Some of the received postards for the IYAF show, My Extraordinary Imagination, taking a tour around the historic town of Kingston upon Thames before going on display at the Penny School Gallery for the show, which runs from 1-18 July 2011.

The show was coordinated by IYAF in collaboration with my REAL wall's educational postcard offshoot Schoolswaps and has collected in over 600 postcards drawn by students all over the world.

Before going into the gallery, we thought it would be nice to show the postcards a little bit of the local area. Here they are briefly on display in Kingston Market Square, where there's usually a fruit and veg market and some great food and entertainment.

We can see post here on the sign from Germany and the UK among others. If you took part in the show and sent us something can you see yours? If not, keep watching the site and maybe your piece will be up soon!

If you are aged under 26, and wondering how to get your mailart into the show it's not too late to enter your piece! If you send it quickly to us we may be able to fit you in! Full details of how to get involved are at our website but do hurry as time is running out!

AD Magazine is the official magazine of The National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD).

This month, issue 2 is out and my REAL wall makes an appearance, complete with a pic by me of Elena browsing some postcards!

The write up is by a student on the course and is about the mailart project I helped run in my university for the Art and Design secondary PGCE.

You can read more about the project here

(Apologies for the scan quality, I'll try and get hold of a better one, this was sent to me by email and is horrible)

Look at that LOVELY Kiera Pannell Ray on Map. I am so in love with her artwork!

Ali's colourful zentangle is great too, as is Nadine's piece in the middle, which makes a repeat appearance.

One piece that really stands out here though is one that you can't really appreciate unless you were to come over to my house and smell it. Gabby has sent me some doodles done on the back of a Dove soap packet. When I opened it I was hit with a lovely detergent smell - it was great!

Many of us are now more than halfway through Mailart365 and many of the pieces we're getting here at my REAL wall HQ are still from participants on this project, including #200 from Katerina Nikoltsou. TWO HUNDRED! EEEEK! What have I unleashed!

This week, me and Elena got back on the mailart wagon ourselves, bashing out mailart every single night. It's been great! So keep your heads up folk, some mailart could be heading your way soon!

Kingston upon Thames is the main town in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames in London.

Having been sent over 400 postcards from all over the world, it seemed a little sad to just put them in a gallery, so here they are around town as a little preview of what's going to be on display in the Penny School Gallery from July 1st to 18th, 2011

We also thought it would be nice for everyone who sent in to see a little of Kingston too, so what better way to show you both a preview of the postcards and a little of Kingston all in one go!

Here are your postcards next to the River Thames, just minutes away from the gallery.

Make sure you make your way down to the gallery to see all of the postcards in all their full glory, and if you haven't sent one in yet, why not! It's not too late, just get over to iyaf.schoolswaps.net for more information on how to get involved.

Full details of the whole International Youth Arts Festival, which this exhibition is a part of, can be found at www.iyafestival.org.uk/

As part of my continuing quest to get people writing and connecting in the post, I've started my REAL wall's educational wing, www.schoolswaps.net, designed to make it easy for teachers to arrange postal swaps for their classes.

The first major project of schoolswaps is a collaboration with the Kingston International Youth Arts Festival (IYAF), who called me when they saw the work I'd done with art students at my university and asked if I could help them work out how to get young people making art and sending it to their show.

Perfect.

Now, after a few months of tireless work, the team at IYAF have deservedly received 429 postcards, with a while left to get more.

With all the postcards just sitting around in an office, I figured that it would be a good idea to get them out there, out and about in Kingston, and this is the first "my REAL wall"-inspired outing for the postcards of IYAF, showing the organiser, Zoe Thomas, putting the postcards up on an iconic Kingston sculpture

"Out of Order" by David Mach, is in the centre of the town and shows a load of the old iconic red telephone boxes tumbling into one another.

The mailart365 artist I'm a superhero and I can like fly and shit has been running the Mail of the Living Dead mailart call. Here's the undead creations he's received so far on his REAL wall!

I'm lagging hugely at the moment with my REAL wall posts and on mailart365. falling about 100 posts behind. It's quite demoralising actually, but I've taken my eye off the ball there, and have been trying to focus on getting even MORE people sending postcards on Twitter, linkedin and my new project schoolswaps

The aim of schoolswaps is to try and bring my worklife, which is teaching together with my passion for postcards and link teachers together in the post.

It seems to be going pretty well so far, with our first show already scheduled and I'm arranging a big swap called (rather unimaginitively I admit) The Great Big School Swap where I'm going to connect up as many classes as I can for a big postcard swap with classes from other countries. So far I have over 50 classes involved from 17 countries! By my calculations, that should amount to over 1,500 postcards going in the post on June 25, 2011!

So, my apologies for not posting your awesome postcards up as frequently as I used to!

Todays gems come from a number of new sources, which is really refreshing. One new contributor, Jose Day, found my REAL wall on flickr. Nastya and Kate from Eastern Europe and Erika all found me via Postcrossing and I sent postcards back out to the them earlier this month.

Mailart today comes from Dewi, Nadine Mojica, Farstarr and The Snailmailer B. Thanks to all of you and I hope to get things back to you soon!

On 27th April 2011, Andy and Elena gave their first ever public mailart lecture at Pimlico library together. As part of the graphic novels season, we put together the Little Big Stories show, and the librarians thought it would be a good idea to include a talk about mailart in the season as it is a relatively unknown artform.

We agreed to run the talk together and the library bought the stamps and postcards for the participants.



The talk was modestly attended but those who turned up were treated to a feast of mailart. We talked about the history of mailart, how it came about and how my REAL wall came into existence. After a look through some of the gems that have appeared on my REAL wall, we got the participants making their own, which they addressed to some of the people who had sent some to us in the past



By the end of the session, everyone had made at least one piece and put a stamp on it to post. I've since heard that some of the pieces have been received.

If there's anything more satisfying than making a piece of mailart, I think it's watching those first pieces of mailart go out from people who have just discovered the medium. It's just great!



The Graphic novels season was a huge success for Pimlico and I want to take a moment to say thanks to them for putting on such a great programme of events and for including us in there (I would never have ever thought i'd have my name on the programme with Helen McCarthy and Paul Gravett! Wow! fanboy geekness heaven!). You can read a writeup of the night on their blog. It has been excellent and I can't wait to get involved again next year!

Thanks to everyone for sending in your pieces for Little Big Stories. Keep your eyes on this site to hear what happens next with those, you've not heard the end of these yet...