I’m trying to establish a tradition of designing a new Christmas card every year. This year, I wasn’t really feeling the Christmas spirit, so I wanted to honor all of the Scrooges and Grinches out there.

The final product features “Merry Christmas” in negative space, surrounded by smaller handwritten text that reads “Bah Humbug”.

To complete this piece, I used a ruler to lightly pencil in borders along the edges of a 5 x 7 inch sheet of watercolor paper. Then, I lightly penciled in the “Merry Christmas” outline. It’s intentionally imperfect and a bit clumsy. I wanted it to look written by a human, not a reproduction of a common font.

Once the outline was in place, I rotated the paper and repeated the phrase “Bah Humbug” in a consistent size and style, occasionally alternating between uppercase and lowercase lettering. I continued until I filled all the space, then carefully erased all of the pencil lines. The original design took approximately one day to complete.

The completed piece was scanned, edited, and printed on 5 x 7 inch watercolor paper greeting cards.