 Hello there, it's Sandy All Knock and I'm going to show you today how to make a retro cat Christmas card. And if you want to go crazy, you can paint your own cats like I'll do at the end of this video, but I recommend sticking with the card. It's a lot easier. So let's get to it. Earlier this week, I was talking about Christmas cards, but using trees. And I thought it would be fun to do something a little more complex, but still very easy to draw. And basically, draw an oval with points on the two sides of it and then make what might feel like a lamp stand and a tail on the end of it in two ears. When you put the eyes in, it just starts to feel like a cat, but it's a retro cat. I've been kind of really thinking a lot about that sort of 1950s, 1960s, atomic design. You can pick up the sketch over on my blog if you need to just take a look at that. But it's super easy. I made a bunch of these. And after I made the first few, I didn't even need to do the drawing anymore, because I just got used to, okay, I make the oval, paint around it. And you could do this in markers, you could do it in pencils, whatever kind of medium you want. Same process. So I'm painting the head around the eyes. I'm leaving the eyes open. If you can leave the nose open, great. If not, you could draw the nose in later, but just leave yourself some eyes, add on the ears. If you're doing watercolor, it's helpful to be able to add those on while it's still wet. And then draw a neck in there. I left a space, a little gap under the chin, so I can draw in and I could even paint in if I wanted a color. And then there's going to be a sweater down below. The tail is just a swirly line and you can make it curl any old which way that you want. Just make a stroke that's just going to go down in a curve. I'm using a number four brush, but depending on what kind of brush you have, you may adjust the size a little bit as well. But you want to keep your painting as simple as possible. The more you scrub back and forth and fuss over details, the more fussy it's going to look. And you want this to look very fresh and simple. So for the stripes on the cat's sweater, just paint stripes. I'm not even worrying about making them straight or even or anything. I'm just throwing in color. If when you do this, you decide you don't want any bleeding in the sweater, then I would recommend drying it before you start putting in the second color. So I did not dry it and you'll see what happens. I didn't really worry about it because the pen and ink work is totally going to fix that. So don't worry about it. If it does, just keep moving. But if you want to go ahead and dry it, you can do that. So I've painted the collar on the cat. You could just leave it white and then draw in a color. If you get a little bit of bleeding going on, it's real easy to minimize it a bit. Just take a baby wipe and dab off a little bit. By the time that pen work goes on there, it's going to be no big deal at all. Dry it really well because you're going to put the pen and ink on and you don't even want damp paper. You want completely dry paper when you do this. And at the end of this video, I'm going to be talking about the class that a lot of people have been doing already this week. If you're interested in doing very simple Christmas cards like this, we're doing trees. I'll show you a preview of the class at the end of this video. Then be sure to go join in that class because it's a lot of fun. Everybody's having a good time doing it. So then you're going to take a pen. You can use a Sharpie. You can use any kind of black pen you've got in your house. Don't stress out about trying to go get a new pen just to do this. One of the joys of making cards like this, if you have paper, if you have watercolors and you have a pen or any coloring medium, then you have everything you need to make a card like this or any of the trees that are in that class because there's really simple things that you can draw. People appreciate when you send them a card with a drawing on it that you did. Yes, stamps are great and they're fun, but I think they turn into a crutch for us and we don't end up learning to draw because we rely on stamps. So it's why I encourage you to try drawing something simple and see how that goes. Now, one of the things I'm doing with this is not following the lines. And I am not following them deliberately because if I follow them deliberately, I'm not going to get it perfect. I know that about myself. So I'm drawing them deliberately off so that when somebody looks at it, they think, I'm just doing a quick sketch. And most people are going to assume that you put the penwork down first, but I find the penwork first is the backwards way around getting your confidence going. It just doesn't work for me. So if I can throw the paint on and then clean it up with the pen, I have a much better success rate with my work. But it's really easy to trace around these shapes. Just make sure they're not perfectly traced and then make some of those atomic stars. It's basically an X with a line through it either vertically or horizontally. There's only three lines in most of those from my study of 1960s design. And you can make whatever patterns you want. Of course, in your sweater, I think since it's kind of a retro feeling cat, that the retro designs work really well. And from my cards, I have really started not even worrying necessarily about finding a sentiment stamp to go with it. I am just writing my sentiment on it. Now, if you don't have great handwriting, stamps are an excellent option. But if you have decent handwriting, boy, the card's done. Look how quick that was. And this was all in real time. And that was six minutes to get that done. Now the other project that I thought I'd show you just snippets of, I didn't film much of it. I was filming it because I was thinking I might put a little bit on social media. And then I realized, you know, it came out kind of cute in the end, but I didn't really like it a whole lot until the end. There were moments like that, that tail that was really nice because my brush was exact right width for the tail doesn't normally happen that perfectly. And then I started doing again the drawing around the shapes that I had painted and making them deliberately kitty wampas. These three are my cats that I've had before. I don't have any cats left now. But the tall gray one in the back is Oliver. He died a number of years ago and punch this guy with the Stripe sweater on passed away a year ago. And then just about a month and a half ago, I lost Suki, the chunky little black cat that's sitting on the Ottoman. That was always her favorite thing to do. But I customized these for my cats. And then I just put some blocks of color in behind them because the sweater and the cat itself with Punchinello on the left, he wasn't really showing up against that white paper. So I just put some blocks of color in there. And since I had used all these kind of bluish and blue green colors, I went with something very muted and opposite on the color wheel. So it kind of took me into the browns and golden kind of colors, which felt very retro. So there you go. I didn't like this block of color that was behind here. So I decided to make lines over top of it. I did some other adjustments to it. I'm not like going to switch my painting style to this at all. But it was a heck of a lot of fun to just do a little ode to Punch and Oliver and Suki in her little fat body sitting on the Ottoman with her glasses on. So you can customize your own painting if you want or just start with a card. Just start with a card. That's my recommendation because the card is really simple, but it's really fun to paint your own kiddos and do them as cartoons because then they don't really have to look like them if you're not really good at drawing. This is a great kind of sidestep to that. Now I told you there's a class. It's been going on already. You can catch up anytime. The class is still going to be there and it's over at artventure not at art-classes.com. Artventure is a place where I'm putting smaller classes, quicker things. There's more community over there because there's some places where we can talk. You can share your work and I can answer questions, that kind of stuff. And the bigger classes, the more in-depth classes are at art-classes.com. So this class teaches you how to make these trees and I teach you in four different mediums and they're just as simple as that. No, they're simpler than this cat. They're very easy. We just put some color down. You can do it in markers, in pencils, in watercolors, any kind of medium you want and then add your penwork to it. And I got, when I was prepping this class, I got 24 cards done in one fell swoop because I just made a couple of each one of these and Bataboon Batabing filled my Christmas box. So if you're interested, links in the doobly-doo and go make a cat card at the very least even if you're not going to go make trees. But I hope you will because I'd love to see you in the class. I'll talk to you guys later. Take care. Bye-bye.