A few months back, I posted about the daily doodles I was doing at work. And more than one person said that I should be putting them online somewhere, or make a daily calendar, or something.

The calendar thing would be a challenge, only because at this point, I’d have to start researching and drawing 2015. Because that’s how the calendar business rolls. But I did finally build a site where these will be online!

The daily doodles are now at holidaydoodles.com, and I’ve even bumped from 5 days a week up to 7. So now there’s a doodle for every darned day.

The archives are a work in progress, since I’m now colorizing everything in the computer, and a lot of the old ones were colored in with crayon or pencil. So let me show you how I’m building the archives (and the new holidays are done in a very similar way).

I figured that a light table to trace my old stuff on would be prohibitively expensive. But I was wrong! Yes, the big fancy light tables cost hundreds of dollars. But did you know that the magnificent folks at Crayola make a light-up tracing pad for a mere twenty bucks? It fits an 8.5×11 sheet of paper, runs on three AA batteries, and is plenty bright for my needs.

Tracing pad in hand, I started putting five or six drawings on a sheet of paper. I’d copy them over in pencil, then re-draw with my pen of choice: the classic (and cheap) Paper Mate Flair. (I use these at work, too, in a variety of colors.) Bolder than ball-point, not as fat and runny as Sharpie, the Flair rocks my little socks.

Next, getting the new drawings into the computer. Yes, we have a scanner. It’s part of the printer/scanner/copier device we have. And like all printers, it chooses not to work correctly approximately 42% of the time. Instead, what I’m doing is taking pictures of the drawings with my phone. As long as I’m connected to wi-fi, they upload immediately to my DropBox space, and they’re automatically available on my computer. Much faster than scanning.

In Adobe Illustrator, I run a process called “Live Trace” over the drawings. It takes them from plain old JPGs and turns them into vector art, which can be sized as small or large as you want without a change in quality. Sometimes it takes some tickling in the Live Trace settings, to get things just how I want them, but it’s pretty quick. By the way, this is the same process that Scott uses on his characters, as I showed in my Basic Instructions: Behind the Scenes exposé.

Finally, I color in the drawings using the plain old paint bucket tool. I only learned this week that Illustrator has a huge bunch of patterns that you can paint bucket with, as well as solid colors. You can probably see some of the patterns I’ve added to my bucket fill library there on the right. Haven’t found a reason to use any of them yet, but now I have them at the ready.

I save the colorized versions, upload them to the Holiday Doodles site, add in a brief commentary, and set them free.

For upcoming days, I’m doing them seven at a time on the weekend, then scheduling them so they post at 12:01 AM Eastern time every day. And I’m learning my lessons about researching before drawing — I had Tom Cruise Day ready to go for October 5, drawn up and everything, then learned that it’s actually October 6. Or maybe October 10, but I’m rolling with the 6th. I try for a minimum of two holidays per day, but I’m happy when it’s three or more. I have a five-holiday day coming up this week, which delights me.