Season Greetings & Happy New Years!
The Lindberg Family wishes everyone a smooth transition into 2014.
Mythic Santa Concept
The Lindberg Card tradition has been escalating since 1998 (see Teamlindberg crafts gallery). Each year I arbitrarily blend two themes. This year was "Myths" and "Santa," borrowing design elements from the 2010 and 2011 cards, while portraying Santa as are more heroic. Below I list some of my initial concepts to explore:
Santa + Sleipnir = creepy weirdness. The centaur alternative would be "Sleipnir", the 8-legged Viking horse who could ride the sky. This concept just produced creepy sketches (not shown here :) ). Winged horses might work, but didn't Santa have reindeer?
Deer + wings = "Peryton." Okay, Santa doesn't need wings if his reindeer have them. Thanks go out to Seabury Court Resident Mythologist Erin (a.k.a. daughter) for educating me that winged-deer actually have been classified already.
Sleigh or Chariot? Suitable vehicles for sky riding include chariots, as per Helios, Sun-driver. For starters I tried working with the chariot.
Sketches Start the Process
Setting the Landscape with Photography & Virtual Globe
Envisioning an epic, celestial landscape, I went to my neighborhood street (Seabury Court) to capture the sunset's awesome clouds. Thanks to neighbor Frank for letting me trespass on his driveway and grab the below snapshot (in July no less, I had to plan early this year!). For the earth, I decided to take advantage of Photoshop's 3D object capability (I had to learn how to use it sooner than later). Online tutorials (video demo and step-by-step tutorial links) guided me through wrapping the 2D earth-map over a sphere.
Composition: Rotating Earth & Adding Sketches
The sunset image and globe were combined to get the composition started. Adding the sketches came next. The earth had to be turned such that the sun came from the east, chasing Santa as he rides
into the night.
Blocking-in Sketches
Next came painting the characters, so I “blocked in” their bodies by tracing over the previous sketches with the digital paintbrush.
Readjusting & Detailing Perytons ... Chariot morphed into a Troika Sleigh
The chariot idea wasn't working for the image, so it morphed into a sleigh. Notice that Santa is more like a beefy-god rather than beer-belly fatso. Custom brushes were used for the fur, cloud, and feather textures. The Swatch and Brush panels serve as paint palettes. A Wacom Bamboo tablet enabled pressure-sensitive brushing.
Photoshop Workspace
A screenshot captures the complex document. It is >250MB, full of layers (most with masks) and Smart Objects. Had to colorize the 50+ layers to maintain sense of them. Adjustment layers (also masked) help tune lighting, saturation, color-temperature. To wrap things up, the year was added in Roman Numeral style (as done in 2007, 2012). Then it was submitted to psprint.com for hardcopy printing ~Nov 5th. This provides a few weeks to approve the proof and get copies in before the hectic Thanksgiving Day week.
