Thursday, December 18, 2008

this year's "holidays" cards + a new drafting table!

after much internal and external questioning, i finally decided to go with "happy holidays" as the theme for this year's card. most everyone i know celebrates christmas, but figured a more generic holiday greeting is the safest bet.
as far as the subject matter, i decided to kill 2 birds with one stone by including and further developing a family of cattywampi- a new breed of characters i came up with ear marked for a few ideas i have floating around in my head. after tossing the first draft, i then inked this one, scanned, and started dropping in the colors behind a multiply layer of the outlines in photoshop.
the image above wasn't actually used, but instead i customized a bit by laying in a variety of different BG images, to keep them nice and special. below is a pile of the bulk of them, before jen & i wrapped them off like little presents and sent them to the far reaches of the country.


and below are a few of my favorites...in other news... after jen finally gave me the go ahead on acquiring a proper art desk, i scanned craigs list for a drafting table- nice and big like the kind "professional artist folk" use [and similar to the one i used throughout art school]. after a few minutes of searching, i stumbled across this pristine mayline jobby, which best of all, was FREE! after a quick trip to redmond to see if it was legit, rob helped me pick the BEHEMOTH [i shit you not- this thing weighs ~1000 lbs.] up, and get it into the house. i was _extremely_ surprised there were no injuries- nice!

... patenaude

3 comments:

KYMadan said...

Hey Brian, that is HI-LAR-IOUS.
*said in monotone deadpan voice like yours

Those characters are great! We love the card. Thx!
Have a good holiday you guys (even though we've all been snowed in for the past few days...)

Unknown said...

thanks, karin- gladja dig it!
we actually did manage to make it up to lynden yesterday on mon... now the trick will be to figure out a way to get back down through all this new snow!

... patenaude

Joe Kresoja said...

I have the same drafting table. Awesome, good find.