Christmas Cards 2020

 

This time I’m not posting about a painting of any type. Since 2016, I’ve been in the habit of drawing, and occasionally painting, my own Christmas Cards. I don’t sell these, they’re just something I like to do for my friends and family.

I tend to do most of them with an ink pen. Ink sketching is something I really enjoy, and I’m probably more skillful when it comes to sketching with an ink pen than I am when it comes to making cards with watercolours. For one thing you are working on a very small scale, and I find it’s far easier to get details right with a pen than with a brush. I really like the monochrome look, similar to a Victorian engraving, which you can get with an ink pen too. Which probably explains the subject matter that I like to choose.

I’m useless when it comes to making something completely out of my own head. I have to see what I’m sketching. So for a lot of the cards I take my ideas from. . . well, from original Victorian engravings. Few of these are actually taken from original Christmas cards, but for the most part they’re illustrations that have appeared in magazines or books.

Usually I use A5 blank white cards which I buy from a well-known internet auction site (other well-known internet auction sites are available). However, earlier in the year my youngest daughter obtained a pack of square blank cards, a bit smaller than A5, from somewhere, and bought me a pack, so I’ve started by using these. I scanned the before I inscribed Merry Christmas on them because it’s possible I may want to use these images again for another purpose. So, if you’re ready, here’s the first batch of 2020 cards:-

Yes, the traditional bringing in of the Christmas pud. It’s so huge in this one I can’t help wondering whether the lady’s old man is hiding inside it. Leaving aside the facetious comments, it can be tricky getting children’s faces right when you’re working on such a small scale. Still, at least it helped me get my eye in. Yesterday I worked at a fairly furious pace to produce 8 cards.

Working like this did at least mean that I had my eye ‘in’ for the next card. This is possibly my favourite of the cards I made yesterday. It’s such a simple idea (and not mine, as I said earlier), but the silhouette against the snowy foreground works beautifully, and I also really like the way the clouds and sky have been rendered. Using horizontal lines like that says about 1920s to me, but I’m always open to being informed otherwise.

Carol singers are, I find, a fruitful field in which to find useful images to copy, and in particular, Dickensian era carol singers, be they well meaning toffs like these, or harmless, humble yokels like in a couple of the cards I made for 2019.

This next design originally dates from 1900. I just really liked the cheeky faced chap with the mistletoe. To me, that sort of thing is perhaps just on the right side of twee. Being critical, this is probably my least favourite of the cards I produced yesterday since, with the girl and her dog in particular, it’s not brilliantly executed.

I enjoy sketching reindeer, and it’s not so hard to find old engravings and line drawings to work from. This one is part of an illustration from a Victorian or Edwardian magazine, I would guess, which shows a whole group of reindeer, of which this is just one. To my way of looking at it, you really can’t go wrong with reindeer for Christmas cards – pulling a sleigh, lying down, standing up, whatever you do you can’t go wrong, although the hatching and cross hatching to produce the fur is always an interesting challenge.

Of course, if it’s true that you can’t go wrong with reindeer, then it’s even more true that you can’t go wrong with Santa. This rather old fashioned Santa is just based on a rather old painted illustration of the lad himself. I was tempted to paint, but if I do paint any of this year’s cards I’m much more likely to do so on the A5 cards when they arrive.

In past years I’ve always tried to do at least some of the cards by using more old fashioned representations of the American Santa of wonderful illustrators like Thomas Nast, and the old English Father Christmas. This is a more traditional Father Christmas. I don’t know exactly where and when the original illustration that I copied was made, but the clues that it’s English are that long, pointy hood, liberally adorned with holly, that he’s wearing, and the fact that he’s not shown bringing round toys for the kids, but spreading good cheer with food and drink. In the original, he’s carrying a large, dead bird by its neck, but I didn’t like this, so I sketched him with a bottle of falling down water instead.

I really like this next Santa. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how old the original is, but I like the humour behind it – poor old Santa confronting the obstacles posed by the demise of the Victorian chimney pot. We always used to tell our children that Santa had a magic key which opened everyone’s doors so he could get in even if they didn’t have a chimney. Looking at the picture, the style of is coat suggests a little bit of a more old-fashioned Santa, but I think it’s quite a bit more modern than the previous.

Those 8 cards I made yesterday. I got up this morning, my drawing hand felt fine, and so I made these last couple this morning. I liked this rather bucolic carol orchestra, similar in a way to the choirs I’ve used in other cards. I know that if any of us were magically transported back in time to mid-Victorian times, for all the Dickensian trappings we’d find it a pretty grim and horrible place to be compared with our own lives, but there’s no denying the appeal of the images.

Number 10 then, and we’re back to the reindeer. Again, not from an original Christmas card, merely a book or magazine illustration. I always enjoy making cards like this one, because of the intricacy and the level of challenge.

That’s my first 10 3030 cards, then. I don’t have specific recipients in mind yet, but every year I produce more cards, and yet every year there’s requests from my nearest and dearest if they can have one of my cards to give to someone, and I never have any left over by the end. That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it.