I'M INTERESTED IN COMPUTER-BASED graphic design as well as the wet stuff, and occasionally people pay me to do it for them. Here's a look behind the scenes of a Christmas card I did for The Mandelbrot Set (International) Ltd. for 1997 (re-used on subsequent years - cheapskates!) I also used to maintain TMS's web site, and although it is now done in-house, the general look of the site and most of the graphics are still mine.

I did this with Painter 5 from MetaCreations. Painter is a 'natural media' paint program, which means that it emulates real media such as oil paints, charcoal and watercolour, but it also has some very powerful image editing features. In fact Painter is probably the most impressive piece of software of any kind that I have seen. To see how other people apply Painter, try searching for 'Fractal Design Painter' (which is what Painter used to be called) on you favourite search engine.

Okay, let's get started

1. The Holly

I decided to base the design on holly, since the TMS logo looks vaguely prickly, so the first job was to find some suitable leaves. I scanned this picture from a book about Christmas decorations.

Next I used Painter's lasso tool to create a selection. The selection was then floated so it could be manipulated as a separate layer.

Having procured a suitable holly leaf, I duplicated it and scaled the two copies to make two different halves of what would eventually become the holly sprig. Notice that the tip of the holly leaf was a problem, since it was obscured by the dinner plate. I used Painter's clone brushes and the Liquid Lens plug-in floater to recreate the tip.

To draw this in Painter I scaled the original logo to the size I wanted, created an empty clone and used Painter's Tracing Paper feature to reveal the image underneath. Then I just loosely sketched the outline with Painter's 2B pencil, embellishing it with what I hoped were holly-like spikes. The result has a very 'hand-drawn' feel about it - which, of course, it should because it was sketched by hand on a Wacom A4 tablet. This natural look is characteristic of Painter, and it's why the program is so popular with real artists.

3. Putting it Together

Now I had the two main elements of the picture and I needed to pull them together into some sort of cohesive image. This could have been tricky: on the one hand I had a more or less photographic representation of a holly sprig, and on the other a simple pencil sketch. The solution mimics the kind of loose 'visualization' drawings used by architects and industrial designers, where a carefully drawn perspective view is toned with loose watercolour washes or marker pens. It also owes more than a passing nod to M. C. Escher's Drawing Hands.

The main composition was now complete, so all that remained was to add the company name and a sanctimonious festive message (with apologies to the RSPCA). The former was simply a bunch of Shape objects made with the text tool, positioned and resized as necessary and then dropped onto the background. I tried writing the message by hand, but it didn't work too well so I ended up using the text tool for that too (the font is Bradley Hand ITC). I also drew some faint tram lines with Painter's 2B pencil to make it look like I'd hand-lettered the message.

The last thing was to add a surface texture to the whole image to make it look like it was drawn on rough paper. I used Painter's Apply Surface Texture feature for this, selecting a handmade paper texture.