Christmas Card 1998

My photograph for 1998 was Rushmere Heath, near Ipswich, UK, in frost. The structure on the horizon, which I think looks reminiscent of a fantasy castle in this picture, is a water tower. I also think the purplish tinge to the colouration, from the winter light on normal summer film, is reminiscent of the purple colour of heath from flowering heather in the spring. Taken on the way to work in 1997.

It was a deliberate break from my three consecutive years of cute animal photographs but was probably my least popular photograph.

The rounded corners are because I had the prints done as self adhesive labels to make fixing them to cards easy (and they were strangely cheaper than normal bulk reprints) and the labels had rounded corners so as to be less likely to leave an unstuck corner that could get snagged.

Camera = Pentax K1000.

The border was from doodling in Corel Draw 7 (a vector drawing program which I recently got at work for doing technical illustrations, it being far cheaper than the professional artist's Adobe Illustrator and far higher quality than the amateur's Microsoft Powerpoint & Word). It had a 'blend' tool that did tweening between vector drawn shapes and most of the shapes for this border were from unplanned playing with that.

Downloads

• Photograph in screen resolution (as above).
• Photograph as a high resolution scan for printing.
• Border in original Corel Draw 7 format.
• Border converted to PDF format.

Card assembly instructions to duplicate the original:

1. Get the full resolution photograph printed at 5.5"x3.7" on photographic paper. If it does not have rounded corners then round them by cutting off the white bits at the corners.
2. Print the border using a laser printer (or print once and duplicate by photocopier) on A4 160 g/m² white cardboard.
3. Fold the printed cardboard into an A5 greetings card with one straight crease.
4. Glue (or double sided selotape or similar) the photograph to the card in the correct orientation. Take care not to make the photograph too soggy.

Printing the border & photograph together on a colour printer does not give as good results (neither home laser nor inkjet printers have yet reached photographic printing quality). It also costs more (because of the ridiculous current price of printer ink) and gives a more mass-produced look.

More Christmas Cards

For the rest of my Christmas cards, go up to my Christmas card gallery page.

By Andrew Hardwick.
Distributable under GPL or CC-by-sa freeware licences.
Written 2008/2/22-28.
High resolution image added 2011/12/28.
Metadata updated 2017/3/30.
Corrected border download files 2018/7/1.
Available on-line at http://duramecho.com.