A Postcard Prompt for Drawing the Animals Who Feel Like Home

A postcard can make a small subject feel personal: a familiar animal, a remembered pet, or a creature that exists only in your sketchbook. For the final prompt in Amy Cowen’s yearlong series, the invitation is to send a message from a companion. The animal might be furry, feathered, shelled or entirely imaginary. What matters is the feeling of home that comes through the image.

Cowen writes Connecting Dots, a monthly column inspired by her Substack, Illustrated Life. The prompts pair making art with the practical act of mailing it: choose a small surface, make something for a specific person, add a stamp and send it. This edition turns that format toward the animals who share our lives—or the ones we wish had.

Start with a companion, then follow the image

A dog or cat is an obvious starting point, but the prompt leaves room for less expected subjects. Think of a bird, turtle, a pet from childhood, or an animal you never owned. You could work from observation, memory or invention. A familiar silhouette might become something playful and Seussian; a real pet might appear in a quietly magical domestic scene.

That flexibility makes the prompt useful for different ways of drawing. If you have a pet nearby, notice its posture, the way it occupies a chair or watches a room. If you’re working from memory, begin with one detail you can still picture: a marking, a gesture, or the place the animal liked to sleep. Those specifics can carry a small composition without requiring a detailed portrait.

The postcard format also encourages a clear visual choice. You might give the animal most of the space, set it against a recognizable corner of home, or use a few lines and a handwritten message to suggest its character. There’s no prescribed style. A quick sketch can feel as direct as a carefully composed illustration, especially when the image has a particular recipient in mind.

Artists have long made room for animals

Artists including Frida Kahlo, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, George Rodrigue, Mary Cassatt and Keith Haring have brought pets and other animals into their work. The examples accompanying the prompt offer another way to look: at the relationship between a companion and the people, furniture and rooms around it.

The works shown are Woman with Dog, Pierre Bonnard, 1981; Woman on a Striped Sofa with a Dog, Marie Cassatt, 1876; and Mme. Charpentier and her children, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878. View the first work through Wikimedia, the second through Wikimedia, and the third through Wikipedia.

The column also gathers reflections on animal companionship from artists and writers. Georgia O’Keeffe jokes, “It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.” Mary Oliver describes the joy a dog brings as “no small gift,” while Edith Wharton calls her little dog “a heartbeat at my feet.” Their lines suggest several routes into the prompt: humor, affection, attention to everyday behavior, or the quiet presence of an animal at home.

Other quotations stretch the subject beyond dogs. Doris Lessing likens a cat to “a diagram and pattern of subtle air,” and Leonardo da Vinci calls even the smallest feline “a masterpiece of nature.” Virginia Woolf writes about Flush as a personality who resents indifference and returns affection. These observations can work like thumbnail prompts: choose one quality—movement, independence, loyalty, temperament—and let it guide the drawing.

Make the postcard a message

The instruction is simple: send a message from your pet or companion. You might write in the animal’s voice, let the picture do the talking, or build the postcard around a small scene the recipient will recognize. For an imagined creature, invent a place it might call home. The point is to make something that travels between people, carrying a little of the maker’s attention with it.

This is the final prompt in a yearlong series of monthly postcard art prompts. Cowen describes the series as an invitation to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world. She thanks the people who mailed her postcards during the project and encourages readers to keep reaching out to friends, family, new connections and people they have lost touch with.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this prompt first appeared on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics and graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss and creative habits. The head image features assorted postcards and a hand-carved stamp postcard received from Sara Barry.

For further reading, the column points to Beloved Dog and The Marginalian’s “Beloved Dog: Maira Kalman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Our Canine Companions”. A second reference is Françoise Mouly and Mina Kaneko’s “Maira Kalman’s ‘Blue Dog’” in The New Yorker. Both references connect the prompt to Kalman’s drawings and writing about dogs.

Pick one companion, real or imagined, and give it a place on the card. A few observed details can turn a small drawing into a message that feels unmistakably meant for someone.