An interactive Christmas card

A few weeks back, I had the idea to create an interactive Christmas-card-like page mixing analog and digital media. Over the days and weeks, I thought about how I’d create it and made some sketches.

I was also slowly getting back into painting with oil pastels, something I enjoy but don’t always have the inspiration or time for, so I thought this would be a great project to incorporate traditional media into the web world. I always love to see analog and digital mixed in other people’s projects, and haven’t tried much of it myself (apart from the illustrations on this website). Other than it being fun and cool, I think adding in hand drawn, analog elements to a website, makes it so much more personal and unique. I might write about that soon.

I started by painting a few trees, to practice different styles and get the project started. I also drew some decorations for the tree, to then put together on the website.

When I had all the drawing elements, I scanned them and edited them on Affinity to remove the background and edit the colors.

Finally, I put it all together on the website: designing the layout, adding the images and making it interactive. The web’s interactivity puts the whole thing together, and visitors can arrange the decorations on the tree how they like! The “Christmas card” is currently live and visitable from the entry (a.k.a. homepage) of this website and will be during the Holiday season, and then… well I guess I’ll need to create a new one for carnival, or spring… We will see.