*Designing the 2024 Holiday Card*

a little behind the scenes of making this years snail mail (snail mail forevaaaa)

December 2024: No. 5

Hola, Hola :) Felices Fiestas.

Every holiday season, like many others, I like to design and send a holiday card to a small group of friends and family. This years cards contains doodles of said friends and family pets. Our animals are more than pets… they’re our companions, our children, our little soul mates…. I wanted to dedicate this season of joy to our babies that bring so much joy and love to our homes. So below is a quick recap of that progress…

I had a general idea of what I wanted to do… dogs and blue so I started with some doodles of their portraits…

LETTERING!

I love lettering. I love cursive. I love serifs, kerning…. And better yet… I love when it’s been touched by a human hand. So even though I’m still working on my lettering skills, I try to do all my own stunts (so very Tom Cruise of me). Using Procreate, I played around with different ways to write “Felices Fiestas” and using different brushes. I found a few that felt like ribbon and would compliment the bow I would be making. I ended up going with Option A!

*my favorite printers is CatPrint. They’re a small business with incredible customer service and quality.

ENVELOPES!

When sending a letter, I think about the experience of receiving the envelope… the color… the stamps… the shape and size! To once again, compliment the design, I went with a dark blue envelope and a white gel pen. Then each recipient received a quick design doodle. Truthfully I had the envelopes a week before the cards arrived so I had slowly completed them in between other projects. Peek below for the work setup…..

Fin

And alas, that’s it! It’s not the easiest thing to send cards out every year, especially considering I’ve added names to my list slowly and now have about 40 households I send one too. However, I’m determined to keep Snail Mail alive. It’s like….. with every little letter you’re sending out, an essence of yourself attaches to it… and every time someone sees your message, that essence can breath anew.

Snail mail foreevvaaaaaaa. <3

Hasta la proxima :)