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Christmas card 2010

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Description

Good Neighbours

In old Scandinavian lore, mythical creatures like giants and trolls where not necessarily evil creatures. Rather they roamed their respective domains of the forest or mountains and could even be helpful if humans just respected and kept up good relations with them.

Here we see a family doing the rounds through the landscape to visit their neighboring giant and spread some Christmas spirit!


This is my Christmas card for 2010. I'm putting it up relatively early, in case someone's interested in getting one to send. :) An early Merry Christmas to you all!

All done in open-source programs GIMP and MyPaint on Linux. I aimed at getting a style closer to the 19th century landscape artists for this one.

I won't be changing much in this at this point (my cards have already been sent off to the printers after all), but I am as usual always interested in feedback and critique anyway.

Older Christmas cards of mine:

2009 (Surprise gift):
Christmas Card 2009 by Griatch-art
2008 (Night in the troll forest):
Christmas Card 2008 by Griatch-art
2007 (We're THIS tight!):
Christmas card 2007 by Griatch-art
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Griatch
Image size
7930x4735px 3.61 MB
© 2010 - 2024 Griatch-art
Comments50
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Songwind's avatar
:star::star::star::star::star-half: Overall
:star::star::star::star::star-half: Vision
:star::star::star::star::star: Originality
:star::star::star::star::star-half: Technique
:star::star::star::star::star-empty: Impact

You have the best Christmas cards. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt=":)" title=":) (Smile)"/>

You have really outdone yourself, this time. Your technique is wonderful, and I think the end result has a beautiful, realistic-yet-painterly feel.

Three things stand out to me as particularly worthy of comment.

1) The frozen stream is beautiful. It has the combination of shininess and solidity that I expect from ice like this.

2) The humans are very well rendered. The trick of creating a believable and seemingly detailed human figure from a few colored strokes is impressive. The children and the Mom seem particularly well done to me.

3) The giant's head and face. You have stroke a very nice balance between humanity and accessibility, and strangeness which shows us this isn't just a great big human being. The kindness and happiness of his expression is well-captured as well. (Is he giving or receiving that gift?)