Thursday, February 24, 2011

Emily's twenty-second birthday card

Our daughter Emily had her twenty-second birthday this week, and unlike last year, when she turned twenty-one and we had the pleasure of her company here at home, this year she was celebrating with her friends and co-workers in California. I'm pretty sure she had a good time.

I have tried to make a birthday card for her every year, and I thought that this year I would continue the octopus theme which ran through our 2010 Christmas card and the Valentine's card I made for my wife this month. So I got out the sketchbook, and drew this:



It took a couple of days to finish -- I was at first not too certain that this was the way in which I wanted to go, so I left it lightly penciled and came back to it the following day, and decided that I liked it more. So I penciled some more on it, and decided that it was ready to ink.

Using my trusty number 06 Sakura Pgima Sensei marker pen, I got to work, and by the next day, had gotten it to this state:



I knew I wanted to watercolor it, so the next step was to make some copies to work on, which I did down at Mirage. The coloring went pretty quickly, and this was how it looked:



I wanted to put a background in -- something to do with the ocean -- and decided to use a similar technique as my last two cards, only this time I decided to use an actual photograph, albeit one lightly filtered in Photoshop. I went through some of my recent photos and picked out one from my trip with Jeannine to Cape Cod last year. I liked the light on the water and the clouds, and after running it through one of Photoshop's filters (I'm pretty sure it was "Rough Pastels"), this was the result:


I selected the background of the watercolored image, pasted the ocean scene into it, and voila! I had Em's card. -- PL

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Very nice! She loved the card. We had a lot of fun, but she definitely missed you both. Can't wait to see next years theme. Maybe some sort of insect? Or something with feathers?

Anonymous said...

Ah, yes. The Year of the Octopus.

Emily is 22? She seems much more mature. Our Hannah is 21.

Stan

PL said...

" usagiguy said...
Ah, yes. The Year of the Octopus.

Emily is 22? She seems much more mature. Our Hannah is 21.

Stan"

Is there such a thing as a "Year of the Octopus", Stan? If not, perhaps there should be.

I think Emily is, in some ways, a lot more mature than I was at her age. -- PL

PL said...

"Yaima said...
Very nice! She loved the card. We had a lot of fun, but she definitely missed you both. Can't wait to see next years theme. Maybe some sort of insect? Or something with feathers?"

Yaima, nice to see you here! I am glad Em liked the card. I confess that when I heard she was going to take a helicopter ride over LA, my blood pressure spiked in an "anxious Dad" kind of way, but I'm happy that turned out well.

As for next year's theme... I have no idea! Maybe I'll keep the tentacle thing going... although bugs with feathers sound kind of cool. -- PL

mikeandraph87 said...

No,there isn't a year of the Octopus. I double checked before posting.
It is a unique theme though and you nail it every time.
22,just a year or so behind me. I didn't realize that. Happy, 22nd and ,Em!