Tag: card

Art: manga characters

Hand-drawn card of two manga characters back to back: a girl with long orange hair laughing out loud and a tall angry looking boy. I've written 'joyeux anniversaire Adrien' and '15 ans!' on it, dated and signed it.

I drew this card and did some lettering in black for my son at the occasion of his 15th birthday today.

He sent me the picture of what he wanted on his card. A boy and girl are back to back. The girl, a redhead with long hair, is probably making fun of the boy, tall, dark haired and wearing a black coat, who looks angry.

The card next to the envelope I painted in gold ink on which I wrote in huge white letters "Adrien"

Card complete with the envelope which I lathered in golden ink!

Art: Kamado Tanjiro’s water dragon (step by step)

A couple of days ago, I drew a card and did some lettering for my son at the occasion of his 14th birthday today. (He loved it)

This is some fan art of Demon Slayer, a manga/anime he’s a fan of. This is Kamado Tanjiro and his water dragon.

Rough sketch of a flying character holding a sword and followed by a big dragon

Rough pencil sketch on a Bristol paper card.

Colouring in brown the character's outfit and in shades of blue the dragon

I’m using alcohol ink markers. I don’t have many and I don’t have the right colours.

At this scale I had a bit of a hard time filling the small areas in brown.

Blue background with yellow and green streaks. The coat of the character has yellow and grey squares

The paper did something weird with the medium which did not blend as it does normally. I don’t mind the texture, but it wasn’t intended.

I managed to get some contrast on the character’s outfit.

I realised belatedly that the dragon’s contrast was insufficient, however.

Hand-lettering in white, signature in black

I have been using the same sort of lettering for a few years now, more of less. It’s always the same letters 🙂

I used a white acrylic paint marker.

Hand-lettering in black on a white envelope
Card complete with the envelope

Art: 2020 hand-made holiday cards

Making my own holiday cards is fun. Besides, I am keen on the notion of taking time to make something for someone I care about. I’ve hand-made my holiday cards every year for 5 or 6 years now. The time I spend making something for someone is time I spend thinking about them. The only thing missing is… well, them. But in most cases the people I make them for are far away. This year, with the COVID-19 pandemic and various states of lockdown or/and curfew, everyone was far away.

2020 was a rough year for so many people and I felt I could maybe share some love, that I tweeted that I was offering 20 hand-made cards to whoever wanted one. I had found a lovely pad of 20 thick smooth watercolor paper of roughly A5 size which once folded would make nice cards.

Memoji-2020-skeptical

To my surprise, nobody responded.

I was puzzled. Perhaps the time wasn’t right? But Twitter shows the number of impressions (times in somebody’s timeline) and engagement (any interaction with the tweet) and after 4 days that tweet had been seen by over 200 persons, and interacted with by 20. Twenty. Exactly the number of sheets I could make cards with 😀

Memoji-2020-shrug

But then a friend of mine sent me a text message to “sign up”. Woohoo! Game on! That friend was surprised to be the first. That reinforced the idea that perhaps my first message wasn’t sent at the right time. Or perhaps people didn’t care. In any case, I added a tweet in response.

4 friends raised their hands. That’s it. 5 actually, as another friend raised hand three weeks later.

Oh well, I built a list of other people I wanted to send a card to, made and sent the cards to everyone! Most of them have made it already.

6 series of 3 hand-made folded cards on a wooden table.

Here are 18 of them. I chose simple designs and a few colours: blue, sienna, grey, green that I mixed to obtain varying shades. I used gouache paint, a black pen, a white Posca pen, and a metallic gold pen. Inside I traced in pencil a couple lines in case people wanted to cut out the painting and use it as a bookmark. I wrote a personal holiday greeting in each of them.