Card Designer Highlight: Pricey Hancock

The Card Designer Highlight is a sequence 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 option 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 sooner or later and I stated, “Let’s begin a enterprise the place we might be artistic and paint all day!” It was 2010, and because of the 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 very good working begin. 

The place do you draw inspiration from?

 It’s onerous 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 mainly all the things round us. We take each day walks early within the morning and people walks have change into extraordinarily generative to our artistic course of. However there isn’t any set time when an thought will strike—it’s all honest sport. Earnest and I are every good observers of tradition and our environment. We like to consider what makes folks snigger or what somebody would possibly wish to hear when issues aren’t going their manner. I’m typically mentioning, “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? 

Every single day is different and so are our job lists, however it doesn’t matter what we all the time 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 reside. We moved to Richmond, Virginia, final 12 months and located a good looking house in a classic schoolhouse. It has 20-foot ceilings and large home windows that fill the house with probably the most lovely mild. 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 now have over 55 gross sales reps now, so ensuring everybody’s decks are updated isn’t any small feat. We now have the most effective group—they assist immensely with order achievement, invoicing, and delivery 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 house much more light-hearted and cheerful. We work rather a lot 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 mixture of those two mediums is on the basis of our illustration work. We frequently draw our characters in pencil and hand-paint the main points in gouache. Considered one of our unique illustrations options Hancock the Punny Rabbit, a bunny that has since change into one in all 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 for the reason that 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 artistic course of appear like? 

We began Pricey Hancock by creating illustrations at our eating room desk once we lived in Los Angeles, but someway even with a giant studio, we all the time appear to gravitate towards creating paintings 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 sequence of working drawings that we make on tissue paper. Earnest works out the composition, then we switch it to scorching press watercolor paper, after which we’re prepared to color! We’re fortunate that our illustration types work nicely 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 pleased once we obtain emails from clients 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 now have probably the most devoted clients, and we now have actually cried studying emails from folks telling us how a lot our illustrations imply to them. We’re proud once 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, growth, 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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