Back in 1998 we created our first custom Christmas Card titled “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” We had just moved into our new headquarters in Coppell, Texas and it seemed like a nice way to finish off an exciting year. Back then, Tom Alford played Santa for our initial ornament-themed card. In fact, his son Michael and Tom Stimson’s daughter Rachel were the little children hiding from Santa in the background and those kids are now in college! Variations on the ornament theme were created and mailed out until we switched gears and did our first illustrated card in 2002 “Santa’s General Session” where the big guy employed a little AV to make a presentation to his elves. Since then we’ve done something a little different each year.

In 2007 we went back to the ornament theme in honor of the 10th Anniversary of sending out our custom card with “Santa in his Stetson” and once again Tom Alford was the man in the red suit…and cowboy boots and hat. In 2008 we created our last printed card “Silent Night Hole E Night” which actually had a die cut hole in the front cover. The hole looked like the rest of the ornaments on the tree but when it was opened it revealed that it was the “O” in the Alford logo.

Starting in 2009 we started getting green for Christmas and sent out our first card via email only. That year the theme card featured an illustrated Christmas tree with 25 Alford triangle ornaments to celebrate our 25th Anniversary. That year we also supported the Toys for Tots campaign. Last year we had the “There’s an app for that” card that showed Santa using an iPad to check off his naughty or nice list. I’d still like to see that become a real iOS app before next Christmas.

This year after lots of brain storming we zeroed in on just how much social media has taken over our lives in the past few years. From FaceBook to Twitter to LinkedIn and on down to e-mail and texting…it’s with us at all times. We figured a modern Santa would have some modern problems. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he were inundated with FaceBook friend requests and tweets and re-tweets with gift requests. His inbox would be jam-packed with “Dear Santa” letters and all-in-all he would be overwhelmed by modern technology. Santa may work fast but the internet works faster! We thought that Santa might have a wish of his own and that would be a longing for simpler times where he just checked off naughty or nice on an good old-fashioned paper list.

Once we had our idea I just had to come up with the best way to execute the design. A photograph could be staged but it wasn’t exciting me visually for this concept. I knew it would be a lot of work but I wanted to create a digital painting so I could fully illustrate the idea. I decided that a photograph would be a good starting point to get the basic layout and structure for the card and then I could digitally paint over the top of it to get the desired effect. I convinced Steve Alford to stand in for Santa this time and we gave Tom a year off. We put up some control drape in Steve’s office, added a dummy monitor, moved some things around on his desk and then he pretended to be asleep. A few snaps of the shutter on the old Canon 30D and the photo shoot was done.

Once I had the digital photo cropped and positioned in PhotoShop, I began to create layers and paint. Using a Wacom tablet I was able to paint right over the photo one brush stroke at a time. Most people think of Photoshop as a photo editing tool but it can really be a powerful painting program as well. Almost 100 individual layers make up the painted objects in the file which is nearly 300 MB in size. Every detail was painted using the Wacom stylus except for the computer screens. I created fake FaceBook, Twitter and Outlook screens and then placed them into the painting and ran a few artistic plugins to get the desired effect. I wanted those to look as realistic as possible to help sell the imagery. You can see from the progression of images of the card as it was painted just how much was added from the original photo.

 Click on any image below to see a larger version

We hope you enjoy the card and that it puts a smile on your face this holiday season.
They are a lot of work but are so much fun to envision and create each year. May all your wishes come true!

If you would like to take a look back at all of our custom Christmas Cards click here…