Make Art That Sells : Paper market

I am back into the swing of Make Art That Sells and already the first week is nearly done! I am very excited about the Paper market which includes greeting cards, journal covers, notepads, etc...

our 'warm-up' exercise was to draw/paint gingerbread houses which were a lot of fun (and somewhat reminiscent of cuckoo clocks!) -- looking at reference, it's amazing the amount of work people put into decorating gingerbread. they are works of art and i don't think i'd want to eat them, they're too beautiful!

then our main assignment was to create a holiday greeting card (i.e.. christmas but non-denominational) at particular dimensions, using gingerbread houses.

here was my process:

for the 'mini' warm-up I sketched here there and everywhere - in a big sketchbook, on the train in my moleskine, and on some craft paper which i quite liked because i could use white for the icing.

Then once we got the main assignment i started doing some compositional sketches. i pretty quickly came up with the idea of gingerBIRD houses which i liked. (But I PROMISE I will not draw birds next week. Can't seem to get away from them!)

At first I had the birdhouses as hanging Xmas bauble-type things

But decided that was trying to combine too many things (gingerbread, birdhouses, bauble) so made them more birdhousey.

Once I had the sketch, the fun part came. This was actually pretty tricky to do traditionally because all the detail for the houses is in white. I decided I wanted to do this in separate layers so I could move things around if I needed. 

So first I did the linework in black, which I later reversed in Photoshop: 

(I was planning on using the smudginess/fingerprints in the background but didn't in the end)

Then came the colour on the craft paper which i liked so much and gave it good 'gingerbreadiness' (wow i'm writing my own dictionary here!)

 I did the birds separately and some black snowflakes to be reversed and used in the background:
 

as well as some hand-carved stamps of candy canes, stars and circles to be used on the garlands (i changed the colours in Photoshop)

And then I got to assemble it! It all came together pretty easily (for once!) Here was the first try with some text in Photoshop.

not working so well. I decided to change the location of the garland of lights to the bottom of the poles to break them up a bit. I also added some hand-lettered text.

and then submitted! WOHOO! :-)