Designing an H.P. Lovecraft Christmas Sweater for 2019

H.P Lovecraft Christmas Sweater

The holiday season is upon us once more, what does this mean? Parties are what it means. The ugly sweater party has become a yuletide (or whatever holiday you choose to celebrate) staple at this point, and for good reason, they’re a hilarious tradition that doesn’t take anything seriously. Essential when you have to spend so much time around your distant relatives.

My plan; create an H.P. Lovecraft Christmas sweater. Yes, this has been done to death already and honestly, there are a lot of really fantastic Cthulhu Christmas Sweaters out there. This one needed to be different, and I hope you’ll agree that it’s a nice new direction.

I wanted to create something fun and appropriate for the office Christmas party, but also sinister enough that it would prompt questions from the other guests, minimal, yet immediately obvious to anyone who considers themselves a fan of Lovecraft’s works.

With this in mind, I decided to base this design off of the iconic photograph of Howard’s face shrouded in shadows. It’s well-known enough to be distinctively him, and it’s also got a healthy dose of spookiness to it. I decided planned to draw him presenting a Christmas gift, as though leaning out from the shadows in a sinister fashion, what’s inside? Do you even really want to know?

My weapon of choice for creating the Christmas sweater is my 2018 iPad (non-pro) 9.7”, with the first generation Apple Pencil. I love the organic feeling of drawing directly on the screen, and it’s one of the most portable devices you can get for drawing.

I started out by sketching my design in Procreate, this is my absolute favourite app for drawing. The brush engine is second to none on the iPad, the only downside is that my poor little non-pro iPad can only handle so many layers in the app, because of this I primarily use it for sketching and then bring the sketches into another app for inking and colouring. Make no mistake though, Procreate is a powerful professional tool that can create amazing artwork! If you’re better at working with a few layers than I am you can even manage it on the humble regular iPad.

Procreate Sketch

I really wanted to emphasise the sinister and creepy in this illustration, so I played up the shadowing, especially around his face.

Taking the sketch I produced in Procreate, I then export it as a transparent PNG, which I can import into my vector art program of choice: Affinity Designer. Vector art is important for a project like this because the quality is essential, vectors can be scaled infinitely without any loss of quality so they’re

the perfect tool for the job. After importing the sketch I take advantage of the Apple Pencil and ink it with a pressure-sensitive brush, allowing for some natural line variation in the illustration. 

Inking in Affinity Designer

I chose to use simple bold solid colours for the final product, in a comic book pop art inspired fashion. I know Howard would have despised the gaudy red suit and green shirt combo, but it’s Christmas and I took a little artistic license. 

The finished design

So there we have it, the perfect Ugly Christmas sweater for your next Christmas party. Only your friends who are best educated in the arts of cosmic horror will be in on this little design, for everyone else? Brain-melting madness awaits.

H.P Lovecraft Christmas Sweater

The design is now available to purchase from Redbubble, a fantastic website which also offers a host of other products. The stickers are an especially popular option, and they are excellent quality.

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