarking on larger cards.

Australia post have size and weight limits and standard post is now $1.50 for up to 13 by 24 cms and up to 5mm thick. 200 gsm paper is around 2mm thick and 300 gsm paper a fraction over 3mm thick but thickness varies by manufacturer and composition.

Australia post still offer cheaper rate 65c for card only posting around Christmas. I believe they now only sell the stamps in pack of 10 (ie $6.50) and I believe you still need to leave the envelope unseal and write card only on the back. Interestingly, Australian Post allow larger sizes for “season cards”, up to 26 by 34cm and up to 20mm thick, in November and December. So this might be an option if you make you own cards and send out several.

Here is a table of common sized option

Watercolour postcard	Either commercial watercolour or homemade postcards	10 by 15cm ~(9 by 17cm)	☑
A6 postcard		10.5 by 14.8cm	☑
Half A5 postcard	cut in half	14.8 by 21cm/2 =>10.5 by 14.6cm	☑
Quarter A4	cut into four	21 by 29.7cm/4 =>10.5 by 14.6cm	☑
A4 Card	Folded into quarters in envelope	~11 by 15cm	☑
A5 Card	Sent as is in envelope	14.8 by 21cm	⮽?☑ Only in Nov./Dec.

What Brands of Watercolour Postcard are Available and Where?

There are several brands of premade blank watercolour postcards. Here are a few I’ve used.  My favourite is Hahnemuhle which comes in a very nice little tin of 30 sheets, which is easy to pack when I'm travelling. I bought a couple of tins many years ago at a gallery in Fish Creek which is now closed. Unfortunately, this paper then proved hard to source. Recently I noticed that it is now available at The Art Shop in Bayswater.

Another brand of postcard paper I have used extensively is Winslow which I think is only carried by Eckersley’s. I originally bought a pad in Queensland. I think it is a wood pulp paper rather than cotton but it is a very robust 300gsm card. The pad only contains 15 cards, so it is not the cheapest option per card but often available at a discount price in-store.

 Last year I purchased a different brand in a tin called Potentate. It’s supposedly 100% cotton 300 gsm with 24 blank sheets in the tin and comes from China. I bought it from Amazon as it was on special, possibly $15, which was enough to give me free freight on an larger order. I like it but have not been able to find a supplier in Australia and it no longer seems available through  Australian Amazon.

Finally a large number of the postcards I have sent were "homemade", possibly more than half, and particularly the many birthday cake postcards that I sent to the WSV members during lockdowns, These handmade postcards, were just watercolour paper just to size. My YouTube below makes me cringe a bit at the video quality, I made it at the beginning of the Covid locked-downs. Hopefully, it may give you context as to why I like original hand painted watercolour postcards.

Whenever I am cutting up watercolour paper I try to keep any pieces that are roughly 10 by 15 cms in the little folder I made for my Canadian trip and carry this with my plein air gear. This size is great for quick sketches, value or colour studies even when they’re not intended to be postcards.

Can you Send Watercolour Paper Safely in the Post?

I have actually sent a lot of postcards unprotected through the post. From such diverse locations as Canada the UK, Northern Europe, Africa, South Asia, Brazil and even far northern Queensland with just the stamp on the back and an address, without problem. A few took a while to arrive, particularly through the Covid 19 lockdowns. In one late delivery, I had forgotten to add the postcode!

Being watercolour and paper many people worry they are not strong enough and will suffer water damage to smudge or lift the painting. Yes, water damage is a real potential problem but within Australia, the Postal Service does have a pretty good track record. Of course, providing the recipient has a waterproof mailbox!

Concerning the robustness of any watercolour postcard it depends mainly on the thickness and weight of the paper. Cotton-based watercolour papers are actually quite robust but I have not tried sending anything less than 200 gsm homemade postcards. Most of the commercial cards are either 230 gsm or 300 gsm. As far as I know, none have arrived scuffed, creased or damaged. Some wood-pulp-based paper in cheaper watercolour pads feels a lot softer and may require posting in an envelope.

Speaking of which you can always put your postcard in an envelope. Standard envelopes available for letters might prove a little tight. Just refold the top flap to accommodate the card’s width. Given envelopes are also made of paper they will not guarantee that there is never a possibility of water or physical damage.

As far as future provenance is concerned, I romantical have the view that future generations, even art historians or curators might enjoy researching the postmarks and stamp designs. Even today something sent through the post is considered quaint and more authentic.

From Frustration to Innovation: Saving a Watercolour Painting Gone Wrong

As artists, we often stumble upon unexpected challenges that lead to creative solutions. I want to share a recent experience that turned a potential disaster into an interesting experiment with old watercolour paper and ground.

Lately, I've been on a mission to use up my old/unused art supplies – particularly my watercolour paper stash. During a recent Wednesday Wanderers session, I pulled out what I thought was my trusty Bockingford paper, a brand I've always appreciated for its forgiving nature. Oh, how wrong I was!

The Problem

As soon as I began applying my usual semi wet-on-wet technique for the background, I knew something was off. Instead of the familiar behavior I expected, the paper acted more like blotting paper – greedily soaking up every drop of pigment. The whole sheet remained stubbornly wet throughout the entire session. Even after drying, the paper was noticeably warped.

I suspected this must have been a forgotten sheet from an ancient pad, likely suffering from deteriorated sizing. But rather than consigning my work to the bin, I saw an opportunity for experimentation.

The Solution

Remember that watercolour ground I'd recently purchased for the VAS 9 by 5 exhibition to paint on wood? That became my saving grace. I decided to apply two very light coats to the troubled paper. While this process did lift some of the original colour (an expected side effect). 

The improvement in the paper's surface was remarkable.

The Result

The experiment proved successful! The watercolour ground not only rescued my painting but also gave the paper a second life. It's fascinating how often our artistic "mistakes" can lead to discovering new techniques and solutions.

Key Takeaways:

• Don't be too quick to discard "failed" paintings

• Old art supplies might surprise you (not always pleasantly!)

• Watercolour ground isn't just for wood – it can rehabilitate problematic paper too

• Sometimes the best discoveries come from trying to fix our mistakes

Has anyone else experienced similar issues with aged watercolor paper? I'd love to hear about your creative solutions to art supply challenges!

Originally shared on Instagram.

Waiting for better colour tools

Photographic software, particularly editing software, has been dominated by adjusting the RGB Red Green Blue numbers. But human perception of colour is slightly more complex in capturing filtered colours on a light sensor under bayer filters or viewing a screen of  LEDs light emittingdiodes, coloured red green and blue-ish . Further  many graphic artist had complained mixing coloursd in graphic software,  doesn’t necessarily create the same colours that you would expect in a mix using pigment paints.

In the end I had to just live with these limitations.

However things are changing a few graphic applications will now more naturally mix pigments for graphic software. What I wish to discuss here is a surprise addition to the update 1.21 to Lumina Neo. It includes a new section called Color Harmony. The two top sliders will be very familiar to ligthroom Photoshop users but with slight different colours on the top slider, which is not called Tint but Brilliance. Instead of starting at green and moving to a magenta it runs for a bluish grey green to a red. I suspect is colour harmony is very much inspired/controlled by the NCS system which still dominates many European countries.

Colour Contrast is something I will also discuss later as it deserves a bit more investigation.

Split colour versions of pigments, as warmer or cooler versions when mixing intermediate colours, have been a long standing practise of how artists have traditionally bought a lot of drama and harmony  into their artisticworks. On a flat surface, like a painting or photograph, cool colours tend to recede warm colours tend to come forward.  

Portrait photographs have known this even back in the film days. Using various filters of coloured lights to enhance their work and bring the sitter to life. In the smartphone world there are “warmify” apps to liven your selfie and deeply buried option on most digital cameras to alter th colour temperature of the photo output. Cannon is renowned for their “warmer” sensors. These digital tools usually apply to the whole image

Why these Split Colour Warmth sliders are different they change warm and cool components of your picture separately. This is a bigger deal than I originally thought. Here is a simple example of a young bougainvillea “bloom”, actually just new leaves that are orange before turning magenta, taken at my studio window. I’m a little amazed how much impact can be achieved when you separately adjust the whoops and cool have on the photo. I’m expecting to have a lot of fun with these sliders.

 

Colour Balance adds nuanced refinements, combining tonal/luminance steps with more detail colour adjustments. It is also an area I wish to explore further.

 Finally I should point out the Film Strip at the bottom of my screen capture above, this has been a long asked for addition to Luminar Neo. It allows you to see several thumbnails of adjacent images in the catalogue and you can rate and compare them directly here

Using robot.txt

For decades, website owners could control how search engine crawlers and other software bots interact with their sites. This powerful tool, known as robots.txt, has been an integral part of HTML since its early days. Let's dive into what robots.txt is and how you can use it effectively.

What is robots.txt? It is a simple text file placed in the root directory of your website. It provides instructions to web crawlers about which parts of your site they're allowed to access and index.

How does it work?

 The file typically contains at least two types of instructions:

1. User-agent: Identifies the crawler being addressed
2. Disallow: Specifies which parts of the site the crawler shouldn't access

 A basic example might look like this:

User-agent: *                                    
Disallow: /                                        

The downside of this approach is that Google’s will not Index your website and therefore it won’t be found in any Google searches. Probably not what we want. An alternative is to identify a folder on your website (if you have folders). In this case my images are all stored in the subdiretory /images. 

Disallow: /images/                           

It is easy to make your robot text file much more specific. For example I don’t want chat gtp’s web scraper to go through my website you can stop so I need to know the agent name that OpenAi are using and I got this information from 20i article How to stop AI scraping your website (see see video below) 

User-agent: GPTBot                    
Disallow: /                                    

At this point in time I not sure this approach is reliable because I suspect that a lot of Bots that are scraping the Internet are just ignoring robot text.  it’s clearly a voluntary exercise. However it is one step that demonstrates you want to be opted out of the datasets collected by specific AI developer, which may come in handy in future.

A more regulated way to opt-out os such indiscriminate content scrapping would be nice?

Is AI getting “good enough”?

In two minds about using AI for art works

This is an AI image I created with the prompt above, using google Deep Mind’s latest incarnation of its generative app Imogen-3. it really looks better than most other generative AI. Less overcrowding with intricate but less relevant detail, with consistent lighting and better capturing the emotional direction of my prompt. It was also my only creation with this prompt.

Google claims 

"We’ve significantly improved Imagen 3’s ability to understand prompts, which helps the models generate a wide range of visual styles and capture small details from longer prompts.

To be even more useful, Imagen 3 will be available in multiple versions, each optimized for different types of tasks, from generating quick sketches to high-resolution images."

Ok that’s nice wording google but what does it mean and why do I see such a difference to other prompt generated images

Well perhaps there is a hint right at the end of their hype.

"Imagen 3 was built with our latest safety and responsibility innovations, from data and model development to production.

We used extensive filtering and data labeling to minimize harmful content in datasets and reduced the likelihood of harmful outputs. We also conducted red teaming and evaluations on topics including fairness, bias and content safety.”

Recent developments in AI technology have raised some intriguing questions about data handling, promoting fake news and bias. It appears that at least google is implementing input checking mechanisms on the information they use to train their models. This likely extends to assessing image quality as well, ensuring that the data fed into these systems meets certain standards. Looks “good enough”.

However, this observation leads to a more pressing personal concern: 

Does responsible AI development truly encompass ethical practices across the board? The issue of data collection methods remains a significant point of contention. Are these companies indiscriminately scraping data from various sources without proper consent or consideration?

This brings me to a personal worry many of us share: the privacy of our own data, particularly our photos. With the prevalence of cloud-based photo storage services like Google Photos, and the vast number of images captured and uploaded from mobile devices daily, it's natural to wonder about the security and usage of this data. I worry some companies are "hoovering up" these personal images en masse? If so, what are the implications for our privacy and the control we have over our own digital footprint? 

As consumers and digital citizens, it's important that we stay informed about these practices and advocate for ethical standards in AI development. The balance between technological advancement and personal privacy is delicate, and it's a conversation we need to keep having as AI continues to evolve and integrate into our daily lives.