Forty Years #34: Christmas/Solstice Cards

Many of my holiday cards over the years have used my lettering. The card above was the first one I did using calligraphy. I was so excited I had it printed at a commercial printer. Dashing through the snow was written with white ink on black paper that was mounted white paper. I photocopied it onto red paper. The Fra Giovanni quote was written with a scroll pen and photocopied onto light green stationery.

I had a brief experimentation with silkscreen for the Wassail card. 

Joy to the World was done the Christmas after my first child was born. I think I may have already started to work on Childbirth Journey. 

The following year featured a brush drawing by my year and a half old son with a line from a song that is sung at the Revels.

My photocopier experiments showed up in some of my cards. The first is a photocopied yew branch. The circles are photocopied pizzelle cookies. 

Dona nobis pacem is another Revels song. I used gold gouache and silver marker and gold marker for the solstice circle.

When I learned photoshop, I used that for some of my cards. 

 I did this card the Christmas after our trip to Korea. I added writing in photoshop to a photograph taken at a temple and added the gold dot with marker to each card.

The flower card grew out of my series of kaleidoscopic photographs with lines from Emily Dickinson that was indirectly inspired by the Korea card. 

When I was in the full force of teaching bookmaking with recycled materials, I made printed the cards on recycled copy paper and made the envelopes from recycled paper too.

The year after I published Art Lessons, I used my favorite quote from the book by Fra Giovanni and hand lettered individual bookmarks for each card. 

The noel card was done after our three-week trip to Paris. The dots above each 'e' were done with gold marker on the individual cards.

The first of my switch to a postcard format, this one was inspired by the Masscribes workshop I took with Mike Gold.

Each year as the news is filled with more and more depressing things, I find it harder and harder to a make a celebratory card. I chose this quote from Albert Einstein (who I since found out was awful to his wife)'

and then another quote from Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series.

Last year's card was a tribute my mother-in-law who loved gardens, plants, and Latin names.