Real Home Made Christmas Cards

I do enjoy making my own Christmas Cards. Well. I say my own, but there’s the thing, see. Up until this year whenever I’ve made Christmas cards they have either borne copies of monochrome designs I’ve found elsewhere, or painted images also copied from elsewhere. Well, following the way that my watercolours came on in leaps and bounds during the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge in June, I finally took the plunge .

I have always said that I am no good drawing or painting something out of my head. Well, during the last fortnight I’ve had a good look at a lot fo the cards out there, and tried to boil it down in my head to a process.

Stage 1 is to draw a design lightly on the card. You’ll see that the three completed cards that I’ve photographed each shows a snowy scene with a church. I’m not ready to create my own landscape with figures – not yet, but I was confident that I could create the shape of a fairly simple country church – several different churches as it happens. I felt it was important to go light on detail.

Stage 2 is to paint the sky and the snow. I have yet to try using masking fluid to create stars and snowdrops, but let’s walk before we can run. I overpainted at lleast part of the area where the trees would go, but left negative space where the church was going to go. Using wet on wet I’ve achieved some beautiful effects and the sky becomes a huge contrast to the snowy foreground. I then left the cards to dry completely before the next stage.

The next stage was to paint in the trees. Smaller trees in the distance first, and these I painted lighter and in a bluey green. Taller trees which are closer to the viewer greener and darker. I’d make the tops of the trees even darker, almost black, but then use the negative space further down to suggest snow laying on the branches.

Stage 4 is the first pass over the church building. I painted in the yellow windows, then allowed them to dry. Then I worked from light to darker, building up more definition on the church walls, and applying blue shadows where wanted on the snowy roofs.

Stage 5 is the second pass over the church building. This is for putting in the darkest shadows beneath the rooflines, window frame details, door and wreath on the door if I used one, That completes the painted image.

Stage 6 is writing Merry Christmas on the card. I did this with fineliner because I feel more confident with my use of fineliner than a paintbrush for lettering. Here’s the cards :-

I’m really pleased with these, because they are my own designs, from my imagination, and a big improvement from the pigswill I usually produce when working from my imagination.

Card Update

 Just in case you were worrying about it, I thought that I'd better let you know that I've finished making my Christmas Cards now. In the end I decided that I'd use up all of my blanks, which means I've made a grand total of 50. With that many I wouldn't be at all surprised if I end up with some left over for next Christmas.

Just out of interest, 2 of them have watercolour, 15 of them are silhouettes, 11 of them just show reindeer, 17 are based on old sketches or engravings, and the rest are a mixture of odds and ends. 

I've always said that the Christmas cards - even when I do 50 of them - are just for family and friends, and not something I would sell. Still, when it comes to stuff that I actually do sell, it's been a bit of a mixed bag of a month so far. During September and October I sold several original paintings, and some prints on Etsy. This month, not so much. I can live with it - well I haven't got a lot of choice - and it's not as if the original paintings and sketches take up a great deal of room. 

You can imagine my delight when I got home from work on Wednesday to discover an order on Etsy for one of my prints. It was almost as great as my chagrin to discover a message from the buyer asking if I wouldn't mind canceling the sale. To add insult to injury, what made it worse was the buyer explaining that he was buying it for someone else, and when he showed it to them on Etsy, they didn't like it!  

Well, I cancelled the sale and sent a polite message to the buyer informing him that I'd done as he requested anyway. No point going on with a sale if you're not both happy about it. 

Victorian Illustration on Christmas Cards

Yesterday I made another batch of Christmas cards, and once again, a significant number of them were copied from original Victorian engravings and illustrations.

I just really love that style of illustration, from the engravings of William Hogarth in the middle of the 18^th century, then the savagely biting political cartoons of men like James Gillray, which begat the social conscience driven work of men like George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Brown (Phiz) and John Leach in the first half of the 19^th century, which in turn begat the more satirical work of artists like Sir John Tenniel, primarily in Punch magazine.

I’d already fallen under the spell of Hogarth and Gillray long before I discovered that I have a family connection to Hogarth himself, and to Gillray’s generation of cartoonists. In the early noughties when I was researching my family history, I discovered that one of my 5x great grandfathers was an artist called Philip Dawe. He may have been a pupil of Hogarth – he certainly worked for him at one time. Philip made a crust from engraving other people’s paintings, from publishing prints, and also from tutoring promising young artists, including George Morland. He was also a political cartoonist, although as his cartoon “The Bostonians in Distress” here shows, he was, in my opinion, competent but uninspired.

I’ll try to illustrate what I like so much about Victorian illustration with some of the cards I’ve sketched this year and in the last few years.

This one shows a cook steaming the Christmas Pudding. Christmas pudding is one of the stock subjects that Victorian illustrators would return to throughout the century, although more often to the bringing in or the serving of the pudding like this one.

The first illustration shows one of the things that I love, the way a Victorian illustrator could suggest a whole background interior with just a few well paced lines, and with careful use of hatching and cross hatching. I think that artists like the man who made the original of this one were also great storytellers too.

This one of this year’s batch is copied from an illustration made right at the end of the Victorian era, in 1900, but it illustrates my point about storytelling here – with the cheeky chappy beckoning the young lady, all the while hiding the mistletoe behind his back. Victorian illustration, when it’s not being satirical in the pages of Punch and the like, can be very sentimental, but that’s another reason why I think they make great Christmas cards – because Christmas is a time of year when being sentimental just fits.

I also really like the rather different ways that Father Christmas/Santa Claus is portrayed. In the cards I’ve made over the last few years, I’ve largely followed two distinctly different traditions, the British and the American. In Victorian times, British illustrators tended to depict Father Christmas as a very traditional figure, a hearty – although not noticeably fat - old man with long flowing white beard, a long robe, crowned with holly, often holding a Christmas tree, and spreading good cheer in the form of food and drink, rather than delivering toys to children. I’ve made a few cards in this tradition this year.

I haven’t made any based on the Victorian American Santa this year, but I’ve copied a lot of the work of the great cartoonist and illustrator Thomas Nast in the past.

As you can see from the cards I’ve posted here, his Santa is a fat, twinkly rogue – not quite in the full coca cola Santa Claus garb yet, but delivering presents for all. I think that Nast's inspiration was the description of Santa Claus in Clement Clark Moore's famous poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" ('Twas the night before Christmas etc.) 

Another Christmas subject that Victorian illustrators liked was carol singers. These two from last year demonstrate a couple of different ways that they explored this idea.

You can see from this first one the artist's social conscience is very much at work, with this rather ragged family deriving some little cheer from carolling in the open in the run down area where they live, hoping to make a few bob, enough to be able to eat on Christmas Day. Well, that’s the meaning I bring to it when I look at it, and it’s a testament to the skill of the original that sitting here, getting on for the best part of 2 centuries later, and I can read that into it.

One of the other things to note about Victorian Christmas illustrations is the wistful harking back to days gone by. This design, showing cheerful folk dragging a yule log up to the big house – in return for which they would presumably be received with a pat on the head, a mince pie, and a glass of the cheap stuff from the Lord of the Manor. The most famous Victorian Christmas story, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” pulls this same trick. It may be set in contemporary London of the late 1840s, but it’s wrung from Dickens’ own longing for the Christmas of his childhood some twenty five years earlier.

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.

Best Laid Plans . . .

 Hello there. How are you keeping? Well, after the last 6 months or so, in which nothing has been like anything I can ever remember, it kind of puts everything else into perspective. It's been a time when I've actually been grateful that I've kept going with the day job. 

At such a time it's difficult to make out a case for the importance of Art. So I haven't been moaning about the exhibition of my sketches not going ahead. To be honest, I'd become just a little disillusioned by the time lockdown began. The date of the proposed exhibition at the Castle kept getting put back and put back. The organisers are lovely people, but I found them frustrating to deal with as it was difficult to pin them down at all. I was commissioned to design a Christmas Card for them, which they didn't even bother to collect and sign off on until after Christmas, and then I found that they planned to use the design for other purposes as well as the card. We had never discussed this, so I was a little put out. Then I had several promises of the account being settled, and in the end needed to get more forceful than comes naturally t me. 

Well, there we are, these things happen. I'm not stupid, so if they do eventually contact me after lockdown and want to go ahead with an exhibition, then I'm up for it. However I do also have another contact I will explore once things have become as normal as they are going to get. 

On the positive side of things, my daughter's shop is now open again, and so I've started making some more sketches for her to sell. We've already sold the first, this sketch of the Plaza Cinema in Port Talbot. I've already made more than a dozen sketches  - all of which are, I think, quality pieces - for my 2021 Port Talbot Calendar. Each sketch is different from the 12 I used for the 2020 Calendar.  You can see all of my newest sketches in my ink sketch gallery - just click on the top link on the right. 

2018 Christmas Cards

Since finishing the tram painting a couple of weeks or so ago, I’ve devoted all of my spare art time to making this year’s Christmas Cards. Two years ago, in 2016, I hand painted cards for all of the other teachers in my department at work, for other teachers on the same corridor, and for friends from the old school. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’d like to think that the recipients at least appreciated the time and effort I put into them, even if they maybe weren’t that impressed with the results.

Last year, in 2017, I didn’t start off with the intention of making a whole stack of cards. However, I did see a sketch of Santa which I was inspired to copy. So I used a well known internet auction site to buy a pack of blank cards and envelopes, and using my trusty sketching pen I went into production. Each card had a different design on it, and the vast majority were ink sketches. In particular I’m a huge fan of the cartoons of Thomas Nast and Sir John Tenniel, and I used many of their designs featuring the American Santa Claus, in Nast’s case, and the very traditional English Father Christmas in Tenniel. I did paint a few cards, but mostly these were reindeer. 

I remembered that last year it was several weeks’ work to produce the 30 or so cards that I made. So this year I bought the cards back towards the end of September. I had 4 cards left over from the ones I made last year. Mind you, looking at them I can understand why I didn’t want to give two of them. They’re not great, and are sat at the bottom of the pile mentally filed as ‘emergency cards’. I began producing cards back at the beginning of November, and gave myself the month to produce the 25 cards I’d need to start with – or 21 cards when the remnants of last year were taken into consideration. I actually made that target last Saturday, so I set a new target of 30. Not quite there yet, but really not so very far away now. I’ve done more painted cards this year, because I really love the work of Norman Rockwell, and some of his Saturday Evening Post covers are perfect Christmas Card ideas.

These are all in the Christmas Card Gallery now, but here’s the ones I’ve produced this year so far:-