And so in the end it was the littlest shoggoth of all who guided Santa’s sleigh that night

I’ve made you some free X-Mas cards and gift tags!

Printables!

Just like the ones your kids alway waste the good paper on! So there’s never any when you need it! But before I give you the download links, I have some explaining to do.

The world is filthy with X-Mas cards, says you. Well, I think mine are rather special and nice. They are based on visual elements extracted from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904). A very famous and beautiful work. Wikicommons has some lovely pictures. You know what I like best about that cover? (Thanks for asking, and feel free to click for larger.)

I like the fact that ‘Leipzig und Wien’ is in a sans serif font. Somehow that makes it perfect.

As I was saying: I toiled. My great achievement was to mask all the tendrils and wossnames of the central siphonophor-ish monster on Plate 37. (I actually had to draw in some stuff, to make it all connect up. Yes, I actually drew extra tentacles on Haeckel. I’m lucky my wife isn’t giving me a divorce for X-Mas.)

Also, how can you not love something named discomedusa? Plate 28 took a bit of work. (While I’m on the subject: some other lunatic, who knows more about Photoshop than I, but no more about time-management, has extracted a bunch of other Haeckel bits and released the little beasties under a CC license here.)

Without further ado, I give you: a fine specimen of an arborfestivid siphonophore:

I considered various options for making it fancy. I could gild those lily-shaped things, for example. Or put some happy Victorian children under the tree. In the end I settled for a few light flares, and a bit of glow in the bulb on top. Almost minimalist. And do you know what the crazy thing is? No, the other crazy thing. Siphonophores, in addition to being weird colony life-forms – like liberals, fascists and bees, only more so (but possibly not more so than a Nazi made of bees.) As I was saying: the weird thing about a certain sort of siphonophore is: you could even say it glowed. Wikipedia: "They prey on small animals using stinging cells. Among the stinging
cells are stalks with red glowing ends. The tips twitch back and forth
creating a twinkling effect. It is theorized that twinkling red light
attracts small fish that have been found eaten by these siphonophores." Now if that doesn’t merit the full-dress H.P. Lovecraft rewrite of the Rudolph legend, I don’t know what does.

For my next act, I’m going to open a CafePress store in which I sell this stuff on lady’s thong underwear:

Ladies? Would you buy that sort of thing? Guys? On a trucker cap?

Anyway, here are some rather tiny previews (click for larger). Feel free to download, using the link below each picture. (You know you always need more gift tags the night before X-Mas.)

Download the big green X-mas tree card (1 meg). [UPDATE: I had a too-large file uploaded earlier.]

Bow down before the Disco Medusa X-Mas card (1.1 megs).

This next one looks almost sensible, although it has a bit of a rasta thing going on, gestalt-wise. Didn’t really intend that.

Variant Disco Medusa card (1.6 megs).

I call this next one "Snowflake". It’s another siphonophore.

Download "Snowflake"(1 meg).

That’s enough previews. I made two pages of gift tags as well. Link (4 meg) and link (2 megs).

If you find my humble Photoshop noodlings amusing or serviceable, put a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket for me. Or, if you are buying last minute stuff from Amazon, feel free to click through my Amazon link as well. In honor of the post’s theme, may I suggest two fine comics that might belong under the tree: Charles Burns’ Black Hole. (You can preview the first few pages here. If I actually get around to making that thong underwear, the muse of Burns will be inspiring me.) Second, there’s Jim Woodring’s Seeing Things. I haven’t got it yet myself but I want it. (I’ve got The Frank Book, which is great.) If you don’t know Woodring’s stuff … well, you might look at the painting he’s selling right now. His site has lots of images. And they all sort of look like … this guy:

Fun fact! Belle is really bothered by this stuff.