Angels Appear
St. Michael the Archangel Postcard
We start with an antique lithograph of Saint Michael the Archangel, who is not a saint at all, but rather an angel, and the leader of all angels, being above all the others in rank. He has four duties, one of which is to combat Satan. It would be nice if sending this postcard right now could help in the fight against evil.
By the way, always check the description area of the Zazzle page if you want to know more about the design on the product. At the time of this writing, and depending on the device through which you are accessing Zazzle, you may find the creator's design description somewhere under the product picture in an area called About this Design. This is not to be confused with the info entitled About this Product. In that area, you can learn about the product--what type of material a shirt is made of, for example, or in the case of postcards, the size of the card, the weight of the paper used and details about the printing process.
If you want to know more about what is going to be printed ON the product, you want to see the info about the design, therefore, you check the About this Design section. Here you can perhaps read about where the art comes from, who made it, why. You might learn about the colors used, or how to change the border, or any number of other interesting tidbits, to the extent that the creator has decided to share this type of info.
Some, but not all, Zazzle creators add useful information in the About this Design section. In the case of this handsome St. Michael postcard, we learn that the illustration comes out of a 1911 book called Red Letter Saints: Being a Series of Biographies of those Saints for which Proper Collects, Epistles and Gospels. This particular Zazzle creator also offers some ideas as to how to alter the postcard design to be more to our liking. Maybe you would like a blue starry background rather than the yellow background shown. You can do that on Zazzle! You can change many designs slightly or completely. (Rarely you will find a design which the creator has locked down, in which case you will not see a button which invites you to edit the design). This creator even goes so far as to share the hex codes used in the lithographs found throughout the book she referenced. (These codes can be used for precise replication of a shade or a color.) Sometimes the creator has added very little info, but it's always worth looking, because the more you know about the product you are considering, the happier you will be with your postcard purchase.
Yellow Angel Postcard
Cute Angels on a Holiday Postcard
Here we have cute and holiday all wrapped up in one super sweet postcard, showing three adorable cherubic angels singing us a religious Christmas carol. This adorable card also happens to be an example of a Zazzle product which does not offer much in the way of description. It's cute and Christmassy and that's about all we know. Any time you want to know more about the image or the design of a Zazzle postcard, you can contact the creator and just ask. Following a few links should get you to a place where you see the name of the creator and a message button.
Pets as Angels on a Postcard
Would any of my blog posts be complete without a look at how a dog or a cat can be worked into just about any subject area, at any time, for any reason? Here, pugs invade the Renaissance. Maybe you recognize these satirical dogs as being quite similar to an ultra famous detail of a painting by one of the top painters of the period. Click through either the pug card or the related card below it, or both, and read the descriptions to find out more.
It's often said that there is no such thing as a new idea in art, and that artists are constantly taking inspiration from wherever they can find it. Iconic art from the sixteenth century offers plenty of ideas and opportunity.
Vintage Angels on a Postcard
Another unending supply of inspiration for postcard creators comes from the greeting card artists of earlier eras. Modern day artists find examples among the massive treasure trove of vintage cards. They might use the design as is, or touch it up some, or slice up the greeting card art and mix and match pieces of it in new ways using a basket from one card, a greeting from another, perhaps superimposing these on a vintage figure from a totally different card. I am guessing this Loving Greeting card with a little curly-haired winged angel and a basket of pink roses is pretty much the same as when originally printed, which may have been around the turn of the century. I am not even sure which holiday this would be for. It might be more of an all occasion postcard.
Remember how I keep telling you that at Zazzle, you can change designs up to make a product more to your taste? I have done that here. The original card was set against a nice blue background, but I decided to try a brown background. And then I wasn't exactly sure about that, so I tried a lighter brown. You can buy the card with either background or with the original blue or you can use white, black or any other color for your background. Whatever change you make, you are still supporting the creator who posted the card.
If Zazzle should send me a penny or two when someone buys something I have carefully chosen to display on this blog, the price stays the same, even in a case where I have altered the postcard design. The card costs nothing extra. For the reader, my quest to find and post some nice cards in which you might be interested, adds nothing to the cost.
This is a more religious vintage card based on what the creator tells us is a painting of two angels with blue and white cloaks holding a gold cord and ringing a bell in the sky. Beyond that, we have little to go on. I changed the card up a little to see what I could do with the border.
Stone Angels on a Postcard
Some of the postcards on Zazzle are photographic creations, such as this photograph of a colonial era church on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Wye Mills. I photographed the church, keeping the church graveyard in the foreground and at the same time, photographed a number of the headstones and sculptures found on site. Later, in what we photographers call post, I enlarged the angel you see here, which was just a small sculpture placed on one of the graves. Then I added her to the photo, making her look like she is watching over the church and all who worship there--and in my mind, watching over everyone. I am not religious, but even I know that we could use a big dose of this kind of help right about now. This card is available at Zazzle, by clicking through. And you can also buy a blue and yellow version of the same postcard.
In addition to changing the design on a postcard, you can also take almost any design you see on Zazzle and transfer it to a different product, especially a postcard. This is because a postcard is a small item, therefore most images found on Zazzle will be large enough to print nicely on a postcard. (All my readers want to support the artists who makes POD sites possible, so rest assured, once again, that the creator still gets credit for sale even when you transfer the art to some other product on Zazzle. Zazzle has coding in place to make sure this happens.)
The aspect will not always match, meaning the length and width arrangement of an image that fits on a certain kind of greeting card may not work on with the length and width of the postcard. In this case, I loved this stone angel so much that I took it from the greeting card it was meant for and used it on the postcard. In order to make the image fit nicely, I added a border. To make sure the border would be complementary to the picture, I picked up a color from inside the image and created the border using that color.
Hopefully you will enjoy the vast variety of postcards available on Zazzle, appreciating them all the more now that you know a little bit about how to navigate to find some more information. Have fun making changes of your own to the postcards you like. Most importantly I hope this blog post about angels finds you well and secure during troubled times.
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