I’m excited to announce that the Harper’s Bazaar x Studio Spelling Christmas cards are now out and here is the link!

The cards are £15 for a pack of 12, shipping is £2.99 and they’re available from the Harper’s Bazaar website - the button above will take you straight there. The cards are available as a single pack, or in a bundle of three or five packs, where there’s a saving on the shipping. A quick heads up - each year the Christmas cards tend to sell out quickly. We’ve produced a lot more this time but there won’t be a second print run, so if you’d like to send these to your friends this year it’s probably a good idea to buy them sooner rather than later.

The cards are BIG and the print quality is sublime! They’re deeply luxurious. This is Christmas as a time of glamour and dressing up, night skies, twinkling lights, a beautiful chair to rest in after the party. Twenty four brand new miniatures channelling the vast Harper’s Bazaar archive. I loved painting this piece!

I made this card right at the beginning of my immersion into the dreamy world of the Harper’s Bazaar archives, and I set about building up an atmosphere of excitement and understated glamour. I built the paint chart from scratch with strong, confident colours, I named the colours and I built the slightly crooked font by taking individual typeset letters from the vintage paint charts I’ve collected. It was so much fun to see it start to take shape. And then I painted it!

The Harper’s Bazaar archive is vast and magnificent and the copyright for each page is complex, so I’m not allowed to show you the original references here. But if anyone is in the mood to do some detective work, you might want to look up the cover of the December 1938 UK issue, which inspired the painting on Wine, the cover of the October 1938 UK issue, which was the starting point for the painting on Tangerine and the cover of the November 1938 UK issue, a detail of which found its way onto Ultramarine. All of these covers were painted by the artist A. M. Cassandre, under the genius art direction of Alexey Brodovitch. Cassandre created a lot of bold, odd and wonderful surrealist covers for Harper’s Bazaar during the 1930s. If you don’t know them already I’d recommend you feast your eyes and Google them! This amazing period of the magazine’s design underpins my whole project.

And there’s more! Hidden inside one box of cards is a golden ticket. On the reverse of the golden ticket there’s a secret code. Whoever finds this will win an original paint chip painting!

These cards are only available in the UK I’m afraid. I’m sorry if this is frustrating. I really tried to make them available worldwide but because they’re being sold through Harper’s Bazaar UK it just wasn’t an option this time. However, the prints of Shades of Flat and Lustre Finishes, the main piece that I’m painting inspired by the Harper’s Bazaar archive, will be available worldwide, and they will be ready in October.

If you have any questions about the Christmas card just drop me a line!