Every year, from childhood to 2019, I’ve designed and produced something postable for Christmas. And when I say ‘postable’, I mean that in the traditional way — put it in a postbox! One day I’ll write a piece about some of these extravagant productions and the hours of work they entail, but they are legion.
After all; I am an illustrator, an artist, a person who does lettering, loves print, and works with ink and pixels and paper all day/week/life long. You would be correct in saying there’s something of an expectation there.
They've ranged from a snow-white 7" record release on white vinyl complete with fully illustrated storybook and website, to a foil-embossed trio of hangable mandalas illustrating prose my my writer friend Ed, to a set of mini chocolate barshand-wrapped in my own Christmas wrapping paper (sold separately in my shop, 7 different designs), and individually hand-printed book marks.
These myriad creations are not necessarily on my website — I think of them differently from client work — and for many of them there isn’t a copy left, so if you had one, you were #Blessed, a sort of ‘you had to be there’ vibe.
The lockdown of 2020 meant that these very physical greetings were put on hiatus as people moved to home working, changed jobs or retired — or even left the industry altogether for something else. Who would be where? And for how long? How do you find out where all those people are and is it worth the postage spend when half might not arrive? My four-figure mailing list was suddenly in doubt, so an equally time-consuming animation was sent out instead — I still made some hand-printed greetings tags as well, unable to fully abandon the analogue.
The world had seemed to have lost a little of the joy in the tangible — or even become a little afraid of it, with all the sanitiser and hand-washing? — but I wasn’t too fretful at the time. It would, I was sure, be back.
2021, 2022 and 2023 were a mildly fretful mix of ‘cards just for family and friends’ and an online creation for the ‘Big Mailing List’, but carrying over a thousand identical but individually-signed objects to our local post office seems to have become a thing of the past, the list requiring a significant amount of updating and research before risking the associated expenditure on postage. Instead my aim, at this point, is to have a postable list of perhaps a third of the size, of colleagues and clients I know are still working, or in my orbit in a mutually-appreciative way, and who would still welcome funny little creative indulgences in the post.
Meanwhile, this year I was fully intent on some hand-made action. And I thought it would be nice/interesting/distracting to show the process of producing these actually quite simple (by comparison) cards.
I was entranced by a piece of artwork my eight-year-old niece made one day in September when I was looking after her, using some prototype inks from the UK ink company I work with. I was to put them through their paces; they didn’t exist yet, they didn’t have names, and I only had a tiny bottle of each (“ooh, don’t use too much of that”) but in she went, using too much of that, with a cotton bud and some gusto; dot dot dot.
The colours blended and overlapped in an exquisitely simple CMYK kind of way. I kept that piece on our studio wall for weeks. I knew it would be my Christmas greeting, but I decided I would figure out what the rest of it would look like nearer ‘the time’ (with the world being as it is, any outward-facing visual communication has benefitted from a certain ‘reading of the room’ before committing). Ideas were floated and rejected. I knew two things: it needed to use the newly-arrived batch of neon ink I’d bought for my obsolete Japanese Gocco printer courtesy of a friendly new supplier, and it needed to be simple.
And sure enough, what the world needed towards the end of November was a big smiling bauble face, because I am ALSO eight years old and like drawing and sharing big smiley and preferably imperfect faces.
Smiley faces were drawn with ink and the wrong end of a paintbrush and auditioned. Those rejected were cut up to be deployed as gift tags on the family pressies. Then a rigidly symmetrical star was made in Illustator and tested, and laid over one another.
Boom. The infectious joy of a Christmas bauble backed by a neon star and an explosion of 6-coloured dots, overlapping and interacting with each other like CMYK Christmas lights.
I got the niece back in the studio to make as many dots as she could, but this time on pre-ordered pre-folded blanks. Since this was a solid collaboration, I also got her to draw her logo so it could be added to mine on the back of each card.
This she did.
The stars went down first on pre-scrored Hagaki-proportioned cards, the bauble colour laid over, then the bauble face in 3 separate screens:
And when G tired of dotting (she wasn’t being paid after all), Auntie Sarah finished the last ones off…
And thus, a couple of hundred cards were made and sent.
Called ‘Print Gocco’ by their manufacturer Riso, whose name you will probably know in connection with other, larger and less analogue machines, my little printers will not last forever. They’re essentially made for children and their parts and supplies are obsolete, but luckily I have a supplier and have been buying up supplies for 15 years. While I have them in full working order, though, smelling the get-high printing inks and running my hands over the dried print, knowing that someone else at the other end will open an envelope and do the same thing, is a sensation I never get bored with. It’s one of the things that gives me joy in a very, very screen-based, fast-to-make world. I hope that it does the same for the recipients too, a hark back to the times when you waited for a return hand-written letter, knowing that the hands of the writer — of whom, it is assumed here, you were fond — had touched the very same paper.
If you would like to receive a hand-made thing every Christmas, you can let me know here.
And you can buy Gocco-printed cards in my shop, if you fancy some of that intoxicating print smell for yourself…or know someone who will!
