Christmas is usually the busiest time of the year – not because of all the shopping and parties I have to do (I don’t) but because clients, wanting to use every last penny in their corporate budgets, end up asking me to do some project or other which I need to finish before the year is up. It’s also the time of the year that I’m commissioned to create art for various purposes.

Here, I was asked to create a family Christmas card, three by five inches, so I took my Letraset markers and came up with this:

Except oops! I didn’t ask enough questions, and it turned out that client wanted it to be in landscape format. So oh, fine, I’ll just add to the drawing:

But apparently, orange isn’t festive enough – or, I guess, Christmas-y enough – so I scanned the art into Photoshop and colored stuff in using my 3″ x 5″ Wacom Bamboo tablet and a very basic color palette.

Voila!

Lyndon Gregorio has been creating Beerkada comic strips for around ten years now, and only just recently released his first graphic novel spinning off concepts from the successful comic strips. Go-Beerkada is his take on the Japanese sentai genre, infusing it with his trademark storytelling sensibilities. It was launched at Komikon 2009 and is currently available in stores, sporting logo design and wraparound cover art by yours truly, with coloring help from Ruben de Vela.

Earlier this year, I illustrated a set of posters for Krispy Kreme; the goal was to evoke the retro aesthetic that’s so closely associated with the brand. All were hand-drawn before being scanned and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator.