Clattertron

[dc]S[/dc]tephanie and I went with the ‘crafty’ route for Christmas gifts this year. As in the ‘hand-made’ crafty, not the ‘sneaky, cunning’ crafty.

While Stephanie labored over her sewing machine making 16 pairs of mittens (from re-purposed¹ wool sweaters and Snuggies), I painted cartoon snowman families.

Do You Wanna Paint a Snowman?

I decided watercolor cartoons would make fun Christmas gifts. I got lucky, as I only needed to make six paintings, where Stephanie had to make 16 pairs of mittens (for my fellow communications majors, that’s 32 mittens total).

At first, my idea was to come up with six different ideas, and make each painting unique. A fine idea, if I could come up with all those different ideas. Inspiration struck while brainstorming ideas in my sketchbook. I don’t remember exactly how I got the idea, but a snowman popped into my head, and from there it became ‘snowman families.’

Assembly Line Cartoons

With my idea figured out, arguably the most difficult part of the project, I could get to work. Instead of starting and finishing each watercolor cartoon one by one, I took the assembly line approach, like I do with my comics and the mini-paintings I sell at shows.

First: I thumbnailed the paintings and figured out how to customize each for the recipients.

Second: I sketched each painting on a 4” x 6” piece of watercolor paper with an HB pencil. The paper I used came from a Fluid Easy Watercolor Block, which was super-handy (and good paper).

Third: Inking with my Faber-Castell PITT pens and erasing the leftover pencils with a kneaded eraser.

Fourth: Watercolor painting. I took a similar assembly line approach with painting too, using the same color for multiple cards when possible (painting all the carrot noses orange at once, and so on).

Fifth: When I painted the skies, I applied salt to the wet paint to give it a more interesting look. This was my first time using the salt trick for a watercolor painting, but the results were good and I will try it again in future paintings.

Here’s a couple more of the finished paintings (I forgot to get photos of the rest. Oops).

The snowman family paintings were a big hit as Christmas gifts—huzzah!

–

¹ I refused to let her say ‘up-cycled.’