Last holiday season, I could not seem to find a Christmas card that spoke to me so I decided to design my own.  I purchased a set of blank cards made of a sort of watercolour paper from Melbourne’s Zetta Florence and I began having a play with watered down acrylic paints.  Drawing inspiration from my new tropical surroundings and the quirky, cartoonish drawings that adorned the cards I had perused, I drew up a picture of a palm tree juxtaposed next to an evergreen tree.  I outlined the drawing with a ballpoint pen before colouring in the various sections with lighter and darker hues of green and brown, adding texture and depth without being overly realistic.  Along with the “the palm trees to evergreens” caption, the final image gave friends and family back in the United States a visual representation of the card’s lengthy journey and the distance between us.