Styles of the times

I'm looking into the style of images in the Edwardian period and the War - what ticked people's boxes, what were their skills? What resources did they have to hand?

Embroidered postcards during the war mainly featured flowers, flags and medals with the odd animal thrown in for luck.

Occasionally quite funky, symbolic text appears:

Soldiers would not have been able to make these, even with time on their hands waiting in trenches or hospitals.

But there's an album online of images scanned from a book kept by one of the women who graduated with Isabella, Celia McNeill. http://s143.photobucket.com/user/quartz-quill/library/WW1?page=1 

It's full of drawings, paintings and poems done by the wounded men she was treating. 

The standard of the painting varies:

as does the literacy level of the men:

But it amazes me that they possessed any of the skills to draw or paint. It challenges my stereotype of men in the war as much as Isabella does with her doctoring.