This is a cropped close up of a digital illustration I painstakingly did for Delaware County Magazine, which I was Editor-in-Chief and designer for. Unfortunately, the publisher had to shut the business down in fall of 2024 as printer fees, paper costs, ink, distribution fees, etc, etc, etc all played their part. We kept it running as long as we could, and it was sustainable if it wasn't for the constant price increases our printer kept making us pay (I'm looking at you, Gannett). It was a great job and I had fun as I got to do a lot of different and creative work with minimal oversight!
I drew the initial design on paper based on the cover specs we used. Then scanned it in and painted over it in Photoshop, using my tight pencil sketch as a guide. I used the computer mouse to paint with and a set of brushes I had created at the time. Probably could have been much easier if I used a drawing tablet with pen sensitivity (didn't have one at the time) but it came out pretty great in the end! I did a lot more to the illustration than I needed to and used a lot of layers to keep it easy to change (or swap out) some aspect of it. I have 2/3rds of Santa's body done but only used the top half. In the end, I used it twice on two covers we published. First time was in 2019, and then tweaked it to look different in 2023.
This was all done in a pre-AI world. I still have the pencil drawing and still use my Photoshop brushes I created on various work like Scooby and the like.
This particular size and crop was for a holiday card version I created for the magazine to send out to our advertisers. I also created a computer wallpaper and email "thank you" pics.
Hope you like!
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