Drawing our daughter’s birth card

One of the things I like a lot is that my dad drew my birth card. A birth card is an announcement we send in the mail when a baby is born, which is apparently not a global thing. My dad’s not a professional artist at all, but making the card himself adds so much personality. As soon as Kim and I started chatting about a birth card, I indicated I wanted to try making the one for our daughter myself.

Just like my dad, I’m not an artist. While I enjoyed drawing as a kid, it had been ages since I had picked up a sketchbook myself. I was also not expecting too much of myself; it was more about the thought than anything else.

I drew quite a bit on a hardcopy sketchbook and stuck with the idea it would be funny to have a line-up of animal bums with a baby in between.

Phone sketches

After deciding to go for the animal bums, I installed an app on my phone called Linea Sketch. With a clumsy finger, while not being able to sleep, I drew some animals.

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Moving to computer

Based on the above, Kim suggested it would be funny to make a play on The Big Five which you hope to see during a (safari) game drive–lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino, and elephant. We were going to put our daughter in between those animals.

I looked around a bit and found the free app called SketchBook which I was going to use for the next phase. I started by watching this great tutorial on all the possibilities of the app.

The first version was quite rough, but it gave a good idea of where I wanted to go with it.

After a few iterations and tweaks, I ended up with a result I was happy with. The lettering in SketchBook isn’t a smooth process so I moved that over to Photoshop. The result is definitely not a perfect card, but one that is personal and I’m happy I invested the time in it.