Christmas cards: 1995 & 1996

I didn't have time yesterday to post the Christmas card of the day. I got distracted working on this comic instead. So here are two, today.

I notice I don't have cards for '93 and '94. Guess I was too busy in those years being a wild and crazy university student to send out Christmas cards (ha, ha. That was a joke. The picture opposite - from a mini-comic that can be seen here - depicts the truth about my rowdy life as a wild undergraduate.)

 When I finished school, though, and found myself back in my hometown of Calgary, I did make some cards. This '95 image shows how Calgary seemed to me then, after living in downtown Toronto for three years: cold, clear, clean and quiet. An anomalous urban presence in the middle of nowhere. I think this card, sent to friends in Germany and Toronto (among other places) was kind of a plea for sympathy: "This is where I am! Yikes!" Oh well. I wasn't ready to fall in love with Calgary back then. That happened later.

I'm a line-drawing person. Black and white outlines are what it's all about for me. So this next Christmas card is a bit out of my usual zone. I blame it on the fact that it was the same year I spent at an art school. (OCAD, whence I escaped from Calgary.) All this messy red paint just shows that I was trying to push my artistic limits. Luckily this (like art school) was just a phase.

This isn't a very Christmas-y image - a medieval clinker-built North Sea ship with a stern rudder - but it's what was most on my mind at that particular time. That's another story which I assure you will be told another day (if this blog keeps on blogging, it's bound to come out sometime). For now, it's just the Christmas card I sent out to folks far and wide from my then-home base in Hamilton, Ontario, of all places.

Continue on to the next Christmas card from 1997.