Hey ho, here we go – Christmas cards of 2019!

Last year for my birthday (or maybe Christmas, not too sure) my family gifted me some watercolour paints. Up until that point I had only used the pencil variety so I was pretty stoked to finally, after all these years, to use the real deal. I knew I would want to use them for this year’s cards, it was just a matter of working out the image and application.

When I was a sketching up ideas, I thought it might be comical to have Lucy included in some way and ended up drawing a bunch of different dog related Christmas scenarios. I settled on one involving her popping out of a present that would easy enough to implement. For the style, I was inspired by Lissova craft with her layered pot plant creations to try something similar (definitely not as cool as hers though).

I believe this is my 8th year (!!!) of making Christmas cards and if these years have taught me anything, it’s that preparation and experimentation are key for ensuring everything will come to fruition. I’m glad I started prepping for these cards early on as there were quite a few missteps along the way.

After last years work, I wanted to go back to something more simple. For some reason I thought linocut printed cards would be an easy idea, I could just roll out as many as I wanted once the lino block was carved. Getting to that final day of printing would turn out to be another matter.

Continuing the theme from last year of avoiding overly complicated cards, I wanted to find something that wouldn’t be too stressful to create. I’d always had an interest in using gold leaf but was unsure how difficult it would be to incorporate. After doing some digging and watching some videos, I discovered that the process was rather simple and the materials fairly inexpensive. From that moment, I decided to create a completely gold leaf card with a simple brushstroke design.

The only materials you need to get started working with gold leaf is some brushes, gold leaf sheets and a special adhesive, all of which you should be able to pick up any good art supply store. For the gold leaf sheets, you don’t need to buy the expensive ‘proper’ version, gold imitation leaf works fine.