Summer is a great time to be experimenting with fun drawing exercise on postcards sized paintings or drawings. The advantage of this project is that anyone can do it, adults and kids alike and that it doesn’t take much time, plus you can always send a card with a drawing of a place you are visiting by snail mail, it doesn’t happen very often anymore so it will be a nice gesture.

You might also like : Summer Fun: Watercolor Ombre Postcards

To make these distressed graphite cards, you will need:

• A very soft graphite, I used a 9B Derwent pencil
• A white eraser
• Card-stock paper

You can either draw a scene like a landscape, plants… or draw an abstract design.

You can draw a scene at home.

You can draw plants

Or you can draw abstract designs, here a “mandala inspired design”

You might also be interested in  : Zentangle and Mandala Inspired Christmas Cards Ideas

This is a fun drawing exercise that you can enjoy as a family.

I am a Blick Art Materials affiliate and I receive a small compensation for sales. That does not effect in any way the cost of the purchaser’s order but it helps me keeping the content of this blog free.

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Strathmore 400 Series Mixed Media Cards Strathmore’s 400 Series Mixed Media is a heavyweight, 140 lb paper that combines the attributes of a watercolor paper with a vellum drawing finish. Ideal for wet and dry media, these cards accept watercolors, gouache, acrylics, graphite, pen-and-ink, colored pencils, markers, and collage. – 400 Series Mixed Media Cards, Pkg of 100 with FREE Stencil.

This technique will work better if you make the outlines of what you draw very dark, you cam go over them a few times. You can also color in a few areas.

When you are done with the drawing, take the eraser and move it on the surface of the drawing. Here you are not trying to erase lines so much as to smudge lines on the surface of the drawing, so it will work better if you are using a light hand. Some lines will be smudged and some lines will be erased, it will all blend together.

You can decide to erase with straight lines or curved lines and can experiment with both styles.

When you are done, you can erase a bit around the edges of the card to make it look cleaner, and outline or not along that clean edge.

I just erased along the edges without outlining.

Or outline along that clean edge.