Before email, Twitter, Facebook, texting and Skype, people sometimes communicated with letters and postcards.  Yes, it’s hard to imagine that some folks actually sat down and wrote with a pen or pencil, but I assure you it happened.

Those old bits of paper look pretty quaint now, but many of them were quite beautiful:  exquisite handwriting on luxurious linen or vellum stationery, or scribbled notes quickly dashed off on postcards, hinting at adventures.

Of course, not all those postcards revealed scenes of exotic lands; sometimes, the picture on the front was of downtown Minneapolis or the state prison in Delaware; perhaps it was a caricature of bathers at the seashore, or an antique photo of cowboys herding cattle in Wyoming.

Lately, I’ve been trying to recreate the look and feel of those old postcards and below are a couple I constructed that were accepted into the recent Leawood, KS juried art show.  The first is a card showing the Pont Royal bridge in Paris.  I’ve also included the original photo from which I created the final image.  The second card is a river scene from near Chalon-sur-Saone, France and the original photo.

A postcard of the Pont Royal bridge, as printed, mounted and distressed to resemble an antique card.

The original photograph, taken from the window of a tour bus in Paris.

The postcard of a river scene along the Rhone River near Chalon-sur-Saone.

The original photo taken from a boat on the River Rhone.