There are many things I love about being an artist, but my absolute favorite is being able to apply my creativity to every day obsitcals. This Christmas I wanted to try and do everything fairly unique and different. I’ve put together a little showcase of some things that I did this Christmas, and feel free to use my ideas next year.

Custom Christmas Cards

This year I didn’t think to make Dunlap Studios Christmas cards until it was almost too late. Therefore, if you’re one of my customers and you never received one, then I don’t have your address on file. (Make sure to get it to me because you may be missing out on much more!)

Because I had a limited amount of time I didn’t do anything too special. I recently made some pieces that I was considering for my portfolio. After I decided against them, I didn’t want them to go to waste so I turned them into Christmas Cards. You may recognize them from a past post.

Next, I created a personal Christmas card for my family. I designed it really quick but it turned out pretty well. We’ve received a lot of compliments on it, I think it’s mostly because of the vector elements and the gradient into the photo. Those two tiny touches make our card stand out from the normal cookie cutter photo drop in cards. And it doesn’t hurt that it has the prettiest girl in the world on it!

Let me know if any of you need any custom greeting/holiday cards designed.

Custom Gift Wrap

My gift wrap ideas this year were pretty cool and I’m really happy with how they worked out. First, my wife’s Christmas list contained really small items such as a DVD, Book and I also got her some girly soaps. All of the gifts were small, which is essential for this project.

I put together a repeated pattern that also included my wife’s name and some elegant colors. I then printed it out on a thin 12″x18″ sheet of paper and used it as wrapping paper. This was a really cool and easy way to personalize the gifts and show off my creativity at the same time. I think they turned out really well.

The paper was kind of a black on black, the flash on the photo below makes it seem much lighter than it was.

My second creative wrapping idea isn’t so much wrapping but labeling. This is a great project for any of you that decided to “go green” for your New Years resolution.

My wife had a cool idea to wrap presents in newspaper, though I decided to use an old Trader Joe’s bag. First off, because it gives more of a home-made look and second it reminds me of those old fashion packages, like it should have an address scribbled on the top. So with that in mind I came up with a cool way to label it… what’s cooler than Helvetica?

I printed out the reciever’s name on already used paper and then traced it and cut it with an exacto knife. Later on I realized that I could have just stroked the outlines of the font in illustrator and elminated the tracing part but, it’s more hand-made this way.

I’m pretty happy with all of them, what do you guys think? Did any of you do some unique wrapping?