Christmas Card 2011 Mr. Royal and the Electric Mayhem Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!
Well this year I just barely made it under the wire for the getting the Christmas Card done "on time" this year as in I got the card done before Christmas.
This year no one really had any ideas on what should be going on in the card. Then Laura, Alex, Uncle Ricjard, Nathan and I saw the Muppet movie for Thanksgiving so my mom threw out the idea that we should all be Muppets in this years card. So I drew us all as our own Muppets.

 (Rough Sketch with us as Muppets)

 I also had the idea to make us into Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the Muppet Show band.

 

I decided to ink this version and make it clearer what was going on.

Every one liked the Dr. Teeth version better so I went ahead and worked on that version. I found it really hard to find time to devote to working on the card this year with school, work and being a procrastinator. 

I wish I had thought out the layout better, but over all I am really happy with how the card turned out.

Congrats to the Wedding Zombies

Congratulations to my friends Catey and James DeSantis who tied the knot on this day in Las Vegas.
Here is a drawing of the happy couple as a pair of zombies.This was done on the inside of the card Laura and I gave them congratulating them on their wedding.

Christmas Card 2009

This year I ended up making two Christmas cards. My mom just asked for something funny. So in October I came up with theses sketches (previously seen on my sketch blog), they all had to do with global warming or the bad economy, things that are on my mind. Plus one about Santa being tattooed which was just fun. (If you are having trouble reading the dialogue on my sketch blog I wrote out the dialogue for clarification)










































My parents weren't too crazy about the ideas that I came up with but I guess it started my Dad's mind a turnin' and he came up with "Things may be a little tight this holiday season what with the recession and all. But there is a barrel of love and good wishes from the Royals." So with that in mind I just started working in Photoshop.























Here is what I came up with. I got it done pretty quickly for one of my Christmas cards (which usually take forever for one reason or another) I finished it in about a day. Yes I know "recession" is misspelled, I based it off of my Dad's spelling which is also not very good. My mom liked it when I showed it to her, but then I showed this to Laura and she didn't like it and thought I could do better. That the elves were ugly and they should be cute, so then I decided to show it to my friend Chris Vear, who felt that the back ground could be more detailed and that I could incorporate the text elements better. So I decided to just redo it to incorporate their suggestions.










Here are the new elf sketches that I did trying to keep them simple cute and homeless looking.













I compiled all of the sketches along with some of the roughs I had done fro the older version and I created a new back ground sketches adding more posters on the walls. This is the sketch that I took into illustrator and made into the card.






















Here is side A
I wanted to try and not do heavy black outlines and to not shade it so that they looked like little cut out characters. I took the finished Illustrator version into Photoshop and added paper texture to everything and added some blues to make the elves look more somber. Some of the lines got a little washed out; I should have paid a little more attention to my contrasts. There are a lot of things that I like about this piece and a lot of things that I think could have been better. I learned a couple of things and I think the second one definitely looks better then the first one. Though it took me way more time so we got off to a late start and I never got around to sending out my cards to my friends. Sorry guys, I still love you.


















Here is side B
We based the idea of doing a post card off of this weird troll post card my mom found, on the back of that post card there was an illustration of the troll kids just sitting there so I wanted to do a similar thing. So here is the back of the post card with my homeless elves dumpster diving.

Two Cups of Tea

Here is something I did for my friend Catey for her bridal shower, which is today. Laura is one of the brides maids and was helping out with the festivities of the bridal shower and had me design an invite. The theme of the bridal shower was a tea party, which made Laura think of the song by the Star Fucking Hipsters, Two Cups of Tea. One of the lyrics is "Two cups of tea // one for you and one for me."






















This was always designed to be a painting but I started out by sketching it in Illustrator because I wanted a nice and clean template for the cups and the pattern going around the cups. The sketch I made in illustrator ended up being too flat for Laura and she sent me some tattoo pictures of tea cups for reference. Based off of those I sketched out these tea cups and added a ribbon to it with the song lyrics in the ribbon. I was really happy with how the painting turned out














This is a used tea bag that was meant to hold the the info for the bridal shower. In the end it was not the right size to fit all of the information. So I added it around the illustration, using the tea tag for the RSVP information.

We ended making these into postcards to send out to invited guests.

Christmas Card 2007

It seems that despite the fact that I had this blog way back in 2007 (I think) I didn't bother to post this on my blog even though I posted all of my old Christmas cards from the five years before that. So Before I let another year pass without posting it here it is.
In 2007 my mom asked me to do a family portrait being tired of doing Santa jokes from the years before. In 2o07 I also met Laura and my mom recognizing how important Laura was to me and how much i loved her offered to have me put Laura in our family portrait. Letting her know that she is part of our family.






















Here is the sketch that I started with the idea being that it was

























Here is the final version of the card that was sent out to every one.