Our biggest and best-ever range of Christmas cards

A look at the making of this year’s Christmas range — a project full of collaboration, joy, and meaning for us in a difficult season.

Our biggest and best-ever range of Christmas cards

Naomi and I have gone above and beyond this year with our Christmas card range. We normally only do a few cards a year, and it’s mainly me (Lisa) working on them, but this year we worked together on a much bigger and broader range of cards, from cards that tell a story, to some really punchy white designs on black backgrounds.

Naomi and I love Christmas cards that are a bit different – that are a bit us – and that don’t necessarily have the standard Christmas colours (those strong reds and greens). We think you’ll particularly notice that in this year’s range.

We did quite a few collaboration ones this year. When we worked on our colouring books, we both found that the collab images rose to the top as our favourites very quickly – my hand-drawn images and Naomi’s digital additions. And once again, we’ve discovered how much fun it is to bring our individual skills and styles to the same image. “Cute Christmas Baubles” is one of our collabs, for instance: I did the initial doodled design and Naomi coloured them. I then took her coloured versions, “cut them out” digitally, and did a variety of layouts. Or “Nordic Noel”: again, I did the initial drawing and Naomi did two great coloured versions for you and did the card layout. I had been working on a series of white-on-black ones for that scandi-style tree, but when I saw Naomi’s coloured versions, it was love at first sight, and I chucked out my designs immediately. (We did, however, keep one version that featured the hand-drawn outline. We put it on a rich dark-green background instead.)

This year, we’re “going out” in a blaze of glory. If you’ve read our recent posts, you’ll know that Willow Lane might be closing soon, but we spent so long on these Christmas cards, from initial planning through to painting and drawing, to designing, that we couldn’t bear the thought of not bringing them out. At the very least, they might bring you Christmassy joy just looking at the images of them on our site, or maybe even inspire your own artworks and Christmas projects.

If you’ve got a card set in mind, grab it now, while you can. Here are images from this year’s range, including two new Christmas mugs.

About the Author: Lisa Saul

Fiction writer · creative guide · lifelong storyteller … Lisa Saul writes in the quiet spaces between words and paint. For more than twenty years she has worked side by side with her sister Naomi — shaping novels, illustrations, notebooks, and the little studio world behind this blog. A lifelong maker, Lisa has moved through journalism, photography, editing, watercolour, and award-nominated fiction, always returning to the same thread: story. Whether she’s writing a novel, illustrating a notebook, or sharing a moment from her creative life, Lisa brings a thoughtful, honest voice shaped by imagination, experience, and a deep love of helping others grow creatively.