This year’s Father’s Day card:

(How I made it below the jump)

I like to draw animals in clothes, and I found myself with a lot of patterned paper on hand, so of course I did what any person would do in such a situation– I made a father’s day card featuring animals* in clothes made of patterned paper. With wallpaper.

I have two older brothers, who were born in the early 70’s, and I was born in the late 70’s, so I decided that it would be fun to depict everybody in 70’s style semi-formal clothes. I remember a particular photo of us with our dad when I was very young, and everybody was wearing variations on brown and orange. My dad is about 6’4″, so he stood in the middle with his three much shorter children standing around him like Ewoks. Given the constraints of proportion here I wasn’t able to replicate that height difference, but I tried to capture our respective personalities at the time in the faces of the dog family.

First I drew the heads with their necks and collars (if applicable), cut them out, and placed them on the “wallpaper” to get an idea of where they would need to go.

Then I cut out the respective outfits– just the general shapes. The pattern for Daughter’s dress was the most difficult to choose. I knew I wanted 70’s browns and golds for the mens’ suits.

I changed my mind about the pattern for Daughter’s dress. Did some Googling for “70’s mens suit” and “70’s womens’ dress” and added the styling.

Hands. The brothers needed hands.

And ties– they couldn’t go without a nice wide tie each, could they?

The final product. Unfortunately there was no way to get the entire thing on the card using the photo card uploader/editor on the Walgreens web site, but I got most of it.

*Corgis. If it wasn’t clear, my feelings aren’t hurt.