EARLY HISTORY
I've been making my own Christmas cards since I was about 16 years old. The first ones involved sticking coloured film on to hand drawn images, and took a long time to make. I probably only made a dozen or so, for my close friends.
DARKROOM DAYS
In the following few years I made some cards in my father's darkroom, by laying things on pieces of photographic paper, exposing them to light from the enlarger, and then developing them with the usual chemicals. This was probably even more time-consuming than drawing each one by hand, but at least I could be sure they were all the same! I'd colour them in with magic markers. The mostly involved variations on Santa Claus with humorous text. (Well, at least I thought they were humorous at the time.)
PHOTOCOPIERS! THE 20th CENTURY'S GREATEST INVENTION!
Gradually, things got more technical. I had a job in a drawing office, with access to that most wondrous of modern technology – a photocopier! Back then, photocopiers were in their early days, and couldn't cope with large areas of black, so images had to be outlines, with no filling in. And of course, there still wasn't any colour unless I used a pen to fill it in. Still, it was much faster than the darkroom!
ABOVE: 2008 CARD (complete with recorder players and dogs)
COMPUTERS AND PRINTERS AND SOFTWARE!
Fast forward to more modern times, and I had a computer with graphics software and a printer, so things could get really fast and fun, especially when I got my hands on an OKI LED printer with a straight paper path, so that you can send quite heavy card through the machine, and print the exact colours you want. If there was anything wrong wrong with those cards, it was my fault, not the printers'.
Some of my longtime friends (you know who you are!) have managed to collect a copy of just about every card I've ever produced, and may even have some that I've lost myself!
ABOVE: 2016 CARD (one of my favourites featuring Ghyll, Kiri, Aineko and Oscar)
THE COMPROMISE PRINTER
Last Christmas, 2025, I gave in and bought an interim inkjet – a perfectly decent Epson – which is fine, but I still miss the sad old OKI lurking moodily under my desk.
INSPIRATION STRIKES!
I needed inspiration for a card, and one day when I was sitting in my car in a queue of vehicles stuck at one of the interminable sets of temporary traffic lights, in order to alleviate boredom I started making up phrases based on the initial letters of nearby number plates. The one directly in front of me was LWM. Oh, that's easy. LAST WISE MAN. I started wondering who the last wise man was, what happened to the other two to leave this poor magus as the final one alive, and so on. By the time I got home, there was a story in my head, as well as an idea for a Christmas card.
This time I did some mixed media messing around, using aquarelle pencils, watercolours, black pens, and a lot of scanning and tinting with both vector and raster graphics software. It's not quite how I wanted it, but I could keep refining it for ages, and Christmas was looming, so it is what it is.
I love the way you can sketch something on paper, (or even trace bits of other people's photos if you're crap at drawing a freehand camel for instance) scan it, refine it with vector software, print it out, colour it in, rescan it, adjust the colours with Lightroom or something, then write the text with a black pen on paper, scan that, and drop it on top of the image on the computer. It's great fun!
THE STORY BEHIND THE CARD
Oh, you want the story, do you? OK. In order to try to avoid my stuff being hoovered up by AI bots, I've turned the text into jpg images rather than text, just to make things a little more difficult for them. You can print them out if you like. They were designed to be printed with 2 columns to an A4 page, but I had to separate the columns to make them legible on this blog.
If you'd like a large text version, please let me know.
