Creating the Bearthday Card

Workflows are very popular these days so I thought you might find it useful to see how I created the 50th birthday card for my brother.

The Idea

One leads to another and since the flatulent bear from the curry episode was still in my mind, and toilet humour is something that amuses my 'little' brother (it runs in the family Awa Rich), the bear sitting on the throne seemed like a good image to use.

There are so many euphemisms for visiting the smallest room, but going to meditate seemed appropriate for his milestone anniversary. Some soothing music helps with meditation and an old wind up gramophone works better visually than some boring electronic gadget. Also, I have plans for this bear and the mad Fitzcaraldo character from Werner Herzog's film (of the same name) standing on the bridge of his boat crashing down the rapids of the Rio Urubamba with Caruso playing on his wind up gramophone is an evocative image (for me anyway). When  your world is going down the toilet, at least have a moving soundtrack!

A bear can't do everything himself so he needs an assistant. I have no idea why I chose a squirrel other than they seem to be particularly active at the moment.

If you're going to ponder on the bog, you can't get better than a Crapper. Thomas Crapper & Co. are alive and well in Stratford Upon Avon, still making the finest bathroom porcelain money can buy.

Preliminary Sketches

Plumbear

Glum Bear

Wind up Gramophone. A Victorola I think

A squirrel that lives in my head

A squirrel that lives on Streatham Common

Bogbear

Composition

I liked the bear sitting on the throne with the gramophone but the bear looked too happy. I found a photo of a suitably glum looking bear on the internet and based the glum bear sketch on that. 

Wind up gramophones need winding up and that's a job for Assistant Squirrel. The first sketch was from the generic squirrel model in my mental image library. The one I used is from a photograph I took in the woods on Streatham Common.

I photographed the sketches with my iPad and imported them into AutoDesk SketchBook Pro as separate layers.

I chose Sketchbook Pro over all the other similar apps because it's available for the iPad, Mac and PC, so it's easy to transfer images from one device to the other (That's what the kids call Cross Platform Awa Rich). I can rough out a drawing on the iPad and transfer it to the Mac Book Pro for clean up.

All the layers were opaque, so I erased the paper around each image to reveal the layer below. Then I rearranged and resized the layers so I could get everything where I wanted it. I also flipped the squirrel around so it was facing right. and finished up with this.

Transferring the Image

I printed the composite image and rubbed the back with powdered graphite, layed it over a clean sheet of 200 gsm cartridge paper and drew, fairly roughly, over the top of the printout.

The final drawing

Now that I had a feint outline of the composition I redrew the whole thing with a 3B pencil. I added the cistern, again from my mental image library. I copied the Thomas Crapper & Co. logo from a sewer cover in Knightsbridge. You can find them all over London as Thomas Crapper's works was originally on Sloane Avenue in Chelsea. Thomas Crapper toilet bowls really do have names on their rims but I'm not sure there's one called 'The Endurance".

I was going to colour it with watercolour washes but there was a dead lion approaching and I needed to get the card in the post.

Assembling the card

I photographed the final drawing, transferred it to the MacBook Pro and made some adjustments to the exposure and contrast using the built in (but much overlooked) Preview app, where I also added the sepia tint. A last minute decision.

I created the card layout in Apple Pages using a template I'd designed years ago for making greetings cards - just an A4 landscape page divided vertically in half with some boilerplate text and an image placeholder that can be replaced with something appropriate to the occasion or recipient.

That's it.