Unleashing Your Creativity in a Christmas Art Challenge
Wait, Christmas is over, you say. Yes it is! But I promised you a little post about the Christmas Holiday Art Challenge I participated in during December. It’s a great way to level up your skills and have fun creating the type of art you would like to buy.
In case you haven’t yet heard of Jehane, she is a fabulous and warm-hearted art agent (and an artist herself) located in Brighton, UK. She has two art challenges each year - one in the spring and one for the holiday season. She also offers a course in January called ‘Your Creative Gold.’ I haven’t taken the class, but I’m sure it’s fun and worthwhile. She also is a “Live Instagram” guest during Folktale Week as well, or at least has been the last few years.
Well, if you sign up for her email list, you will be mailed the prompts a week or two early. Shhh!! It’s a secret! That way you can work on the prompts before December 1st rolls around. Perhaps you want to join next year?!
A lot of people participate and I absolutely love seeing what everyone makes. There are so many ways to interpret words, and the variety and level of skill is stunning. You will also meet some new art friends along the way. Everyone is kind and you can leave nice comments to encourage your new friends!
This year the prompts were:
I love brainstorming ideas for Christmas cards, so I decided to make all my designs in a card format - 5” x 7” to be exact. I printed them professionally as well, to see how they turned out.
My process is as follows:
Write prompts in doc
look on Pinterest and Google for keywords: winter, frost, night sky, etc.
Close Pinterest and brainstorm original images that come to your mind and write them down under the appropriate prompt
cross off the ideas you don’t want to use, narrow down to just one idea per prompt
make a rough sketch for each prompt. I did this in Photoshop in a single document with 12 layers, one for each prompt.
Draw line drawings for each prompt in their own document.
Color to your heart’s content while listening to Christmas music or your favorite podcast!
Here are my final designs! Art like this can be used for art prints/wall art, cards, gift wrap, bags & tags, patterns, stickers, mugs, gifts, and more in the art licensing world. I hope you join in next year!
I printed them as 5” x 7” cards but at the last minute I had to select flat cards (not my favorite preference) as the templates did not accept the full-page bleed. In other words, I had set up the ‘front’ of the card to look like this…with my logo on the back of the card which when folded would be correct, but the printing company wasn’t set up to receive files like this. It was almost midnight when I ordered, I was tired, and I didn’t have time to reformat, AND the coupon code expired at midnight, so I ordered using just my designs on the front. So I now have prints of my artwork without any logo! These things happen, and it’s fine.
Thanks for reading, and now…