Card Designer Spotlight: Dear Hancock

The Card Designer Highlight is a collection that includes unbiased makers whose greeting playing cards yow will discover 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 strategy to mix their love of portray, drawing, and paper items. Pricey Hancock’s painterly aesthetics and narrative particulars characterize 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 had been on a stroll in the future and I mentioned, “Let’s begin a enterprise the place we may 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 12 months and Earnest joined me full-time two years later. We participated within the Nationwide Stationery Present in 2010 with simply 30 card designs and had been picked up by Paper Supply and Anthropologie, which gave Pricey Hancock a great working begin. 

The place do you draw inspiration from?

 It’s arduous 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 every part round us. We take day by day walks early within the morning and people walks have turn out to be extraordinarily generative to our inventive course of. However there is no such thing as a set time when an thought will strike—it’s all truthful sport. Earnest and I are every good observers of tradition and our environment. We like to consider what makes individuals giggle or what somebody may need to hear when issues aren’t going their means. I’m usually declaring, “Wouldn’t that be an incredible 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? 

On daily basis is diverse and so are our activity 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 dwell. We moved to Richmond, Virginia, final 12 months and located a gorgeous area in a classic schoolhouse. It has 20-foot ceilings and big home windows that fill the area with probably the most lovely gentle. This previous week our days had been full of 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’ve over 55 gross sales reps now, so ensuring everybody’s decks are updated isn’t any small feat. We’ve the perfect group—they assist immensely with order success, invoicing, and transport 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 area much more light-hearted and cheerful. We work lots 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 small print in gouache. One in all our authentic illustrations options Hancock the Punny Rabbit, a bunny that has since turn out to be one among 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 rapidly 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 after we lived in Los Angeles, but in some way even with a giant 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 preserve my concepts in a single place, however I like the liberty to attract wherever to get my concepts out. We then create a collection of working drawings that we make on tissue paper. Earnest works out the composition, then we switch it to sizzling press watercolor paper, after which we’re prepared to color! We’re fortunate that our illustration types work properly collectively; we now have comparable sensibilities and aesthetics, which helps each in enterprise and in our private life. 

What are you most pleased with as a creator and card maker? 

It makes us so blissful after we obtain emails from prospects telling us how they’ve been accumulating our playing cards for years or shopping for the Pricey Hancock Bunny calendar yearly as a practice. We’ve 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 after we cease and take into consideration how far we’ve come. It’s most obvious when reflecting on the development of the numerous 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 development 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, observe @dearhancock on IG.

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