Holiday Cards: The Makening

As it turns out, a few of the unsuspecting recipients of my Holiday Cards had no idea I made them, much less that I made them while sitting in their bar(s), so I showed them the few screenshots I made during the process and, as it turns out, people actually like seeing stuff like that. So here's the pics; I'm going to try to get better at remembering to take them more often.

I doodled a few elf-faces for about an hour, based on a plastic decoration I remember being at my parents' house. Here's a few of those:

I knew I was going to want to go out at the bar that night and work on my tablet (in a digital painting app called ProCreate), so I sketched this up real quick and took a picture. The energy of the sketch was all I'd planned on using but most of the composition also managed to fall into place as well:

And here's some random steps:

 This is a close up before I added the rosy reds:

And after:

 I didn't like any of the typefaces I had installed on my tablet, so I Dropboxed the file as a .psd and put in one called Santa's Sleigh, which is fitting, and added some nifty 1940s-styled stars...

After a few stressful hours doing color correction, adjusting the size, and depleting half of my ink cartridges, I sent them off to the printer.

Note for next time: design according to size. That was a pain. Also, Pantones do not work for desktop printers, so don't paint with them, as awesome of an idea as that sounds.

Time to get to work on Spring/Easter cards maybe?