let's make cards!

After I quit my job at the end of last year, I started 2026 focused on travelling, exploring, and refocusing my creative process. This has included taking every opportunity there is to create.

One of my main love languages is Words of Affirmation. I love cards. I love writing them. I love receiving them. However, one thing I have stopped doing over the last few years is making them. A few of my good friends had birthdays while I was away travelling. Since I would be missing all the celebrations, I wanted to spend some time making cards and then I mailed them out, because who doesn’t love a little surprise in the mail? (Support your national postal service!)

It took ages, but it was so fun, and I’m so happy with how they turned out. Check out some of the process, and the final product, below.

A thumbnail and some tests.

These two tests were inspired by Sha'an d'Anthes current art style. She uses negative space to block out the colourful shapes. I also wanted to try out sgraffito (colour underneath, darker colour over top, and then scraping away the top/dark layer off to reveal the colour).

Midway point of two of the cards.

Now that I'm looking at the second card (the girl floating in the air with the balloons), this is also similar in style to Sha'an's work. I clearly had been watching a lot of her videos at the time. I really do love the vibrancy of the pastels.

The middle card was so involved that I didn't take any photos while I was making it, but I have been trying to do more construction paper art. There's a stop motion/construction paper art idea that I've been playing around with for a while, so this was nice practice for it. If you can see the little white tab on the right of the middle card, that's connected to the lid of the box. So the box lid comes on and off, revealing the little friend in the box.

PS. My friends were happy with the cards!