Christmas is in the air

Christmas is in the air most of the houses I pass by already have parols, and the music I hear on the radio are christmas songs. Even the guards at our office are wearing santa hats or reindeer headbands. :) The people at the office are all talking about how to spend their 13th month and if we have bonus this year (fingers crossed!). And also don't forget the list of people that you will be giving gifts! I'm hoping that I saved enough money to buy christmas presents! >_<

Since it's christmas is near, an artists job is to christma-fy every design he-she is doing, it's the season of santa hats, christmas trees, reindeers and snow! So here are some Christmas designs I made. :) The first one is for project guard this is in collaboration with my friend's passion project which I'm really excited about! (will talk about this on my next post) :)

And also some new year posts for "The Adventures of Pepot and Dora" and for my fb page. :) I wasn't able to create new sets of postcards this christmas, but will definitely make one for next year, I already added it on my 2015 goals! :) 

Woof woof christmas pawscard

arf arf woof woof my 2013 Christmas postcard! :) Check out my last year's design here.
This year my christmas postcard design is a Blues Clues inspired dog illustration! :) Will post the steps soon. Keep your paws crossed. :) Cheers!

Christmas Card Illustration Process

As promised here's the process for this project. This was a design for the Christmas carolers thank you card. Here in the Philippines this is a tradition. Everyone young and old will jump from house to house singing, and the house owners if they like your singing will give you money in return. When I was a kid my siblings and I will get/create musical instruments like stringing bottle crowns together, creating drums from discarded milk cans, or if there really is no time, I just get a spoon & fork and bang them together! And that was the end of my singing career. :) Okay enough flashbacks.

SKETCH
I started with a very quick sketch (I did the sketch on the first paper I got my hands on, I can't find my sketchpads anywhere so the notebook it is! ) The sketch/doodle is very rough, just to get the layout. Next I transferred it on watercolor paper here I refined the line art.

sketch

COLOR
After the detailed sketch I started blocking out the colors, I used watercolor for the sky & tree and used the gouache for the rest. I wanted a colorful opaque style for this, more like a vector feel. Okay if you are looking at my sketch & my colored piece intently like your life depended on it (which I doubt), you will see that I removed an element in the background. What you didn't notice?! I decided to remove the kid & dad in the background so the user will focus on the carolers, KISS (keep it simple stupid). :)

DETAIL

After I blocked the colors I added the details, line art, which needs a lot of concentration... and not breathing... and tongue sticking out on my part.

FINAL ART

And after a couple of hours tadaaaa! I would like to present my present! (get it!) I hope you had a blessed Christmas!

The most wonderful time of the year!

I can't believe December is almost over! I only blogged twice this month! Got caught up with so much work which unfortunately I can't post yet :(. So I did this christmas card illustration instead. This took a while since i'm juggling my office work and our xmas party preparation. Christmas is just 2 days away and i'm sooo excited to spend it with my relatives. So glad to be able to do this illustration for the holidays. Merry Christmas everyone! Will post the step by step process hopefully this December. :)