A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 3.

Written on 2/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy from my Etsy store), and follows on  from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

This is how I left this pic before the weekend. Since then, I have finished it!

After writing the last blog post, I decided that his cuff fur trim was way too narrow so I widened that up and decided I wanted to texture it a bit more. I was at the house of Jicsi's Jewellery and her littl'un has some teddy bears, so I spent 5 minutes photographing bear bums to use as a fur texture. When I got home, I whipped out an old belt for his belt texture too.

The whole pic was well on the way then. A bit of light and shade in the eyes and bits of shading in other things here and there, and adding Geoffrey's other fingers to the tree left me ready to add the frame and lettering.

My stamping is not really up to scratch so I stamped out the message, but knew I'd need to tidy it up in Photoshop. Then it occurred to me that while I'm at it, I might as well do the whole alphabet so that next time I need some lettering, I can just nick it from the master sheet.

I learnt I can't keep my stamping in a straight line.

I borrowed a frame from Jicsi to photograph, and then put it in the illustration and resized and reshaped it. It is a round frame, which I liked because it was reminiscent of a snowflake, but I was aware that to fit the writing into it the frame would need to be widened so that was an unfortunate sacrifice. To simply make it bigger whilst contraining the proportions would have led to the frame dominating the image which I didn't want.

Then I dropped a photograph of some textured paper I took ages ago over the top with an off-white layer set to 'colour' over the top to take the glare off it. Then I masked it to the right shape and size and used the burn tool around the edges for a bit of shade, then dropped my newly neatened up stamping over the top. I had to make the lettering quite narrow to fit it in which isn't ideal.  I had to play around with masks and his top hat for a bit to get them right but it worked.

That left me here. I'd spent a bit deciding whether I wanted his coat a nice bright red, or a little darker. I'd gone with darker at this point but I still wasn't convinced.

I had some pictures of some cog-esque paper snowflakes I'd made years ago so I did experiment with having them as fairly prominent hazy overlays but decided they were better behind the frame, and as small ornaments in the tree

All of my previous Coggington cards have always been done using just flat colours (apart from the glowing eyes) and textures and for this reason, I'd been reluctant to to add more subtle light and shade from the tree lights. This had been a conscious decision and I liked the way my Valentine's Coggington card could look a bit like it had been done with woodblock prints. Although I'd lost a bit of that with my more recent cards, I'd still always just used flat colours for them.
 However, I just couldn't be happy with the shade of his coat so I decided to very simply lighten Geoffrey on the side nearest the tree (50% opacity white layer set to 'overlay'), and darken him on the other side (35% opacity near-black layer set to 'vivid light'). It looked a lot better than I'd thought it would so then I applied an orange-to-transparent gradient to Geoffrey from right to left. I liked these effects so much, I made the light and dark layers more opaque (the dark one is set to 100% 'vivid light') and applied another similar gradient to him.

He looks warm, don'tcha think?

Right at the end, I remembered I wanted goggles on his top hat. I was excited that I could justify these goggles rather than just having them there because steampunk. (Yeah - I know he's a robot who doesn't need eye-protection when flying a steam-powered sleigh! Shh!)
Off I went to the living room to photograph my goggles whilst trying to stop the kitten from savaging them. I transformed the strap to the right place and applied a 'cutout' effect to them, then put a yellow low-opacity colour layer over the top to help blend them and shaded them and tweaked the levels a little.

I'm very happy with the results you see here.

The card is available to buy from this link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/204426247/steampunk-christmas-card-with-the 

The finished card!

Cheers for reading this far!

-Curt-

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator

And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

Written on 17/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy form my Etsy shop), and follows on from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

I now have a little more work done on this.

My main point of focus today was getting the Christmas tree to look like a tree. I want the lights on it to pop but also for the rest of the tree, which is mainly black in my photo, to not just blend into the background and become a black smoosh of nothingness.

Erasing the bit of curtains etc that was in the background of this picture of the tree was first.

Then I applied a couple of hue/saturation modification layers to the tree and adjusted the levels to highlight the lights, bump up the saturation, and alter the hue slightly.

Then I created a mask of the tree, and put a layer of gold over the top, set to colour blending mode to make it warm and suggest the yellows of the background.

Then I created a custom brush from a photo of a fir tree branch, colour selected the dark areas, and used the brush at low opacity and with varying shades of green to bring some of the shadows to a nice Christmas tree-esque green.

I lens blurred the background a bit and took the brightness down.

I've started shading Geoffrey's coat and applied the same rusted metal texture I usually use on Coggingtons to him.

Lastly, I've applied the old photograph border I created for my Coggingtons card to this, and darkened selected bits of the background.

I've decided I need to photograph a pair of my goggles for his hat (legitimate reason though: He's been flying a sleigh! I'm not just sticking goggles in because steampunk!) and I think I will forgo the Christmas hat, but may make his top hat festively red!

I want to bring elements of the background out a bit more, such as the stockings.

When Geoffrey's a little more fully coloured, I will need to start blending him into the background a little more.

That's been enough for today though. My housemate is back and has wine!

-Curt-

Part 3 is here!

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator

And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

Written on 14/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

I have started my Steampunk Coggingtons Christmas card tonight. I won't post this blog post until after I have published the card. (Edit: The finished card is now available here)
I don't know if anyone's interested to know how or why I made the decisions I did about this card, but here comes the reasoning.
Concentrate.

I've had a few ideas about the basic idea. On the one hand, I would like to show Geoffrey Coggington as a Santa-type figure. I have ideas about epic steam powered sleighs and I've got a couple of photos of outdoors in Brum from Christmas from years back to use as backdrops for this.
But also, I want to show Geoffrey as a dad figure with his family. But I have yet to cement the idea of who his family is in my own head, let alone anyone else's. I also have some photos of my own living room from last Christmas that I would quite like to get in there with that concept.

I've decided to kind of combine the Geoffrey as Santa idea with the home idea. I hope to produce different Christmas cards that explore all of these ideas at some point - maybe for this Chritsmas, maybe next.

Here's the design as it stands:

It's my living room in the background with the tones tweaked in it to make it warmer than the photo suggested. There's also a separate picture of the Christmas tree which shows it a little better and I have brought that out of the background and enlarged it to the foreground. It's still got a fair bit of its own background surrounding it.
Obviously, I drew Geoffrey in there.
I didn't know what sort of coat I wanted for him. A traditional done up Santa coat like so was my first thought:

This , though,covers up so much of his chest that only his head really shows, and I don't want him to just look like a Santa with an orange head. For the same reason, I don't want him to wear trousers. I need enough of him showing that people unfamiliar with previous Coggington cards understand what he is. However, with a short coat and no trousers and with his waist/hip area exposed, he could just look indecent. (That said, it worked for Donald Duck. I still don't get why he covers his nether regions whenever he loses his top, though. They're ALWAYS exposed!).

So then I thought about a coat more like this one: 

The problem here though, was that with the pose I'd given him, an open long coat like this just draped awkwardly and looked little like a Santa coat.

Having caught a bit of Star Trek: Generations on telly when I'd gotten in earlier today, this popped into my head as I pondered this problem:

After a bit of Googling for historical military jackets, which fitted in with my idea of G. Coggington as the captain and pilot of his sleigh, I found this which justified that style of jacket with my idea in my eyes:

After toying with the idea of him in a top hat, versus him in a Santa hat, versus him in a top hat with a Santa hat on top, I've decided, for now, to forgo the Santa hat and hope the whole scenario conveys his Santa-ness.

That decided, I've laid down the flat colours on Geoff. 

That's enough for tonight.

Bed beckons and work is peering at me from under the cover of tomorrow morning.

Part 2 is here!

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And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

What I don't like about Christmas.

It's the middle of September. This is fine. I like this time of year. What I don't like is the countdown to Christmas. People who know me will know this.

But this is going to cause me a problem soon. I'll come to that in a moment.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate Christmas. Far from it! I love Christmas! But the Christmas I like is just one day. The Christmas period I like is the short run-up to it and the continuation into New Year's Day.

The Christmas I don't like is the one that dominates a full third of a year.

Christmas seems to get earlier and earlier with each passing year. Earlier this year, I went for some food at The Harvester in Star City in Birmingham. On the entrance was a sign informing us that Christmas bookings were now being taken. I don't remember when this was but I know it was around a couple of weeks before my birthday because we decided to go somewhere else to eat for my birthday because we'd been here recently.
My birthday is 18th August!!

Someone, somewhere decided that Christmas promotion needed to start over 4 and a half months, and probably nearer or over 5 months before Christmas. Christmas is but one day.

It's a one day religious event in the UK, actually - a Christian-appropriated pagan celebration. I've no problems with it being an appropriation. Jesus' birthday is unknown so why not stick the celebration on a date where people are already celebrating. I've no problem with non-religious people getting involved. Religious celebration passes into tradition and each celebrates in their own way. Those who want to be religious about it do, those who don't don't. The tradition of gift giving is lovely. But it has become such a feeding frenzy for anyone with any product, service, or message to sell and the sheer force of consumerism that rears up like a tidal wave before December 25th is just nasty.

Can you imagine if I started getting excited about my birthday, another event that is so common as to happen every year, 4 and a half months before it happened? If halfway through March I started telling people on a daily basis what I wanted for my birthday. If I started demanding that they buy me cards 4 and a half months before my birthday. If every single day for 4 and a half months, I reminded people that my birthday was only a few weeks away.

Pretty obnoxious isn't it? Pretty obnoxious to be demanding people buy me stuff in the first place, let alone to constantly bring it up for months. Which is how I feel about Christmas. It's gotten obnoxious.

I know Christmas exists and I know it's coming. Cripes, I know it's coming! I don't need constant telling. I know that the tradition is to give gifts and celebrate. I'm hardly going to forget. So I would love for marketers and businesses everywhere to just STOP! Stop harassing me into buying things. Stop taking what should feel like a special annual occasion, and diluting its specialness by spreading it out over more than a full third of a year until it is everyday and tired come December 25th.
We are told for 4 months solid that we have to BUY ALL THE THINGS or we've ruined the magic and killed Santa and made children cry and broken family values and kicked puppies and we're mean old miserly killjoys and I don't like it.

Which puts me in an interesting predicament now. I'm on the other side. No - it's not working for Cadbury World. That their Christmas produce stocks in September, and that it makes up something like 5% of total sales in September annoys me enough already but that is as big companies do.

No, I'm talking about selling cards. I have a small greetings card business now.
Here it is: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred . Please - go and have a look. It's only small so I'll wait here until you get back.

It's a little bit steampunk, isn't it? In theory, I'll be selling other illustration based products there but at the moment, it's greetings cards that I'm focusing on.
I started with a Valentines Card this year, and to date also have a birthday card, Father and Mothers' Day cards, a graduation card for sale. The next big greeting card day is Christmas Day (no-one buys Halloween cards, do they?) so I've got a nice long stretch to work on this one or maybe even produce a couple of designs, and not feel pressured by an imminent deadline like I have with the others.
So here I am, thinking about my Christmas produce. In September.
Also, I want to have the card available earlier rather than later because I personally know people who have started buying Christmas stuff already and as it is something I want to make a bit of money at, sense says I should catch all the early buyers I can. What's the point of me bringing the card out in time for those early-birds if I then don't advertise it to them so they know it's there? But if I do that, I become the bit of Christmas I hate.

Earlier advertising leads to people buying earlier which in turn leads to earlier advertising the following year to catch the early shoppers and so on. It self-perpetuates.

I think I'll produce the card. I'll put it in my store. But I won't shout about it throughout the end of summer and all of autumn and the start of winter.
It can be how I feel about Christmas: It's there and if you want to get involved with it in September, you can. But I'm happy with it not being waved and shouted about and pointed at for the next quarter of the year.

It hadn't occurred to me until now that I need to think about how I want to manage this one so I don't hate myself.

-Curt-


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