Starting the Holiday Card Crush

Well hello everyone! Tuesday has fast approached and I am determined not to break my streak of a blog post every week. This will be a quick post, and it will most likely not be very well written, or well researched, or even well punctuated.

Not the best photo, sorry. But this is the original.

 Why will this blog post be kind of shitty? Well, because I'm totally enveloped in work right now. The holiday party gigs are lining up, as they always do in December, and I'm just now starting on my batch of Christmas cards for the regular group of clients that are kind enough to call me back each year and send updated photos. I'm starting a little late this year, thanks to a big batch of proofreading that arrived late and ended up squashed into my Thanksgiving week. Nothing like being busy--beats being out of work, right? Anyway, this is the first of the holiday cards on my slate, and I figured I'd post it because it's a unique hybrid of sorts.

And here's the original with holiday patches applied.

I actually OLD-SCHOOL cut and pasted this baby. The client wanted just a regular airbrushed caricature of the two of them with their great danes and rottie on the family boat, and they were going to scan it and throw some holiday verbiage on there. I was struck with an idea that stemmed from my recent addiction to making cut-out vine videos. I volunteered to go a little extra mile and "customize" the airbrushed caricature to make it a better holiday card . . . I drew a few little accessories, cut them out with my fancy new Martha Stewart precision scissors, and stuck them on the caricature using tacky kneaded eraser bits, then scanned it at FedEx Kinkos (they scan 11 x 17 artwork for a dollar, it's proven so much more economical than buying our own oversized scanner!). The accessories peeled off the painting just fine, so the original they hang on the wall won't be festooned in Santa garb. I cleaned up the scan just a bit on photoshop (love that clone tool), sized it down to 5 x 7, and emailed them that version to make cards with. I'll send along the hard copy and a letter of reproduction rights so they can legally print it up.

So nice to get double duty out of one drawing, and I hope their friends and family get a kick out of the cards. Now on to the rest of them! Happy party gigging and holiday commissions to everyone out there--remember, fellow caricaturists, we'll sleep in January!