Making of... Yoga postcards
Over the last few months I’ve been drawing hundreds of women in (mostly) stripy shirts doing different yoga postures. It all started with publishing my book of visual notes from the yoga teacher training I attended in 2016. When someone orders a book from me, they can choose an asana and I’ll draw it in the front of the book. Below is a big collection of poses I’ve drawn so far. Many of them several times.
As the recipients really enjoyed the little drawings, I decided to take some of the most requested poses and a couple of my favourites to draw and make a set of postcards so these yoga-ladies can also live outside of the books, travel to far flung places and bring some joy and a smile to the people they are sent or given to.
The process for making the actual drawings was pretty straight forward. As I had practiced the poses so many times, I already had already figured out my favourite way of drawing them. I chose to draw the final illustrations in Procreate (on the iPad). Drawing digitally makes it easy to manipulate a drawing and play around with different colour options before making a print-ready version.
I first sketched a rough version of each pose in light grey and then drew the final lines in black on a new layer. I added a 20% shadow layer to give the figures some depth. The colour fills got their own layer as well, which allowed me to play around with different colours for the mat and colour accents. I finally settled on a nice sunny yellow.
The postcards are printed on a nice heavy card stock (400g/m2) and are left blank on the back, except for a small strip of text down the side with the asana name and credits. When the cards arrived from the printer, I was super happy with the result… until I spotted a stupid mistake I made.
When uploading the files for printing, I mixed-up the files for the back of the Sukhasana card, so the backs have the wrong asana name. Urgh. After a few minutes of being angry with myself, I decided though, that it doesn’t help to be angry as it won’t undo the mistake. Instead, I added a hand-written correction on all cards (a lot!), so now they are even more unique ;) And the next edition will be printed with the correct asana name. Problem solved.
I hope these little ladies will bring some smiles to their recipients, wherever they may be :)
You can buy the postcards here.