Autumn is the hardest season

Every Autumn, I make a point of going out and about with my camera, getting snap-happy with the golden, terracotta and burnt umber foliage that graces my local park. The resultant photographs provide a background for a hand-lettered seasonal quote that becomes my traditional Autumn post.

This year, for some unknown reason, Autumn snuck up on me. Disappointingly, by the time I visited the park most of the trees had already shed their leaves, so it was back to the drawing board and Plan B.

After much consideration, I decided to create a simple greetings card design.

I layered a diamond shape in Photoshop with an assortment of autumn-coloured leaves (the shape started out square, but I quickly discovered that revolving it by 45 degrees made it more interesting). I wrote out the quotation using black ink and coloured it using Photoshop’s colour-picker tool, which allowed me to sample various colours from the leaves image. The common colour scheme tied the lettering and the image together. Conveniently, the completed composition fitted perfectly into a square, which I surrounded with a narrow border, the colour of which I also sampled from the leaves image.

The resultant artwork, shown above, was not as satisfying to create as the artwork in my previous Autumn posts (here, here and here), but a departure from tree-themed artwork was probably long overdue anyway. All I need now is a square envelope, and a postage stamp, and a friend who would appreciate receiving an Autumn-themed greetings card.

In the meantime, so that I don’t miss out again next year, I’ll set my phone to notify me of the start of Autumn 2014.

It’ll be here before I know it.