The Christmas Story

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With Christmas well and truly over, hopefully everybody has received all the Santa Cruiser cards destined for them by now! Here’s the story (and a few pictures behind the design.

I really wanted to do this illustration I came up with last christmas I called ‘The Nutkraken’ for our cards this year, but even after drawing it all up properly, the idea was nixed by Lilly.

nutkraken

Back at the drawing board post-it pad, I set about coming up with some other ideas, including this one I called ‘Santa and his Elvis’. This was nixed too:

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Eventually we came back to trying to reflect what happened in the past year, and decided that getting bicycles was probably the biggest thing. I put Santa on various bicycles, including some more conventional bikes like our own, and fancy racing bikes like my cat stickers, but his rotund nature meant he was best suited to a very upright cruiser bike. Here’s the final sketch, before tidying up:

cruisesketch

Everything was manufactured and ready to print:

A photo posted by Ricky Trickartt (@trickartt) on

The pressing wasn’t without problems, but it came out pretty good in the end:

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…And for our digital-native friends I did a special gif version to email them!

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Christmas Cards 2015: The Santa Cruiser

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I’m selling christmas cards again this year. Click here to buy some!

Last year was my first year selling my letterpressed christmas cards, and in hindsight, it was a bit ambitious to try and sell every single design I’ve done all at once when I was printing them on demand. To keep things simpler, particularly under the time constraints, I’m just going to be printing and selling the one design this year, which you should be seeing a mockup of above.

This year was the year of the bicycle for me – Lilly and I got bicycles for the first time since we were teenagers, and spent the summer cycling around Hertfordshire, so we decided to reflect that in this year’s design. In developing the illustration, I tried to put Santa on a variety of bicycles (he looked particularly ridiculous on a racer bike!) and found he fit best on a slightly beach-ish cruiser.

As ever, these cards are being hand-letterpressed onto high-quality 300gsm Somerset card stock, and they will come with appropriately-sized envelopes. This year the envelopes are made of recycled paper, which is a big look!

Cards will be pressed and sent out to you during the first week of December, so they arrive with you in good time to send out to your people. It’s a small selling window, so get yours now!

Would you like some to send to your nearest and dearest? Go and get some here!

Tete De La Course Stickers

TDLCs

I got some stickers made up of a post-it doodle from earlier this year, for no other reason than they seemed like a good idea. Would you like some? Yeah you would! They are orange because that’s the colour they’re meant to be, and blue because that’s the colour of my bicycle (although my bike isn’t a road machine like this!).

If you go here and Paypal me just £2, wherever you are in the world, I will post you two of each colour. What a good deal!

Many-TDLC

Hospital Bike Club

For some silly reason I have agreed to partake in Hospital Bike Club – along with some of our officers, I shall be embarking on a two-wheeled journey from Hospital’s HQ in South London to Brighton on Saturday 8th October, before Hospitality Brighton that night.

I have been given the relatively easy end of the bargain here, because unlike my colleagues, my two wheels will be propelled by a tiny engine. This doesn’t make it much less daunting for me though – the trip from SE26 to the Brighton seafront in itself would be pretty much the longest journey I will have ever taken my tiny 50cc Vespa on in nine years of owning it, and my journey doesn’t even begin there, as I have a thirty-mile ride to the start line too.

Still, I can’t complain too much – Edgar, Riley, Zac and Tom will be doing this using the power of their own bodies while I buzz along with them, handing them sugary drinks and kendal mint cake to keep their energy up! Lilly may also be joining me to ride on the back, as it would be fun to film the event Tour de France style, with her facing backwards with a camera. We’re not sure on the legalities of that, but I will document the event one way or another!

So why are we doing this?

Well, aside from fun, we are doing this for charity! We are raising money for MIND, the mental health charity, which is a pretty awesome cause. You can donate money on our Just Giving page here. And if you don’t think my mammoth Vespa trip is worth it, then do it for the chaps who are actually pedalling the whole way!

 
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