The Great Greeting Card Experiment

Here’s an interesting example of some of the strange jobs that come your way when you are a freelance illustrator.

I have never given a thought to doing greeting cards. They are an art form unto themselves, blending art, writing, humor and context to make cards that resonate with buyers. Cartoonists like Sandra Boynton and Oliver Christianson (aka “Revilo”) are amazing talents. It’s one of those areas of cartooning I didn’t think my skills lent themselves to.

My friend and fellow member of the “Usual Gang of Idiots” John Kovaleski disagreed. He was (at the time) working as a creative director at Marian Heath Greeting Cards and the company was trying to come up with a line of political themed greeting cards. I was one of a number of cartoonists he tapped to come up with some ideas and art for possible political greeting cards. He didn’t need finished cards, but rather concept/gags with basic ideas on the art. So I used some sketches and bits of art I had laying about or had used for parts of other jobs to show my ideas with the intention of redoing the artwork to make it more appropriate if they picked up any of the concepts. This happened in early 2007, so no Obama yet.

The process of doing greeting cards is similar to that of doing gag cartoons. Most of them are done by the artist/writer doing a bunch of them and submitting to a company. That company then looks them over and decides if they want to buy the rights to any of them. In that manner you can imagine that for every greeting card you see on the card racks at the store there are a thousand or so that were never made.

What I discovered during the Great Greeting Card Experiment was that:

1. My initial instincts were right, I am no good at greeting cards, and
2. Most of my cards belonged in the “thousand or so that were never made” category.

The one with Cheney at the top of this post was actually printed as part of their political line, but they redid the caption. I don’t have any of the actual cards, and I can’t remember the exact wording they used, but it was something similar.

Here are a bunch of the rejects:

These are elements from a MAD job

This was a sketch for another project

Not too many people remember Howard Dean’s “Screamgate”

They asked to do some odd events… this was as odd as I could come up with.

This was supposed to be making fun of how boring Gore is…

This was a quick sketch I did on the Cintiq… like 4 minutes

This Bush was part of a magazine cover job that never got printed.