Lantern Trust Christmas Card

I was asked a little while ago to make a Christmas Card for Lantern Trust. Lantern Trust is a Weymouth-based charity that helps people with multiple exclusion factors, those who are most vulnerable and who most often find themselves homeless. I drew a couple of portraits for them earlier this year. One is here but sadly the other gentleman I drew passed away and I don’t think it would be right to share it. It brings home just how important the Trust’s work is.

The request was for the Lantern Trust building, lit up at night, in the snow. I generally use pencils to draw things based on what I can see but it doesn’t snow all that often in Weymouth so that wasn’t an option. Also, being Christmas, I was going to need to use some colour.

I’d been looking for a reason to learn Procreate for quite a while so this seemed like the perfect project. Apart from anything else, Procreate has multiple levels of undo and it felt like that would be very useful. I bought a course on Domestika and got stuck in. It’s a good course although it’s in Spanish and I was trying to follow it and read the subtitles on my phone while using the iPad to draw, which was difficult.

I wanted the picture to still look like a drawing so I didn’t make the lines dead-straight. I started with drawing the Lantern Trust building as it is.

Then I added a layer to make it nighttime and put in some lights and snow.

Then some major cropping and a festive message.

This year I donated 25% of the (meagre) profits from my drawing to Lantern Trust. If you would like to make a donation you can do so here.