Christmas Card 2011

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! Ours was fun and chaotic which is just the way life is when you have a 2 year old. Here's the christmas card/booklet I sent out two days after Christmas which folks should have received by now...

Merry Christmas

I didn't have the time to make a full color Christmas card this year so I stuck with something simple and easy to reproduce on my home printer. The drawing is of my daughter Virginia.

Best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Christmas Card 2009.

I am submitting this for Illustration Friday: Trail. Forgive me if I have submitted this for another theme, I honestly can't remember if I did or not.

For the past few years I have incorporated Ranger Kent and Cowgirl Pearl (two characters my wife and I portrayed for our church's annual Vacation Bible School) into our Christmas card. This year, with the birth of our daughter Virginia, I wanted to put her in as well our dog, Charlotte. The problem I ran into was that Kent and Pearl were never married so I would have a lot of explaining to do if they showed up on the card with a baby, right? I decided to go with it anyway and added this little note on the back of the card:

Last year sometime Ranger Kent and Cowgirl Pearl got hitched and had a baby some 10 months later. Oh, and they also adopted a dog, apparently.

________

I hope that straightens things out kids!

As a little side note, if you go back and look at some of the illustrations I have done for Highlights this year, you can see Kent or some kind of cowboy in the illustration.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. God Bless you and your family and best wishes for a successful and healthy new year.

- Chuck, Daisy, and Virginia.

O Bethlehem.

In April of 2001 I had the wonderful privilege of visiting Israel, a trip which changed my life and forever altered my appreciation of God's word for the better. This is a small excerpt from my Israel trip sketchbook, as well as my Christmas card for 2001. I hope to have my Christmas cards delivered to me by Tuesday which means I should be posting the illustration on Christmas Day at the latest. Meanwhile, enjoy and have a Merry Christmas.

Forgive the quality...

Philadelphia Christmas Card.

Last card, I promise. I meant to put this up sooner, but I got swamped with other stuff.

Back in 1995 my good friend Ramsie and I entered a contest for the city of Philadelphia's official Christmas Card. Students from all of the art schools in the Philadelphia area entered and Ramsie and I were chosen. We both developed the concept of using the Love statue but I have to be honest and tell you that Ramsie did most of the work. She did the bottom half since she was very good at drawing "small" people and I did the top half because I was more familiar with the buildings of the city. The funny part is that we never meant for this to be the finished art but Mayor Rendell (now the Governor of Pennsylvania) was so pleased with it that they ran with it as is. The print house that was sponsoring the contest (CR Waldmen) loved the card because they got to show off their new 5 color press since we had used Doc Marten's dyes which contain some fluorescents (they run into the fifth color area). Although you can't see it, they also put a UV coating over the Love statue which gave it a glossy look adding to the beauty of the card.

Unfortunately, Ramsie moved to Texas before she had the opportunity to meet the Mayor and have some promotional photos taken so I went alone. Below is one of those photos. Not everyone can say that they got be the Mayor for 52 seconds...