Christmas Card 2020

Last year I made my own Christmas cards with some card stock, markers, and embellished stickers and I loved how they turned out. This year I wanted to do something a little fancier and get them done.

For years I have followed Laura Kay aka @diarysketcheslk on Instagram because I love her sketches. She does beautiful sketches for designers, celebrities, custom portraits etc. For the longest time I thought she only drew for famous people and companies – mostly because that’s what I took note of on her feed and I never looked further into it. But then over the summer I found out she takes commissions for regular people too. And when she shared some Christmas portraits she was already working on I knew I wanted to ask her to do one for me!

She is brilliant and can do basically anything you ask her. You can share with her multiple photos and give her your ideas and she’ll create it for you. For example, I knew I wanted the portrait to be of me wearing a certain outfit I wore last holiday season – a leather pencil skirt, my grinch heart graphic tee, and my white shearling coat draped over my shoulders. I sent her 3 photos. One of me standing so she could see what the whole outfit looked like, one of my sitting in front of the Christmas tree that I wanted in the background of the drawing that way she could see what the tree looked like, and then a close up of me to give an idea of the pose I wanted but standing.

She sends a digital copy and the original. It turned out so good! I used the digital copy to upload to Minted so I could create my Christmas card. I picked out the “Trailing Stardust” design with gold foil and I just got the standard shape.

I still need to get a frame for my original illustration. Right now I have it still in the protective sleeve sitting on my bookshelf for Christmas decoration!