Merry Christmas from Me to You

I found a great website a while back that lets you add all sorts of animations to your pictures and save them as animated gifs.  The site is LunaPic.com.  The site does not limit you to animated effects.  It actually offers a full range of effects that you might find in Photoshop, as well as a whole lot more. 

But it was the snowfall effect that caught my eye, so what better to do at this time of year than to add some snowflake frames and snowfall to some of my artwork?

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So take a break from the Christmas rush, pour yourself a mug of hot cocoa and enjoy these animations I created featuring the Christmas and winter-themed digital artwork I have made into greeting cards in years past, as well as some seasonal quotations. 

Each of the images I have shown here are available as Christmas cards on my artist website at JayneWilsonArt.com (without the animations, of course!)  I've put the direct links under each picture so you can stock up early for next year!

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“I love snow for the same reason I love Christmas: It brings people together while time stands still. Cozy couples lazily meandered the streets and children trudged sleds and chased snowballs. No one seemed to be in a rush to experience anything other than the glory of the day, with each other, whenever and however it happened.”  

Rachel Cohn - Dash & Lily's Book of Dares.

"Children Playing in the Snow" is available

as a greeting card at JayneWilsonArt.com

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Oh, jingle bells, jingle bells. Jingle all the way.

Oh, what fun it is to ride In a one horse open sleigh.

Jingle bells, jingle bells Jingle all the way.

Oh, what fun it is to ride In a one horse open sleigh.

James L. Pierpoint

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"Winter Sleigh Ride" is available as fine art prints and greeting cards

at JayneWilsonArt.com

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"Snowmen fall from Heaven, 

One snowflake at a time"

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"Winter Cottage and Snowman" is available as a greeting card 

at JayneWilsonArt.com

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"I love the excitement, the childlike spirit of innocence

and just about everything that goes along with Christmas." -- Hillary Scott

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"Watching for Santa" is available as a greeting card 

at JayneWilsonArt.com

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"Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind.

To cherish peace and goodwill, the plenteous in mercy

is to have the real spirit of Christmas" -- Calvin Coolidge

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"The Snowman and the Curious Foal" is available as a greeting card 

at JayneWilsonArt.com

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"Christmas isn't a season, it's a feeling" -- Edna Ferber

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"Bridge Over a Winter Stream" is available as a greeting card 

at JayneWilsonArt.com

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"Snow falling soundlessly in the middle of the night 

will always fill my heart with sweet clarity" -- Novala Takemoto, Missin' (Novel)

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"Snowman in the Moonlight" is available as a greeting card 

at JayneWilsonArt.com

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I hope you enjoyed the wintery scenes and quotations.  Now, if you have a little time and want to amuse yourself for a while, head over to Lunapic.com, upload a photo of your own and spend a little while playing around with various effects and animations.  Or, if you're caught up in the holiday rush, just bookmark the site to go back to later, when you have some time.

This will be my last post before Christmas, so I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year, and a Happy and Healthy New Year.

Christmas Greetings to All

Unlike many at this time of year, I'm not rushing around buying tons of gifts and cooking all sorts of food. My family is on the other side of the Atlantic and my husband's family are scattered from coast to coast. So Eric and I will be celebrating a quiet Christmas at home together, just the two of us.

As I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I thought I would share some of the winter and Christmas themed art I made into Christmas cards this year, as well as some Christmas quotations.

"Winter Fun" - Available as a greeting card at JayneWilsonArt.com

Snowman in the Moonlight - Available as a greeting card at JayneWilsonArt.com

Christmas Toy Store - Available as a greeting card at JayneWilsonArt.com

At Christmas play and make good cheer, for Christmas comes but once a year.
~~ Thomas Tusser

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.
~~ Norman Vincent Peale

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.
~~ B. C. Forbes

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!
~~ Charles Dickens

The Making of Winter Snowscape

The first 3D art program that I used was Bryce, by DAZ Productions.

My husband Eric introduced me to it and I was thrilled that here was something I could use to create art that the cats couldn't get into and mess up and they seemed to manage to do with other arts and crafts projects!

Eric's sister, Michele, also uses Bryce for her art and I noticed right away that she was a very prolific artist.  This inspired me to learn all I could about the program and start creating in it!

I spent a lot of time over the Christmas season on 2007 listening to Jethro Tull's Christmas Album. It's still one of my favorites but then it was even more special as it had been the first Christmas gift Eric had bought for me, before we were married.  Since he was travelling on business that Christmas (bummer) I listened to that album almost 24/7 as a way of keeping Eric near.

I really loved the cover art of that album. As I listened, I began to wonder if I could recreate the scene, or at least evoke the feel of it, in my newfound obsession, Bryce.

So I started out by opening a scene with the default ground and sky in Bryce.  Then I had to consider where to get or create a building that looked similar to the one on the album cover. Bryce comes with landscape features built-in -- the terrains, atmosphere and texture editors.  But it doesn't have any man made objects - they have to be purchased, or obtained as "freebies" from one of the 3D art content providers.

I found this one as a freebie at 3D Commune, which sadly is no longer online.  I felt it had promise, but obviously, I was going to need to either find or make a texture for it.

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I was able to find a texture that simulated the brickwork.  I still would have to find/make a "snowy" texture for the roof parts and perhaps have some lights glowing at the windows.

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But first I needed to make the scenery look a bit more wintery.  I added some basic mountain terrains and moved them to the back of the scene, and added a snowy texture to the ground plane.

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In this one, you can see I've added some snow to the roof parts of the building.  It gets a little tricky adding textures to these 3D models because you have to identify, out of the hundreds of meshes that make up the whole object, which ones are which.  It's especially difficult if the parts are named in a foreign language.

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Here, I've located all the windows in the mesh and applied a yellow glow and I've also started working on the atmosphere to try and come close, or at least get the same feel, as the inspiration piece.

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I continued to tweak the atmosphere and  I also added some more houses, all objects found free at Renderosity or 3D Commune.

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To add a little more detail to the scene, I added some trees - both pine trees and leafless winter trees - to fill out the scene and make it look more complete.

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I might have decided to call it finished at this point, but I had been doing quite a bit of work in another 3D program, DAZ|Studio, also by DAZ Productions, and it offered me a chance to do something I hadn't been able to do in Bryce up to that point -- add people to my scenes.

Whereas Bryce is specifically for creating digital landscapes, DAZ|Studio is a program in which you can create characters for your scenes by using 3D models to which you add textures and clothing and then pose them. Scenes can be rendered within DAZ|Studio, using a photographic backdrop for the 3D models, or the models themselves can be exported and used in programs such as Bryce and Vue, which is what I did here.

Looking back on this now, I see I changed the atmosphere again.  Not sure I like this version, it's too yellow to my eye, I prefer the previous version, but this was the one I went with in the end.

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I added some more characters, as well as a horse and sleigh (which I really had fun creating in DAZ|Studio) and that was it, finished.

Of course, it's difficult to see the detail in these small images, so you can click on this one to see a larger version of the finished render.

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As I said at the beginning of this post, I was inspired by the cover artwork on Jethro Tull's Christmas Album.

Do you think I captured the essence and feel of it?

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Winter Snowscape Christmas Card by 3DDesignsByJayne
Look at more cards from Zazzle.