2021 Illustrated Calendar
During the 2020 holiday season, I wanted to create a memorable gift for my family and church friends that I could also sell in my Etsy shop. The gift had to have a personal but timeless touch to it while also combining my passion for watercolor painting and minimal graphic design. It turned out that calendars fit that description perfectly. So, I decided to create a 12-month unbound calendar with vivid watercolor illustrations featuring scenes from all seasons of the year.
Clients: Friends and family, Etsy customers Timeline: 4-6 weeks
Materials/Software: Illustrator, Photoshop, Procreate, watercolor, colored pencil
Sketches and Brainstorming
Part of the fun of designing calendars is keeping each month visually consistent so that all 12 iterations look cohesive together while each individual month still retains a unique aesthetic touch. For this project, I decided to paint landscapes and use seasonally-appropriate colors, flora, and fauna to keep each month's illustration distinct.
Painting Process
Each watercolor illustration was painted on an 8"x10" sheet of watercolor paper with Daniel Smith watercolor paints. Much of my visual inspiration came from favorite artists, Pinterest searches, and a general love of flat, simple, yet colorful and whimsical illustration. For each painting, I tried to stick to seasonally-appropriate (at least, in the northern hemisphere) colors and natural elements or scenery that fit the "mood" of the month.
please ignore my breathing, and yes that's the animal crossing soundtrack in the background
Final Paintings
Designing the Calendar
After the paintings were finished, scanned, and edited in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Procreate to remove any blemishes not caught by the scanner, it was finally time to start laying out the calendar. This was mostly completed in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted the graphic design and type to be generally very subtle and minimal so it wouldn't overwhelm or take away from the illustrations, but still tasteful and timeless. I eventually went with serif typefaces: Baskerville for the headers, and Minion Variable Concept for all other copy.
Production
The most difficult step of the project was not creating 12 unique-but-cohesive-yet-time-consuming watercolor paintings, or how-do-I-scan-watercolor-paintings-without-washing-out-the-colors, or even, how-do-I-even-fit-a-whole-month-on-one-page-with-an-illustration-and-a-header.
No, the most difficult and challenging aspect of this calendar–was actually printing it. Many, many sheets of photo paper and $16 cartridges of ink were expended in the process of creating this calendar. Many last-minute Amazon and B&H Photo orders were placed in a panic upon realization that much of the supplies I needed to print it all–was out of stock. It was the holidays, after all.
totally not printing from under my desk
totally not using my bed as a table
totally not working on the floor
Final Product
After weeks of obsessing and grinding, the calendar was finished, and custom printed just for my church. They loved it. I also released it on my Etsy. They (my customers) loved it too. A few weeks after the craze of the holidays, I went back and began doing more test prints on the watercolor paintings and eventually released them as separate art prints on my Etsy. People still love them and buy them today, which just goes to show all the effort put into creating each painting was worth it :)