Just a few days left until Christmas! Eek! I finally, finally, finished my Christmas cards this weekend. I love to send them out but it seems to turn into a production. It's been fun to turn sketches into cards this year. Holiday sketches are a joy to create. After taking Junelle's class this year, I've been working on loosening up and sketching faster and more. Christmas cards are fun to sketch. There are so many fun colors, images and memories to choose from. The ideas keep coming.
Some artists don't add faces to their figures- or there is a partial face. I like adding faces to my people, but these images are so small I kept messing up! I loaded too much paint on my brush and the lips would dribble down to the chin. Yikes! I finally decided to give them a bit of a blush and let them go as they were.
Another thing I learned from Junelle was to let go of traditional seasonal colors and play around a bit. Instead of traditional red, Junelle would add a bit of fuschia into the wreath or jacket. I played with this, blending the red and pink and enjoying the different hue it produced.
For all the sketches I sketched them lightly on watercolor paper, erased the heavier sketching, went over them with watercolor. After the watercolor, I used a Microperm 05 pen to outline and accent the sketches. The girl with the red boots, holding the wreath- is not my sketch idea: I created her when I went through Christy Tomlinson's Boot Girls Class.
girl with wreath
I did mail several cards from a pack I bought at Michael's. Maybe next year I'll be able to sketch all of the cards. You can see in the picture below that I messed up with the Fiskars paper cutter. I'm forever messing up the measurements with this handy gadget. I'm sending the card to another artist who I hope will find it funny. These things happen. We just keep learning and creating (and cutting) some more.
Even if I don't do anything with the sketches, I do add a date to them, especially the ones in my book. It's fun to see (or for others to see) what we were sketching in years past. It can be very reflective on what was happening in our lives or our growth through the artists journey.
Did you send out Christmas cards this year?
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