Christmas Card 2010
If I had to rate December on a scale from 1 to hectic, I would almost certainly give it the top ranking of “hectic”. There were gifts to purchase, a company to build, family and soon-to-be family spread across various states to visit, and a looming wedding to plan.
Despite this, I wanted to carve out time to design and send Christmas Cards. Crafting up last season’s card was awesome fun and an excellent learning experience, so I set to work using the skills I’ve been developing through the past year.
There are a few themes I like to center on when making cards like this:
- Hometown references
- Mildly subversive but ultimately heartwarming messaging
- Giant monsters
The final product ended up depicting a romantic stroll through Liberty State Park set against the backdrop of a snow monster eating lower Manhattan.
Printed on the inside: The holidays are a time to focus on things that really matter.
The drawing was created start-to-finish in Photoshop using a Wacom Cintiq tablet. I verified the final document resolution required by the printing service before beginning to sketch, this eliminated some of the headaches faced last year.
After the sketch was completed, I started rendering the background and the skyline. I used a reference photo of lower Manhattan to inform my coloring choices but I didn’t want to get too crazy recreating its exact details; the larger-than-life events in the background should be subdued and overshadowed by the couple strolling through the park.
To drive this focus home, the couple was inked with black lines. I used a standard round paintbrush and set the size to be controlled by pen pressure.
Next up was applying flat color on a new layer underneath ( this was the easiest part ).
Finally, another layer between the inking and flat color was added for shadows and details.
As an aside, it sometimes looks really cool if you remove the flat color layer after adding the detail layer. I might play with this sort of coloring in future projects!
The skyline looks particularly interesting like this; click it for the full effect.
Naturally, the design process ran late. The cards didn’t end up getting mailed until the 23rd, and most folks didn’t receive them until the 27th.
If you haven’t received one by now, I probably don’t have your address. If you’d like to get one in the mail, send me your address this clerical error will be corrected!
