Fruity - our annual holiday card, 2023 edition

 

Just a simple "reveal" of the seasonal-holiday-of-your-choice card that we've sent out this year. We alternate the design duties, and this year the job fell to G. Her most excellent and perverse brain conjured this fruitcake extravaganza, a group portrait of the artist Jan Brueghel the Elder and his family by Rubens serving as the base for the transformation. As she is currently crazy busy with a huge, teetering stack of freelance design jobs, in addition to her full-time day-job, I offered to do a little fine tuning of the image before handing it back for her to deliver the final polish. 

I must say I fared better in the "face/off". She took a rather flattering picture of me and pretty much just dropped it onto the original image; only Bruegel's ears are still showing. The image G used of herself was decidedly not so flattering. And it was not helped by her having to change the lighting to better fit the lighting in the painting underneath, and having the side of madame Bruegel's grayish cheek showing through. When I first saw the Photoshopped image, I commented on how ungenerous she'd been to herself. And I also asked if her rather grumpy expression was intentional. You know, for humor's sake. I mean, she has a gigantic fruitcake around her neck. I think a certain degree of grumpiness would not be an entirely unreasonable reaction if one found oneself so encumbered. But she only said, "That's just the way I look." Gentle readers, I am here to tell you that that is quite false! I see the very dear woman every day, and I can testify that she's actually a most attractive human who smiles frequently and generally possesses a very pleasant demeaner. Very.

Other than being gifted with a pair of inexplicable hands, I think Nicholas came off pretty well.

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Portrait of Jan Brueghel the Elder and his family, by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1613-15.