It’s Christmas time! I love Christmas and I love send Christmas greetings. I’ve been sending home-made Christmas greetings since 1989 almost every year. For me, I don’t think there’s a more personal and loving way to greet Christmas than doing my own card. In the 90’s, for a couple of years, I even recorded a bunch of Christmas songs with my friend Lali and my old girlfriend Ela and got them sent to my close friends and family. That was pretty fun to do, even when the results where pretty amateur!

I’ve trying to remember all the Christmas cards that I’ve been sending and digging in the drawers in search of them. I couldn’t find them all but I managed to rescue some of them. And of course, since Naomi and I started Intuitive Designs in 2002 we’ve been sending Christmas greetings to our clients as a way to thank them to work with us, so if you are one of them you may be receiving your card very soon!

So these are some scans of some of the Christmas greeting cards I have sent. Starting with this engraving from 1989, a couple of years after I first started etching engraving, I did this piece a technique of drawing with a pen. I remember this character of the Christmas Tree-Man came up to my mind while I was visiting the old little village of my ancestors in the Basque Country, Lendoño. It was soon before Christmas and I decided to go for this idea of a different way to represent the spirit of Christmas. Maybe in the way that my grandmother and great-grandparents would imagine a magical figure coming from the woods to bring light. I think I may recover this character sometime for a little Christmas story or something similar.

This Christmas card from 1990 is also an etching engraving. For this one I used the technique of aquatint, painting directly on the plate with acid using a pencil. I also used powdered resins for the starry sky. This one represents the Star of Bethlehem, I always thought that the story about a wonderful astronomy event guiding the wise men was so magical and beautiful.

This other card from 1991 was an acrylic painting that I later color-photocopied. Sadly, I don’t keep the original painting today. I took the idea of the star further to represent the Seven Sisters, the Pleyades. Probably because around this time I had a lucid dream where I met an old wise woman who told me she was from a planet in The Pleyades. This woman also told me that I would work with computers in the future. At the time I hated computers, I didn’t want to have anything to do with computers. It was 1991 and they were cold and ugly, and I used to think they were only useful to waste your time playing video-games. It’s funny, but by 1996 I started realizing about the wonderful possibilities of computers in arts, design and music, and I got my first computer. Soon later I started focusing all my professional life to computers and the Internet, so whatever the dream meant it was damn right! So sometimes when I look up to the sky I have this feeling there’s somebody out there…

In 1994, I did this other Christmas card influenced by some stained-glass windows that I saw during a visit to Salisbury’s Cathedral, by the Preraphaelite artist Burne-Jones and made by Morris & Co. They’re just delightful! I always wanted to learn how to do stained-glass but I ended up doing this little piece of watercolor featuring an angel.

This Christmas card was sent by Intuitive Designs in 2006 and is a vector digital work that I finished up in Photoshop. For the background I used some vector brushes of snowflakes. I barely ever use brushes done by other people, but this one time I did an exception considering the snowflake figures are not necessarily something personal that someone has created, but patterns from nature. I remember I wanted to do something with a Eastern touch and I got influenced by pictures of the Chinese dragons and the revolving fireworks in the Chinese New Year’s Eve parade.

We don’t want to kill the anticipation to our clients who are waiting for our new card, so I’m going to wait for another week until they get it and then I will post here the latest Christmas card. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas everybody!