I made most of the Christmas cards that I sent out this year. I had looked around at all of the standard ones and to be honest, I really wasn't all that impressed by them. Did I really want to send kittens? Or snowmen? Sure I found a pretty cute "Happy Everything" card, but was that really all there was? So one day, as I sat doing a lot of nothing in our apartment, I happened upon a really cool ad. It was in Time Out, so luckily it was in color, depicting all it's witty glory: Bavarian Black Lagar. There stood a cartoon dominatrix with her male slave in the background with a beer balancing on his butt.
"I want that!" I said in my silly voice that Brad says makes me sound slightly mentally challenged. He just laughed at me. I was inspired though. I had to figure out something to do with that cartoon. I rummaged around in the basket we keep in the bathroom (you know for what--don't make me say it) and found another ad. Two copies. So I got to work.
The first one I worked on looked pretty good (I though)--I got rid of the beer on the butt with a trusted Sharpie (since it wouldn't translate once I got rid of the marketing crap). I had recently bought some nice card stock from the craft store along with some scrapbooking supplies and voila! My dominatrix Christmas card prototype.
It was cute, but it wasn't perfect. I cut the whip out of the original because I didn't trust myself to get rid of the background ad info without ruining the picture. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't satisfied, so the next step was a doozy. Because I used one of my only two examples of the ad on the prototype, I was very, very nervous about using my only one left to do the rest. What if I screwed it up? What if I accidentally cut off her head instead of just piece of the whip?
Thankfully Brad came to the rescue and he was able to isolate the flash picture on line to make a still PDF. He saved that and printed it so I wasn't as nervous cutting into it--I knew I could print out more. Luckily I painstakenly cut out the picture, using a tiny pair of scissors I usually reserve for cutting loose threads on silk and satin when sewing, and I finally had a ready picture. We headed over to Staples, I made color copies and I got to work...
The silver foil is actually oragami paper I found at Kate's. The purple is also from Kate's, but that is regular stationary. I also found the cool snowflake cut out thingy there.
Here's the messy workroom/office:
A bunch of bitches:
The final card:
I only sent this one out to around 12 people (and I gave one to a coworker who thought his sister-in-law would get a kick out of it). Anyone who had small children or nosey relatives got a tame one. I think it would be fun to sell them, but since the image is probably copyrighted, that's not going to happen. I think I'd like to work on doing other kinds of cards though--goodness knows I've got plenty of wise-ass sayings to go in them.
