Christmas: 2012

Season’s greetings everyone!

This year’s Christmas card came together fairly well I think. I still have to say the whole process still feels far too digital/mechanical and not nearly artistic enough to me. Maybe one day there will be a way for me to make these with software or a device that feels as organic as markers and a pencil … until then these always feel like a human-generated pencil sketch that I paint-by-numbers-with-a-computer on top of. But I digress…

No real shockers on the content side – my kids continue to be my best/favorite material to pull from. I may have made Corgan look a bit younger than she looks in real life now but hey … a Dad can pretend right? Of course neither of them are even remotely accurate portraits – but hopefully I got their height and clothes close (?).

On the technology end of things – continuing with last year’s approach I used my iPad to do the painting. I used two separate apps this time though: Brushes 3 and Procreate. Both apps were able to create a decently large canvas for HQ printing – and I would have used Brushes for the whole thing but I didn’t realize till around 80% that it didn’t have a ‘smudge’ or ‘blur’ brush – so that’s why I finished the card with Procreate. Honestly the quality of the cards I printed on paper for snail-mail wasn’t clear/crisp as I would have liked it – I’m not sure whether that’s because my paint style didn’t use hard-edged lines or if the resolution/DPI of these iPad apps is just not fine enough yet.

One final technical note – I took down the old standalone site for my Christmas cards this year and moved them all to this blog here (or via link in the Artwork Galleries  menu item) - just seemed to make sense … one less website for me to deal with.

See below for a cool time-lapse video and some sketches/etc from this year’s card. PS: For bonus points – see who can find my signature in the picture this year… it’s pretty subtle!