Connecting Dots is a monthly column by writer Amy Cowen, inspired by her popular Substack, Illustrated Life. Each month, she’ll introduce a new creative postcard prompt. So grab your supplies and update your mailing list! Play along and tag @print_mag and #postcardprompts on Instagram.
I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
This is Who I Am — Postcard No. 8
What is your look? What makes you you on the outside? What assorted accessories say something about you? In simplest terms, the superficial language of “things,” what defines you.
A bit of a toy-store divergence this month, and we may be straggling in just at the tail end of this trend and face-off between AI and artists, but a Starter Pack seems like a perfect opportunity for a unique postcard.
Think just a bit outside the box—or blister pack—and you might have the makings of a tiny, one-of-a-kind, “collect ’em all” postcard series.
The Starter Pack Buzz
From TikTok to LinkedIn, AI starter packs have been making the rounds.
Depending on your feed, you may have first heard about AI starter packs in conjunction with the pushback from the creative community, with artists drawing their own, an outgrowth in some ways of the “Created with Human Intelligence” movement spearheaded last year by Beth Spencer.1 Many of the hand-drawn starter packs have a “no-AI” stamp as part of the packaging.
Starter packs aren’t really new, but they got a major injection of high-gloss plastic this year with AI. They leveled up.2
The current viral spin is more personal, more individualized, more plastic, more “I am a product” than previous iterations, which often focused on generalizations and stereotypes.
If you are a writer, your starter pack might have a set of related tools or objects that are somewhat generic, but your character probably looks like you. You might even have several variations of your starter pack. Maybe you take a Severance approach, bifurcate your life, and create a work pack and a home pack.
Maybe what you are really after is that whole-life pack. With you at the center, you don’t have to “just” be a writer. The objects you include hint at a multi-faceted you.
Starter packs offer a playful and whimsical approach to self-portraiture, but there are questions of identity and personal philosophy tucked into those moulded and recessed sections.
Who are you on the surface? How does your starter pack relate to who you really are?
Starter Pack Basics
The AI Starter Pack idea revolves around an AI prompt. You feed in an image, some color instructions, your name, and some information about items that provide insight into who you are. AI churns (and uses a lot of water) and spits out an image of a blister pack that contains a figurine that looks like you, accompanied by several small elements that go along with the character, things that help convey what you enjoy or care about.
Your starter pack is a tidily packaged representation of you. Who wouldn’t want a collection of starter packs or, at the very least, starter pack postcards?
The starter pack idea isn’t that far off from creating or customizing your own avatar in a game or changing the clothing and features on your Memoji on your phone (or any similar “mini me”). The starter pack takes this personalization a bit further and spits out something that looks like a product you might find hanging in rows in what used to be the “dollar” aisle in a big-box store.
You might think of a starter pack as a really interesting visual calling card.
Make a Starter Pack Postcard
This month, draw your own personal starter pack on a postcard.
You may have already drawn a starter pack. If so, there are plenty of ways you can spin this postcard prompt as an extension of the core concept.
Focus on the accessories. Think about the “accessories” that surround the character of a starter pack. In most cases, the icons are pretty obvious. Someone who enjoys art might have a palette or a paintbrush or a canvas. A writer might have a typewriter or a fountain pen or a bottle of ink. Someone who enjoys gardening might have packets of seeds or a pot with a plant in it or gardening gloves or a shovel. Maybe you choose items from several thematic categories or items representing several different hobbies or passions.
If you spend time scrolling through starter pack galleries (or browse the hashtags #starterpacknoai and #starterpackai at Instagram), you will see that the number of objects or “accessories” varies, especially in the hand-drawn variations. You might not be able to decide on just four or five things. That’s okay. When you are creating your own, deciding the scale and layout, you can include as many things as you want.
Focusing on the accessories, you might:
Draw a grid, maybe three by three, or even just three singles, of some of your starter pack accessories. This strips the starter kit postcard down to an icon-driven grid, a few object-oriented icons. You might think of this as a tell me who you are without telling me who you are exercise.
Do a small series and include just one thing on each. Each postcard is then part of your starter pack series. The “accessory” you include might just be a small icon tucked in on the side of the written note on the back of a regular postcard. You might, for example, include a coffee cup drawing in a small square box (keep that blister pack in mind) on the back of a postcard, right alongside your note. That postcard features one of your set of five or six icons. This idea would work especially well if you have a pen pal who will be receiving the full set and, over time, collecting your starter pack. With this idea, your starter pack series has a “trading cards” feel to it. Like puzzle pieces or clues, your starter pack cards can be sent to a single recipient, one by one, or scattered among several recipients.
Make it a game. Turn your postcard into a game of “two truths and a lie.” Draw three accessories, two of which belong in your starter pack and one that doesn’t. See if your recipient can sort out which item does not belong in your starter pack.
Explore your decades. Consider a series in which you design starter packs that represent you in your high school years, your 20s, 30s, 40s, and so on. This is a fun idea for reflecting on how you’ve changed through the years.
Explore variations of your character. Try out different hair, different clothes, different sets of accessories, or different colors.
Create starter pack postcards representing your family or friends. As a creative exercise, imaginary friends are game, too. Or maybe you create a starter pack for a classic author or artist. (Leave the name blank and see if your recipient can guess!)
Send a blank starter pack. Some of you share your cards with younger pen pals or family. You could design a starter pack template and draw the outline for the starter pack elements, leaving room for the character, a number of accessories, the name, and anything else you want to add to the pack. Write the directions on the back, and have your recipients draw their own.
However you do it, thinking through your starter pack can be an interesting exercise.
If you send an entire hand-drawn starter pack, be sure you make a copy or draw a duplicate in your sketchbook/journal!
I will admit that I was curious. I used a generic prompt with AI (and didn’t give it my photo). The character in the starter pack it spit out, vending machine style, looks very much like an aging Melissa Etheridge. (I don’t look like Melissa Etheridge.) A few days later, I decided to try it one more time with a slightly different prompt (and a different mix of icons). (I’m sorry about the water.) That one was interesting, but AI decided I needed three fountain pens and multiple composition books. I included “cribbage board” in my prompt, and the result is laughable. I tried one more time, refining the prompt, and I got a better mix, but the cribbage board is still totally wrong. It was fun to see them, but I’ll also draw my own. I think I need a full-color starter pack calling card.
I hope you do, too.
In simplest terms, the superficial language of “things,” what defines you?
Starter Pack Inspiration
Above, left to right: Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedek (illustratedjournal), Caitlin.in.colour (caitlin.in.colour), Ellie Bear (ellievsbear), Nora Racz (nori_draws)
See also this post, from Liz Gumbinner, which includes many inspiring examples of human-drawn starter packs.
There are so many wonderful hand-drawn examples. It’s a beautiful sub-genre of self-portraiture illustration.
A Year of Postcard Connections
This is the eighth in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. Feel free to jump in and make and send your own postcard art.
Reminder: It is totally OK to be sending regular postcards and just adding a bit of illustration within your lettered part.
This post is not a comment on AI one way or the other. I assume you are manually drawing or creating your postcards, that they are old-fashioned, analog, and probably involve a pen or a pencil somewhere along the way. This prompt hinges on a viral AI meme, but this is not an AI discussion. ↩︎The subreddit for starter packs is odd, but it has been around for a decade. This 2018 article posits that starter packs debuted in 2014. ↩︎
Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.
Header image: assorted postcards, including postcards received from readers, courtesy of the author. ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.
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