I can’t send cards to everyone, but I thought I’d post the image I created for my holiday card this year. It’s the first time I’ve made a physical card and I’m quite happy with the results! I’ve posted some process and photos of the end result under the cut.

Like I often do for illustrations, I started with good ol’ fashion pencil and paper. I played around with a few layouts and came up with the above image. Then I scanned it into Photoshop and used a tablet to paint it up using a variety of textured brushes.

I then scanned in a sketch I made of some cheerful looking lettering I made for the cover image. Please excuse the poor quality Instagram photo, I cleaned house and deleted the original scan. From there I traced out the image in Illustrator and ended up with a simple vector version. I imported the lettering into the finished illustration and found a nice placement for it. I thought the lettering was getting a little lost so I had a little fun with some frosty fills to make the text stand out a little more. With that done I whipped up some text for the interior and made a fun variation of my logo for the back and sent it off to the printer!

I’m always looking for new printers, not that any others have been bad, but it’s always a good thing to keep an eye out for others and know what they’re capable of. Juke Box had recently done some nice looking business cards for me, so I gave them a shot at the greeting cards too. While I had a little grief with their online card maker, their Prepress department was great in helping me make what I uploaded the same as what I wanted to print.

Here’s a few photos of the end result, and now I think it’s time to kick back with a glass of eggnog with a splash of spiced rum in it! Happy Holidays!