Let it snow, let it snow, LET IT SNOW!

For Christmas I was inspired to paint a snowman. We decided to take our neighbors Snowman Soup (hot chocolate) for Christmas. My mom found a cute poem online for Snowman Soup and the idea was to put the poem on a recipe card. We had this planned for a while but never talked about the card. The other day I felt like I was going crazy and need to do something and started drawing. The process went very fast so all I have are finished product pics!

Since I was just practicing and relieving stress, I just drew the outline of the snowman and his hat.

Next I added a grayish blue very lightly around the base and sides of the snowman, then my imagination went a little wild. I wanted their to be trees and his hat to have a red bow. Then I thought wouldn't it be cool to add a leaf to one of his branch hands and a bird on the other. I drew the bird, but I free painted the trees. I started very lightly, and added more layers to the ones I wanted to seem closer. The spontaneity of the exercise made this very relaxing and enjoyable. I wasn't expecting a painting! I planned as I went and the purpose was to experiment and improve, what I ended up with was a Christmas card! There are definitely things to improve, I see all the flaws, but I didn't need to toss it out and start over, it was cute enough to use and perfect to grow from.


 Since I decided he was a keeper and he went perfectly with our Snowman Soup idea, my mother and I took the original down to the FedEx Office Store. They have a variety of papers to choose from. We chose a heavy weight semi-gloss paper. They scanned the paining in and we luckily ended up with a very customer service oriented employee who worked with the machine until she got the image and background coloring as close to the original as possible. Here are the results!

She reduced the image by about 50%, which gave us four to a sheet and were the perfect size for what we needed. This is not the first time I have done an original for a card. Office Supply stores are great to work with for printing. In the past I have usually tried two to a sheet for a folded Christmas card. You pay for the paper, I believe the one we chose was $1.24, and we decided to do 6 sheets, so we ended up with 24 cards for less than $8.00! It's never too early to start working on cards! Valentine's is around the corner and it's always someone's birthday somewhere! :)