Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

This year I learned how to create handmade cards using watercolors. I painted the cover of each card by hand. Have a look at the results.

holiday card with a painting of a snowman on the front, with a carrot nose and coal eyes and mouth. It says "Let it Snow" across the bottom.

holiday card that has the word JOY on the front, with the letter "O" replaced with a wreath.

row of triangles decorated like christmas trees, with the words "happy holidays" above them.

single triangle painted with stripes with a christmas star on the top.

These cards were unquestionably difficult. One challenge is that watercolors were new to me, so this required a lot of learning, practice, and experimentation. There were many early failures. Another challenge was figuring out the card construction. I needed to figure out how to glue the watercolor paper to the silver cardstock paper and how to get a regular piece of paper on the inside for me to write in. And there was the usual challenge of writing a personal note in each one. All of these combined took up a lot of time. I should have started working on this in October. Instead I started after Thanksgiving, and since Thanksgiving came late this year, I had very little time to do complete this.

Next year I'm going back to printed 3D cards.

Here are some more pictures:

all four holiday cards in a grid, going counter clockwise from the upper left, the cards picture a snowman, the word "JOY", a single christmas tree, and a row of christmas trees.

holiday card with a painting of a snowman on the front, with a carrot nose and coal eyes and mouth. It says "Let it Snow" across the bottom.

holiday card that has the word JOY on the front, with the letter "O" replaced with a wreath.

row of triangles decorated like christmas trees, with the words "happy holidays" above them.

single triangle painted with stripes with a christmas star on the top.

Although this was a lot of work, I have no regrets. I'm going to use watercolors in my other work. Getting a crash course in how to paint with watercolors will pay off over the long term.

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