Postcrossing Blog

Stories about the Postcrossing community and the postal world

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Rose Wong is a New York-based illustrator whose work can be found in the popular Flower Box set, and in the pages of The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and more.

On the left half of the image, Rose's set of 10 flower postcards are spread out on the floor. On the right, Rose laughs to the camera in her studio

Last year, Clarisse (aka CStar9) caught up with Rose via web-cast in her Brooklyn studio. All the art pictured in this interview is Rose’s work!

A heavily stylized illustration of several buildings. Through the windows, you can see the inhabitants doing all sorts of things
When did you first identify as a visual artist? You’ve said that as a child, you used to make intricate drawings in Microsoft Paint.

I’ve always been a visual artist. It was something I just liked doing. No one prompted me to do it. I really wish I had the forethought of saving all those MS Paint drawings I made back then, but it was a different time.

Deciding to go to school for visual art was a more serious step. I didn’t even know what illustration was. Drawing, right? Fine art drawing? But then I did research and saw it was more along the lines of what I thought I wanted to do.

A minimalistic illustration of a house lifting from the ground. A person is suspended between the flying house and a trap door that just opened on the ground where the house stood.

That was a huge leap of faith for me, and for my parents who were funding me through school. My parents immigrated from China before I was born. I’m the oldest child, and they hadn’t really gone to college, so I was the first. I had cousins who had done the STEM career thing, and my parents just said, “You shouldn’t do that. You should do what you’re best at. Yeah, you should do art.”

When I graduated, I did a couple of editorials here and there — commercial jobs like book covers. But I was still very much in the student zone, figuring out my style and getting a footing in what it meant to work for clients.

I think I really became a visual artist when I started working full-time in 2018. I had been laid off from my job. And I was worried, because I didn’t ever make the decision to go freelance. I just started doing it. About a year later, when I started getting consistent jobs, I thought, oh, wait, I’m professionally a visual artist now.

The New York Times was my first client. They’ve been my repeat client ever since.

The 10 postcards in the Flower Box that represent you are “Blue No. 1” through “Blue No. 10”. Can you tell us about the roots of these cards?

Initially the drawings were black and white. But they said another artist in the box was already doing black and white, and they thought two black and white sets would be confusing. So I was like, you know what, I do sometimes draw in blue, so I digitally changed it — my inspiration being Chinese porcelain.

That was in 2017, before I did as much digital work. I was drawing from life. I used to go to the Botanic Garden to draw, after days at my full-time job. That was my oasis.

We can see some plants in one of my recent sketchbooks: these are drawn with gel pen on Moleskine.

Rose showcases one of her notebooks. Both sides are covered in drawings, featuring geometric renditions of plants
Is that sketchbook gridded? How on earth do you make such straight lines?

Sometimes you find materials that are just right for you. Grids have informed my drawing a lot. It also just makes my brain feel good to draw straight lines and to fill in in black. I use a ruler now, but all my plant stuff in 2017 was pre-ruler, just using the grid. It was all very neat. That’s what I think adds to the “design”-ness of my work. It’s not just free-form.

This is my most recent still-life. You can see it’s a return to less linear.

Rose holds up her sketchbooks, featuring plant drawings
What do you think is responsible for that shift?
A minimalistic illustration of leaves floating around. In the center, a tiny person can be seen, surrounded by the leaves

In my craft, even for editorial, I always start off drawing. I let myself be really scribbly with pencil and paper. When you move to Illustrator, everything gets straighter and tighter. So, working from analog paper to digital — the digital has now affected how I do the analog.

In my early editorials, I was trying to imitate the tight aesthetic of digital, and it was really difficult. Illustrator has taught me how to create shapes. It’s so funny to say that, but shapes didn’t come as naturally to me when I was drawing freely. I was just drawing what I was seeing. But then I started to see the flowers and plants I was drawing as squares, circles, ovals.

Of course lately there’s a desire to go back to natural, because I feel like maybe I’m too stiff now when I draw. I’m rulering everything and making it too perfect. So, analog and digital really affect each other for me. The two are in conversation, constantly.

How do you go from observing something to creating art on the page?
An illustration showing four sets of books that seem to portray fantastical worlds, with characters and scenery coming out of them

I graduated from Pratt Institute in 2014, and I got my first job working at Fishs Eddy, which is a kitchenware store. I was the assistant to the product designer and visual merchandising designer, so I was working both upstairs and downstairs of the store. I had learned Illustrator in school but had never applied it. So, during this time I was turning a lot of traditional drawings into vectors in Illustrator, to be printed onto ceramic ware. I was doing that for hours — just, like, tracing a floral design — as my job. And I got really good at Illustrator, and at the pen tool!

But also at that time, I was doing a lot of location drawings with my partner and some friends who had a plein air club. I was starting to develop a style by looking closely and trying to simplify what I was seeing. Now I do image research by spending a lot of time with books, bookstores, and museums. My partner, who is a book designer, is really good about this. Before, I would just look at one thing and then try to create something. Now I’m trying to be more intentional. When I was doing my most recent zine, I had six books laid out on the floor. As much as I love my folder of Instagram saves, it’s so nice to have books around, so I’m not searching through my computer for my inspirations. I have them all together in one place that’s real.

What’s your relationship to snail mail, or to paper and stationery in general? rosewong12

It’s so funny, because I love receiving stationery. I love collecting postcards. I love the images. But I don’t write many letters. I save all the wonderful postcards and little notes sent by my friends who love letter writing and care packages. I am terrible at making time to write little notes, but it might one day click for me.

Can you tell us about your Lookbook project?
A collection of very minimalistic fashion drawings

Lookbook was born during COVID. I got burnt out doing a lot of COVID drawings for client work. I felt like I had no attention span to make art for myself anymore. So, for Lookbook, I gave myself like a set of parameters. I wanted a project that was basically about repeating something small and eventually amassing something bigger. I was already doing these little girl drawings and fashion drawings and repeating them in my sketchbook.

So, here you see basically the origins of Lookbook.

Rose holds up her sketchbook, to show some of her stylized fashion drawings

Then I moved to doing these in Illustrator, which was a lot quicker than drawing them. I would do them in batches of 7 to 10 and post one a day. It was a way for me to quickly create little moments of art: inspiration about this color green, or this shape I saw in real life, or a vegetable I saw that I thought was really nice. I’d try to treat my Lookbooks as if I was drawing in my sketchbook, trying not to delete anything and just keep building. And being like, okay, I’m not going to fuss over them — I’ll just move on to the next one if I have a better idea.

This is not a question but a comment: Please tell your agent that Lookbook should be packaged as a set of postcards.

I’ve had people say, you should make stickers out of this. But I’m holding out for the book first! It’d be so cool for a digital project to come back around to analog, as a book, like we were talking about before. I should reach out to book agents, but that involves all this bureaucratic stuff that artists don’t like to think about when they are making things.

What’s something you’re proud of, outside of your drawing?
A small flower vase or jar made of ceramic, with a tile-like pattern

I’m really proud of my ceramics. When I got laid off in 2018, my friend and I decided to take a ceramics class that we’d already been wanting to do. It was a two-month class. And I said, that’s a great idea — I need structure. I did it as a “treat myself” sort of thing. But then I just fell in love and never stopped! It has woven seamlessly into my life and changed it in ways I never could have imagined.

For me it’s a respite from digital. My ceramics are also different from my illustration because they’re very decorative. I’m finding more ways to simplify patterns within my own language. I’m building my world through actual objects, which is so different than doing it on paper.

So yeah, I’m really proud of that. I also think it kind of links to the idea of postcards, because postcards obviously have a function, but they’re very decorative. The function is what gets it out into the world, but the decoration is why you want to send it. At the end of day, a ceramic piece holds water, plants, or pencils, and but it can also be just simply pretty.

What’s a new project you’re excited about? Or something you’re working towards?
Rose holds up her sketchbook, showing some of her most recent work

Well, I recently just finished my new zine for the Brooklyn Art Book Fair. I do riso printing with my friends from school in a project called TXTbooks. Zines and bookmaking allow me the space to explore something that I’m interested in, in a longer format, which in this case is architecture and imagined spaces.

In my zines there are no words — it’s really a free-form experience — a non-linear narrative. I want it to be an immersive journey. I love feeling like I’m capturing moments in my work.

Otherwise, I am excited to do more ceramics stuff. And I’ve been making a little foray into furniture and other bigger pieces. I’m just really excited to do… everything!

To learn more about Rose, check out her website and Instagram pages! You can also read about her roots as a digital artist, or about fashion and creativity in her recent Lookbook project.


And now, for the traditional giveaway, Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from the Flower Box set to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, leave a comment below to share your favorite illustrator that should have a postcard box made with their art (but hasn’t yet)! Come back this time next week to check out the winners!

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Today we bring you a heartwarming and international friendship story, made of many postcards, emails, meetups attended together… and Kofola, a soft drink from Czech Republic!

Anni (aka stetsflauschig) tells the story:

"So I want to share about my longest Postcrossing friendship, which is still holding up! 😊

I think it started in 2014, when I organized the first Postcrossing meeting in my city, Dresden. Back in those days my username was Fireblossom. My dear friend Vladena (ybur) attended the meeting with her two daughters and some other Czech postcrossers. It was such a lovely time and I was invited to join a Czech meeting in the same year, which I did. Everybody was so wonderful and welcoming, which was an amazing thing for me because in that time my mental health wasn’t good and I was a bit afraid about the long trip and all the people I didn’t know yet. But there was not a single bad moment and everyone was so kind, especially Vladena. She took care of me like a mother would, which I am so thankful for!

kofola

Vladena and her daughters also invited me to visit them in their home city, Prague, which I did several times in the following years. It became tradition that she would come to Dresden when I hosted another meeting, and I joined some other Czech meetings as well.

From the start, we developed a little fun thing about a Czech drink named Kofola, which I really love! Vladena would always bring at least one bottle to Dresden to make me happy, we would exchange cards from holidays and write a lot of emails. I was updated about the birth and growth of her first grandchild, and shared pictures and events from my life with her, too. It almost felt like she would be an aunt of mine, party of my “real” family, a wise and gentle woman which I could talk to and that would always think about me and send me a card or email that often arrived in times when I really needed something to cheer me up.

In the following years, the Dresden meeting grew bigger and bigger, one year we had more than 70 participants from 4 different countries… Vladena sometimes didn’t have time to join us, but when she did, it was always a true highlight to meet her again in person and just spend some nice hours together. In 2020, we had to cancel the meeting because of the pandemic, which was really sad, and in 2021 I moved away and therefore stopped hosting the meetings. We stayed in contact nonetheless, exchanging emails and cards. Even though it sometimes would take one of us several weeks or even months to respond, it always feels like I just met her a few days before when a new email or card arrived. We are currently trying to meet up again in Prague, I wanted to visit her and her family again for a long time, but life keeps us quite busy. But there is a lot of understanding and I am sure, next year we will make it!

2016 DresdenPCMeeting

This friendship has been truly precious for me and I will try to keep it up and meet her again as often as possible. It is one of the reasons why I love Postcrossing so much, because I learned a lot though her and all the wonderful people I have met in the meetings, especially the Czech ones. It is a special way of bringing people from different nations together who share an interest, which many people nowadays may just smile about, but the Postcrossing community is still strong and so wonderful! For me, attending the meetings, especially in another country, were a big step in overcoming my fears of traveling so far and meeting strangers. Strangers became friends, like Vladena and I did, and I still feel very close to her, even if she is far away – but when a card from her arrives in my mailbox, all that distance doesn’t matter at all."

Thank you Anni and Vladena, for sharing your story with the community! 😊

If you’ve made some good friends through Postcrossing, let us know — we love hearing these stories and sharing them here on the blog, now and then.

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The cover of Kitty Burn Florey's book on handwriting, showing an exercise book and a fountain pen

One of my Christmas presents this year was a book on handwriting: Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, by Kitty Burns Florey. It wasn’t a hint about my handwriting, though it’d probably be fair enough if it was: this book has been on my wishlist for a while to review here on Postcrossing’s blog! So that’s what I’ll be talking about this time.

One of the reasons I got curious about handwriting is that, when I look at the postcards I receive, I can sometimes tell what country it’s from just based on the handwriting. Which makes sense: some countries have strong traditions of teaching handwriting in schools, while others don’t, and being taught not just how to write but how to write a specific “hand” tends to produce similarities across those taught. We were taught some degree of handwriting in school, as part of recognising letters and reading handwriting, and I do remember being allowed to use ink for the first time… but I know my handwriting was vastly different to those of my peers (though near-identical with my sister’s as long as I’m using my right hand—my handwriting with my left hand is more like my father’s!).

Kitty Burns Florey’s book digs into some of this, mostly from the point of view of the US. It starts off back with styluses and Phoenician characters, discusses gothic script, etc, but quickly gets onto chapter two: “The Golden Age of Penmanship”. This features Platt Rogers Spencer (“the father of American handwriting”) in 1800, A.N. Palmer in 1904 or so, and a few related teachers. Not even really a peek of whether Spencer and Palmer’s methods were used outside the US as well, which was a bit disappointing—this part of the book could really have addressed the stuff I’m curious about, but the geographical limitation didn’t help here.

The next part of the book discusses graphology: whether personality peeks through your handwriting, and whether your character can be analysed by looking at what you write. This makes a certain amount of sense to me—people who write with flourishes and exuberance always seem more extroverted, while a rounded hand always looks almost cuddly to me… But obviously I don’t think anyone should be convicted as a criminal based on their handwriting (unless it matches a forged cheque or something), or denied housing because of it! (Apparently a thing in some countries!?) So this section was pretty interesting, though it feels to me like graphology goes too far.

The last two chapters try to deal with a big question: is handwriting still important in a digital age? Well, I think most of us here would say that handwriting isn’t exactly dead yet, given the number of handwritten postcards we receive! And probably I should improve my handwriting (especially for my left hand)… There are some lovely examples included which make me feel pretty jealous.

Overall, it was a quick read, and it was definitely interesting to learn a bit more about the ways handwriting has developed, even if it was pretty focused on the US. Not an absolute favourite for me, though!

My next book review will probably be of a new fantasy novel called A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall. It’s due out soon, and it sounds wonderful, and features a romance between penpals. After that, I’ll probably write up a review of Lynn M. Kolze’s Please Write, which she kindly sent me a copy of. But I’m always keen to hear ideas for my next reads, so feel free to drop by the forum thread for making book suggestions! You might need to spend some time browsing the forum before that section opens up, but after that we’d love to hear your suggestions there.

Happy reading!

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Sometime ago, we stumbled on this unexpected topic on the forum, where postcrosser Meowpurr tells her adventures of mailing postcards from the deepest postbox in Germany… so of course, we were intrigued and wanted to bring it over to the blog, so that more of you learned about it. Here she is, ready to take us all along on a dive into the deep unknown!

"As someone who loves both postcards and the underwater world, you guys can imagine I’m thrilled to announce that… Germany finally has its own underwater mailbox!

It’s 19 meters deep inside Kreidesee Hemmoor, a lake north of Hamburg, and a genuine Divers’ Disneyland. The water is very clear (for a lake 😉), the lake is ~60m deep, full of things to explore underwater, and it’s only open for divers — no regular swimming allowed! 19 meters deep makes the mailbox significantly deeper than this wonderful place I can’t wait to visit too.

A little over a week ago, a freediving festival took place at the lake, and this is why I was there too. Not knowing anything about the new mailbox, I was busy from mornings to evenings doing workshops, making new friends… Doing regular things like repairing cars…

A diver inspects the engine of a car underwater. The car is covered in algae

… when a diving friend from Berlin texted me that the lake’s Facebook account had just posted the glorious news! I don’t remember ever letting him know about my postcard shenanigans, so I guess I must have given him a drunk post-dive speech about postcards and stamps (I guess you all know what it’s like). Well, good thing I did! I started my little side quest to find the mailbox, and tadaaa:

A German mailbox is seen underwater, hung on a railing

It even states the collection time (“weekly”), tells us that waterproof postcards can be bought at the reception, and that it’s Germany’s deepest mailbox:

A close-up of the collection times posted on the mailbox

The next side quest began because my tight festival schedule hardly allowed me to visit the reception with its constant queue of arriving scuba divers (but of course I made it happen ), and because said reception had screwed up buying waterproof pens for their waterproof postcards! I tested the one they sold me in the sink: came off straight away 😱 They did have a thick green one I could borrow – good enough, but I was so relieved the addresses I drew didn’t have a delicate script like Chinese!

By the time I mailed the cards on the last festival day my legs felt completely useless and I was frozen – it was those cold days in the midst of the heat wave, with only 22°C air temperature and only 12°C in the 20m depth region. Mailing those cards was the very last thing I did before literally breaking down.

The card itself is posted without the stamp, so the diving mail carriers (?) attach it themselves. Of course I reminded the receptionist that international mail requires more postage than national, haha, postcrossers’ paranoia… Would have loved to see their faces when they saw one of their first postcards is going all the way to Vietnam!

Now, this is the card:

A postcard featuring a shark, surrounded by divers

And this is it, Postcrossing reaching new depths! 🎉

Meowpurr is seen underwater, mailing her postcard Meowpurr is seen underwater, mailing her postcard

And there’s a happy ending too: the first card arrived! I can’t wait to go back and mail some more, and I hope I get to spot some more underwater mail on people’s walls!"

Good news! More recently, Meowpurr went back to the lake armed with a few waterproof pens and wrote some more postcards, which have also arrived. At €6 per postcard, this is not a cheap endeavor… but a fun one, for sure! 🤿

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Did you notice that the 2023 campaign of Cards for Literacy with Deutsche Post had one extra day for postcards to arrive this year? 😍 While a single day might not make a huge difference*, all of these postcards together are undoubtedly going to have a meaningful impact in a lot of people’s lives! Here’s how the campaign went this year:

Postcrossers in Germany sent a total of 120,783 postcards during December, raising €12,078.30 for Stiftung Lesen!
An artistic impression of a child sitting on a dove that is part dove, part plant or flower

What a great result this is! Well done, everyone! There’s so much promise in these numbers… so much good that can come from improving a person’s reading skills — and thus their whole outlook in life!

As always, a huge thank you to Deutsche Post, for partnering with the Postcrossing community and making this possible. We’ve now been running this campaign together for 11 years, if you can believe it, helping fun Stiftung Lesen on their various programs and research projects. We usually think of children when we think of reading problems, but did you know that there are about 6,2 million adults in Germany who cannot read properly? It’s hard to overstate how important this skill is in everyday life — from progressing in a career to living an independent life, it all starts with reading. So it’s important that those who need help improving their reading skills can receive it, and Stiftung Lesen and its partners are there to help.

And now, to wrap things up, Paulo run his script and randomly choose 6 winners to receive vouchers for the Deutsche Post shop. The winner of the big €100 voucher is Feuermaus99, and the five winners of the €50 vouchers are kuchenfee, Tazzdevil, Thekilein, Kamila_Dawid and Morle-Maus .Congratulations! 🎉 You’ll receive an email from us shortly!

(*) 140 postcards were registered on February 29, so not that few! 😊