My Watercolor Christmas Postcard This Year

“It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.”
– Thomas Carlyle

Copyright Beth Parker Art 2013

My Christmas Postcard This Year

I painted this little card to send out this year.  I love the idea of Santa having a nice break at his vacation home after delivering all those presents.  And of course, he takes the elves along.  Mrs Claus is probably inside making the margaritas.

Have yourselves a very Merry Christmas!

About Thomas Carlyle

Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle is best known for his biographies of Frederick the Great and the German playwright Schiller. He was born in 1795. The first draft of his acclaimed two-volume work, The French Revolution, was accidentally burned by his friend John Stuart Mill’s maid; he rewrote it from scratch and imbued the rewrite with more passion and immediacy than was common at the time. This made his writing very popular in Victorian England. He died in 1881.

Santa at Cape Cod

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
– Annie Dillard

 

Santa at Cape Cod
10″ x 14″ Watercolor and Sharpie on 240# Cold Press

Did you see all the little elves?  It’s a vacation getaway for the North Pole crew.   Mr. & Mrs. Clause have lost some weight over the summer, too. 


This was fun.  I drew the whole thing with a Sharpie, before I painted in the watercolors.  When I did “Montreal in Color”, I painted all the lines in with black acrylic.  I got much smoother lines with the acrylic, than I did with the Sharpie.   It takes a little longer, but the quality is better.    If I wanted even better lines, I guess I’d have to change the paper to a hot press.   As much as I experiment with mediums, I really don’t play around much with different papers.   Perhaps it’s time? 

About Annie Dillard

American author Annie Dillard rose to fame with her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which weaves theology and meditations on nature into an account of a year spent in the country recovering from pneumonia. Writing the book so fully absorbed her that she forgot everything else; she lost 30 pounds and all her plants died. She was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. She married her college writing teacher but later divorced him. She remarried and lives in Connecticut.