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The Card Designer Highlight is a sequence that includes impartial makers whose greeting playing cards you could find in Paper Supply shops. Meet and be impressed by a brand new designer each month on our weblog!
Wendy Mason and Earnest Merritt, spouse and husband duo, fashioned Pricey Hancock in 2010 as a solution to mix their love of portray, drawing, and paper items. Pricey Hancock’s painterly aesthetics and narrative particulars symbolize a mixture of nostalgia, humor, and on a regular basis life. Mason’s and Merritt’s artwork backgrounds are evident on this distinctive model, notably in Hancock the Punny Rabbit, a beloved character who’s depicted hopping round humorous conditions with a steadfast expression.
How did you start your card-making profession?
We had lately graduated from the CalArts MFA program; Earnest was educating woodworking and I used to be working as an illustrator. We have been on a stroll in the future and I stated, “Let’s begin a enterprise the place we could be inventive and paint all day!” It was 2010, and as a result of financial downturn, I had been laid off from my design job—the proper catalyst to begin one thing new. I began Pricey Hancock that yr and Earnest joined me full-time two years later. We participated within the Nationwide Stationery Present in 2010 with simply 30 card designs and have been picked up by Paper Supply and Anthropologie, which gave Pricey Hancock a great operating begin.
The place do you draw inspiration from?
It’s onerous to say the place our private lives start and our enterprise lives finish. Our inspiration comes from on a regular basis life, popular culture, our previous and current, and principally all the things round us. We take each day walks early within the morning and people walks have change into extraordinarily generative to our inventive course of. However there isn’t any set time when an thought will strike—it’s all honest sport. Earnest and I are every good observers of tradition and our environment. We like to consider what makes individuals chuckle or what somebody may need to hear when issues aren’t going their method. I’m typically mentioning, “Wouldn’t that be a terrific card thought?” If Earnest laughs, then I do know it’s a good suggestion and we begin to develop a design round it. This course of features a quirky “Wendy sketch” that Earnest refines later for manufacturing.
What does your day appear like as a card maker and designer?
Each day is different and so are our process lists, however it doesn’t matter what we at all times start our day with that stroll and occasional. Then we head out to the Pricey Hancock studio, which is simply 10 minutes from the place we stay. We moved to Richmond, Virginia, final yr and located an exquisite house in a classic schoolhouse. It has 20-foot ceilings and big home windows that fill the house with probably the most stunning mild. This previous week our days have been crammed with ending up our new Vacation launch and sending out samples of our new playing cards and calendars to our gross sales reps and showrooms. We now have over 55 gross sales reps now, so ensuring everybody’s decks are updated is not any small feat. We now have the most effective staff—they assist immensely with order achievement, invoicing, and delivery wholesale and direct orders. Earnest and I additionally painted the studio’s assertion wall this week, illustrating strawberries, leaves, triangles, and smiley faces. We needed to make the Pricey Hancock house much more light-hearted and cheerful. We work quite a bit however really feel so lucky to personal our personal firm, which permits us possession over our schedule.
What’s your most well-liked medium?
We love working in gouache and pencil. The mix of those two mediums is on the basis of our illustration work. We regularly draw our characters in pencil and hand-paint the main points in gouache. Certainly one of our authentic illustrations options Hancock the Punny Rabbit, a bunny that has since change into one in all our signature characters, that I drew in pencil after which Earnest added hand-painted maracas. We additionally like gouache as a result of it permits us to depict detailed work because the medium dries shortly and doesn’t bleed. We additionally like the colourful colours and the opacity of gouache versus different water-based paints.
What does your inventive course of appear like?
We began Pricey Hancock by creating illustrations at our eating room desk once we lived in Los Angeles, but by some means even with an enormous studio, we at all times appear to gravitate towards creating art work in our eating room. We begin from sketches that I create on sticky notes, on the again of payments, in sketchbooks, or from lists of card concepts. I’m a doodler and we attempt to maintain my concepts in a single place, however I like the liberty to attract anyplace to get my concepts out. We then create a sequence of working drawings that we make on tissue paper. Earnest works out the composition, then we switch it to scorching press watercolor paper, after which we’re prepared to color! We’re fortunate that our illustration kinds work properly collectively; we now have related sensibilities and aesthetics, which helps each in enterprise and in our private life.
What are you most happy with as a creator and card maker?
It makes us so completely happy once we obtain emails from prospects telling us how they’ve been gathering our playing cards for years or shopping for the Pricey Hancock Bunny calendar yearly as a convention. We now have probably the most devoted prospects, and we now have actually cried studying emails from individuals telling us how a lot our illustrations imply to them. We’re proud once we cease and take into consideration how far we’ve come. It’s most obvious when reflecting on the development of the various studio areas we’ve labored in since we’ve been in enterprise. With every new Pricey Hancock studio, we will see the visible illustration of the development, enlargement, and progress of the corporate.
Discover Pricey Hancock’s You’re So Scorching Bunny Card, Leaf Bunny Thank You Card, and Bunny with Maracas Birthday Card at your native retailer or on-line at papersource.com. For extra inspiration and behind-the-scenes motion, comply with @dearhancock on IG.
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