Burns Family Christmas Card 2018

Burnsland

2018-12-27

Merry Christmas!

Each year, we try to come up with something interesting for our family Christmas card. Past Christmas cards have seen us sitting with Santa Claus, enjoying a beach scene, and even flying through the air. So we tried to think of something that would at least equal our past efforts.

One of our life events lately has been that Jaylin is learning to drive. Why not do something with Jaylin driving? And maybe Laura and I could be in the back seat with panicked expressions on our faces? So that was our starting point.

At first, our idea was just to take a photo of the above scenario using our car. And that probably would have worked pretty well. But for whatever reason, I always like drawing something as part of our card. Laura mentioned that the red truck with the Christmas tree in the back has been everywhere lately. So why not do our own version of that, with Jaylin driving the red truck? We could take pictures of us, and then I could draw the truck. That sounded like an even better plan!

Once we had our plan and I had a rough picture of how it would look in my mind, we needed the photos. So we took some. But we didn’t need a car, so we just took them in our den.

We started with Jaylin in the front seat. The stack of paper plates was supposed to represent the steering wheel, just to give him something to hold on to. It took a few tries to get everything right as far as his pose goes. But I liked this version. And don’t worry about the fireplace and everything else in the background. All of that will be removed.

Then I handed the camera to Jaylin, and he took the photo that was to be us in the back seat. One photo was all it took. Apparently, we have the panicked parent look down pretty well.

I then drew the scene to insert us into. Because the fall has been a rather hectic one, I actually drew this on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, so that I could send it off to be printed by Tuesday and still get the Black Friday/Cyber Monday savings. Looking back at it all, I would have added a few things to it if there had been more time. But it never was meant to look like a photo realistic truck anyway. So never mind the fact that it does not have things like bumpers. Or headlights. Or seatbelts. Seatbelts save lives, you know.

Here is the final version:

Of course, I am a bit biased, but I really liked how it turned out. Just the kind of thing we had in mind. Hopefully, it made sense to everyone else, too.

Don’t Forget the Backside

We also like to do something interesting for the back of the card. Why have it be plain? At first, I started out with just some words, but it was missing something.

At some point, I mentioned to Laura that it would be nice to have something with our reindeer on the back of our card. For the previous two years, the backs of our cards had featured a reindeer that I drew, and he was doing something similar to what we were doing on the front of the card. Laura said, “It would be funny if he were driving a car, but if it were a really small car, like a child’s toy car.” So with that, I was off and running!

Here is how the back of the card ended up: