Drawing our son’s birth card

As I mentioned when I drew 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.

The same obviously applied for our son.

Let’s go to Belgium

Given that we last time focused quite a bit on South Africa (and The Big Five) as a theme on the card, I now wanted to shift focus towards Belgium, as both of our kids have dual citizenship.

I started playing with the nursery rhyme Ik zag twee beren, a song where two animals are doing something funny in each chorus. Since the bears in the song are spreading sandwiches, I thought it would be fun to see four hands holding the butter knives. However, we soon agreed that it was too foreign for non-Belgians to grasp what was happening.

Then we moved to the idea of things that Belgium is famous for, like fries, beer, waffles, etc. It felt more in the right direction, but it still didn’t have the fun that Mila’s card had.

When Mila had to take something of her heritage to “show and tell” at her school, I gave her a Tintin book to show. It was then that I was reminded of our rich Franco-Belgian comic book history, and decided to use that as the theme for the card. I soon landed on some of our classic internationally known characters: Tintin, Smurfs, Spirou, Blake & Mortimer, while also adding some that are mostly locally known like Jommeke.

Some of the earlier iterations:

Enter iPad

Contrary to the previous time, we now have an iPad with a pen, and using that instead of a combination of phone and desktop made my life a ton easier. I used Linea Sketch for the earlier drafts, as for simple drawings I find that one easy to navigate. Once I had decided on the direction, I only used the Sketchbook app, and almost exclusively the iPadOS version. The version I used was a bit more limited than the macOS version, but good enough for what I needed. I cannot begin to describe how much easier it is to actually draw with a pen compared to doing it on desktop.

I do still think that the lettering and final editing is not a great experience on Sketchbook, so I moved to Photoshop for that part.

This was the final result: