Here’s a selection of Christmas cards I drew up for friends and family last year:
Some of these designs should be available for the 2016 holiday season. In the meantime, I’m available to design & illustrate greeting cards, posters, and anything else you can dream up!
It’s become a habit for me to make birthday cards for my immediate family (you can see a handful of cards from past years here). Each year the cards get weirder and weirder since I don’t want to illustrate the same thing over and over again. This year was no exception.
First, for my fashionable sister, a card featuring everyone’s favorite controversial elderly German: Karl Lagerfeld. The way he half-heartedly throws neon rainbow confetti gets me every time I look at this.
For my EDM-obsessed brother, a card featuring the disembodied head of Dillon Francis (since the pillow featuring his face was unavailable when I looked). His 2014 album is titled Money Sucks, Friends Rule, so it wasn’t difficult to come up with card copy.
Now I want to make a line of snarky greeting cards featuring doodles of fashion designers. And also use my neon colored pencils more often.
I went to my first non-family weddings this summer. Here’s a card I made for my friends Liz and Travis. (Liz is a superb illustrator – you can check out her wonderful cut paper illustrations here: http://lizabethgoss.com/)
Made this for my sister’s “golden” birthday last fall. I’m glad she understood my weird humor.
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| Front of card |
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| Inside of card |
To continue on the Portland theme, here’s hipster Santa, bringing PBR to all the underemployed boys and girls living on the east side…
This was a project I completed earlier this year for my dear friend Kayla (who is sort of famous). The girl has got some pipes. But I digress.
Kayla’s close friend just had a baby, and Kayla wanted a special card made for the family. Specifically, she wanted a family of giraffes. When I finally got down to drawing it out (I procrastinate heavily without concrete deadlines), it didn’t take me very long. I drew out one rough sketch to show Kayla:
All I used for this card was some Micron pens I think. Some kind of pens. I don’t quite remember.
I can only tenuously connect this post to the Olympics, but I’ve been thinking about the Olympics, so deal with it.
This little guy is the Wonder Wolf. As you may (or may not) know, I worked in an elementary school in Beaverton, OR for the past school year (near Nike headquarters – Olympics connection) and the school mascot was the Wonder Wolf. I actually dressed up in that costume a handful of times, unfortunately there is no photographic evidence of this…
Anyway, I made thank you cards for student volunteers and teachers at the end of the year, so I drew a cartoony little wolf. He’s got an apple to signify education, and a little cape to do awesome deeds in.
I let some of the kids color in the cards before I handed them out – I’ll have to see if I can find one to scan in and put up here.
There was no real connection to the Olympics here, although I think the Wonder Wolf would make a pretty great Olympic mascot. Better than that weird blue thing for the Atlanta Olympics in the 90s. What was that thing?
To continue on the theme of my initial post, here is another card that also involves a monkey. Specifically, party monkey.
This was for my brother’s 18th birthday. You can never be too old for monkey cards.
I think I used the same photo reference for this card and the party monkey on the last card. Months and months apart. Weird.
Materials used: Watercolor (very muted), some kind of pen, Artists’ ink & little brushes
So after having this blog set up for ages, I’m finally going to start posting on here regularly. Probably.
To kick things off, here are some drawings of monkeys. They were for a high school graduation card for my brother. I should have gotten a picture of what the card looks like, but I’m a terrible archivist of my own work, so you’ll have to wait on that.
The enthusiastic fellow above is on the front of the card…
…and party monkey is on the inside of the card. You don’t mess around with party monkey. He parties hard.
Materials used: colored pencils, Micron brush pen (love that pen!!)
Whew. That wasn’t too terrible. More will come soon, I promise (pinky swear).
Erika Schnatz 