Snowmen Behaving Badly Christmas Card

Snowmen Behaving Badly was the card I created and mailed to family and friends, celebrating Christmas 2004. However not everyone celebrated the design.  I do recall my mother not being terribly pleased with this creation, but I wanted to have some fun with this card.  And who doesn’t love a bad boy, even if he is a snowman?  Am I right?

The original was created the same as all my art back then.  The black line work was painted on illustration board using fine sable hair paint brushes and India ink.  The original art was painted twice the size of the reproduction.  Once completed, it was photographed and reduced 50% using a stat camera.  I then had two black and clear acetate images at half the size of the original art work.  I created an 8-1/2” x 11” mechanical placing the two reduced acetate pieces side-by-side.  The color (Prismacolor pencils) was applied to an additional piece of paper as an overlay.  Once the coloring was complete, the hand colored overlay was inserted under the acetate layers.  This technique is similar to an animated cell, black line work on acetate on the top with the color applied as the second or bottom layer.  This effect created the image you see above.  The cards were reproduced using a color copier, printing the two images on one 8-1/2” x 11” paper.  Each color copy was backed with an adhesive paper (think of it as a large piece of double stick tape) that also measured 8-1/2” x 11”.  The images were then carefully cut and placed on a blank card.  It’s a multi-step process that is both time consuming and tedious, but the outcome is well worth the investment.