Behind the Scenes, Holiday Card 2022

I’m always curious about how designs go from an artist’s head into reality, so I figured I’d share a meander through the process on my 2022 holiday card. It’s officially a New Year’s card, so I sidestep anyone’s strongly held beliefs on this subject! (Although honestly—if you’re on my list to get a card, I seriously doubt you do anything but an eye roll at the concept of the “war on Christmas.” )

So, like all my projects, this card started out in one of my many art journals.

Side tour through my neurosis: I spent some of this year in a state of pedantic paralysis because I realized, after spending some time on YouTube, that “Art Journaling” is a whole Thing, kind of an evolution of scrapbooking often involving purchasing other people’s art in the form of printables or stencils or stamps. And that’s not at all what I’m doing in my books.

The noun “journal” isn’t really right, because the art I make in them has nothing in particular to do with my day. (I do keep a daily written journal, which I’ve done my entire adult life, but that’s entirely separate from this.) Also I don’t work through the pages sequentially — or all the way through. I often hesitate to share pages because they are never really finished. Any page is fair game for me to return to at any time, which isn’t really in the spirit of a journal, imo.

An alternative could be “sketchbook,” but they aren’t really that either — I actually have separate sketchbooks for doing studies and that kind of thing. And stuff from those sketchbook often ends up in my art journal-ish books.

So I guess they are less “art journals” than “art books,” or an “artist book” — but not so many people know what those are and it sounds like something you’d find in a bookstore…

So there’s some of my mishegos for you.

Anyway, the past few years I’ve been hand-binding these, let’s just call them, “wtf” books. Very simple binding as you can see above. I include all kinds of paper in them — blank, printed, ephemera, vintage magazine pages, pages from my sketchbooks, paper I’ve used as palettes, etc etc etc. I don’t care about the size of the paper inside (a/k/a “signatures.”) I actually like it when I can see more than one page at once. The cover is watercolor paper and I just make sure it covers the signatures.

The five journals pictured are the ones I’ve been working on mid 2021 through today. I make a new one when I want to. I haven’t counted how many I have in total. Here’s a glimpse of what they look like inside:

So to make my holiday card — or anything that I do for wholesale or licensing — I grab a bunch of these wtf books and some sticky notes, and flag what grabs my eye.

I ended up scanning 21 images, and eventually narrowed it down to four: the one I picked, and these three which narrowly missed out:

I like all of these and they will probably end up on something at some point. In fact, I really liked the one in the middle and brought it into Photoshop. After playing with it. I decided it was just a little too weird for this purpose.

So this is the main image I ended up using — the blue star.

And you can see it in situ in the first image below. it was only about a quarter of the page.

And because this would bug me if I were you, here are the pages on either side of the star page .

Then comes the digital art part — I bring it into Photoshop and see what I can do with it.

I used to think I wouldn’t like pushing pixels around, but I actually do. I won’t go into the digital details because it would be way too long and boring!

I’ll just note that I ended up changing from that beautiful teal to a deeper blue, only because I know that color just doesn’t render correctly off screen. (I unfortunately have a huge weakness for teal and turquoise and they really struggle when moved back and forth from paper to screen.) And I pulled in the starry background from another page in a different wtf book.

Any questions about this process? Do drop me a line and I’ll do my best to answer.