This is the second of six postcards I painted for friends whilst on holiday in Spain recently. On our way to the beach one day we were stopped by a time share saleswoman. She proceeded to give us the spiel before excitedly announcing that we’d won…
This is the second of six postcards I painted for friends whilst on holiday in Spain recently. On our way to the beach one day we were stopped by a time share saleswoman. She proceeded to give us the spiel before excitedly announcing that we’d won something and we had to all go together to some hotel down the road for four hours yawn blah yack yack….
We walked on to the beach where I did some doodling. From that doodling emerged this postcard, inspired by the timeshare saleswoman. It’s a mix of water colour and pencil and I enjoyed painting it, though I wonder if I might have been better off using acrylic paint for the lettering – water colour doesn’t really lend itself to such solid colour detail type work, at least not in my hands!
We read a lot of stuff about how important it is to switch off when you go on holiday. Well this year I decided balls to that, and though my location in Southern Spain only offered 3G iPhone access which curtailed my blogging activity, I stayed online. And I had a blast – and judging by the feedback and interaction from friends on facebook, instagram and twitter – there was some useful fun being had.
I confess I did answer two or three emails – brief responses were being respectfully requested from a company who have this week become a new client. I can live with that. And the vast majority of our time away was spent sight seeing, splashing, sunning and swigging. It was very much a dip in dip out approach to the online world.
Now I’m back home I am posting the results of my 2012 holiday postcards here over the next few days and I’d also like to share a couple of fun tools I’ve been introduced to as well.
A few weeks back Laurie Ruettimann shared Flipagram with us. It’s a simple slideshow app which packages up your instagram holiday, or indeed any other kind of pics nicely. Here’s my first attempt at playing with it with some holiday pics, and I can see how you could use this tool for sharing stuff at conferences, from work projects etc.
Something else I found which I like the look of is Printstagram. This little beauty creates prints and sticker books and other cool stuff from your instagram photos. A pack of 250 stickers costs ten bucks plus twelve bucks shipping from US to UK. I’ve ordered a sticker book based on our Spanish adventures, can’t wait to see the results – I’m already thinking of lots of possible ways to develop this idea for promotions, thank yous and other stuff besides.
So can you go on holiday, remain digitally connected and have a proper break? Well for sure we had a great time and came back feeling refreshed, and we had a lot of fun with the online world in a way that perhaps you only can when you’re on holiday. Thanks to everyone who *liked* our beer of the day and other offerings :), see you for more in 2013.
For the second year I’ve made an open offer for people to receive a hand painted postcard from my summer holiday. This is the first of my 2012 series of postcards, conceived after visiting the Picasso Museum in Malaga. The girl could be my daughte…
For the second year I’ve made an open offer for people to receive a hand painted postcard from my summer holiday. This is the first of my 2012 series of postcards, conceived after visiting the Picasso Museum in Malaga. The girl could be my daughter Keira who thinks the best part of a summer holiday is being near a beach or a pool. Her hair and the sandy stripes on the beach were particularly time consuming to paint and I used barely any water in the paint to achieve the solid colour. On reflection I may have found it easier to paint these parts in acrylic – the experience has certainly got me thinking about how to mix different materials.
The postcard was sent to Alison Chisnell. I hope you enjoy the finished product, I will share the rest of the series in the coming days.
