The Nightmare Before Christmas
Christmas card design
Christmas Card design inspired by Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Hand drawn characters done in Adobe Illustrator.
Everyone needs a winter project so this year I designed a fun little Christmas card based on one of my favourite festive films, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
This design was inspired by the end of the movie as I really liked how the winter element interacted with the gothic halloween feel. I have tried to capture some of that here while retaining a more 'Christmas' feel.
Characters were hand drawn and then recreated in Illustrator. I particularly like Zero (dog) and the slightly menacing looming look of Oogie Boogie. Both of these make use of opacity effects and, in Oogie's case, a layer mask with gradient. Set against the iconic pale moon from from the film, i had to play around with long shadows, mostly done with the pen tool and blending effects.
The font used was Burton's Nightmare by Film Himmel and Jens R. Ziehn. This was free for personal use and that is the capacity I have used for this project (BTW - there doesn't appear to be a readily available link to license it for commercial use - if anyone knows otherwise, do let me know.)
Quite a lot of work went into this but it was great to get back into Illustrator after a few months away from it.
Various rough doodles of the characters used in the design.
