Once again I wanted my holiday card design to convey the sense of joy and happiness that my dog Cooper brought into my life again this year. I was also feeling the need to dig in and assemble the card by hand so I combined my digital skills and tactile skills, which I think brings out some of my best works.

I snap a photo of the sketch and place it into Adobe Illustrator where I built out the basic shapes for the items I was going to want to either print and cut in the Cricut, or just cut on colorful paper stock I had on hands. When that was done I had the following components:

Preview in Adobe Illustrator
Outlines in Adobe Illustrator

• Santa head/arms and blue background printed directly onto the blank white 5×7 card front.

• Santa’s mittens holding the “Be Merry” banner.

• Santa’s beard on white card stock

• Cooper’s smiling face

• Wreath on green card stock

• Bow on red card stock

Once I had all of the above printed/cut I then ran the parts through my Xryon machine using the permanent adhesive cartridge to made them all like stickers. And I began assembling them in the layer order needed to build the card.

Once all of them had been applied to the front of the card, I then used Posca paint pens to hand draw on some highlights and other lines on Santa, Cooper, and the wreath. To finish everything off I used the red, blue, green, and black posca pens to add polka dots around the border of the card. And that really just added the final touch of festive fun I was looking for.