From Sketch to Keepsake: Crafting Treasured Scenes Ornaments
From Sketch to Keepsake: The 10th Edition Ornament for a Georgia Chamber
🍷 Preserving a Legacy: The Mount Pleasant Winery Ornament
This year marks a special milestone in my journey as an illustrator and designer at Keystone Specialties Inc.—not only did I complete the 10th edition of a cherished ornament series for a returning client, but I’m also celebrating my 20th year of designing for Keystone’s Treasured Scenes® collection.
Project Overview
The 2025 edition features Mount Pleasant Winery, located in Augusta, Georgia, and was commissioned by a local Chamber of Commerce I’ve worked with since 2015. This marks their tenth ornament in the series, a testament to their commitment to preserving local heritage through art.
Keystone’s Treasured Scenes® ornaments are heirloom-quality keepsakes that celebrate American landmarks and traditions. Since the early 1980s, the series has included glass balls, ceramic, pewter, and glass jade ornaments—all designed to honor the tagline: Preserving America, one Treasured Scene at a Time™.
🎨 Design Process
The concept began with a flood of reference photos—so many photographs!—provided by the client. From those, I focused on capturing three key elements: the winery building, its silo, and a vintage Chevy truck that adds nostalgic charm.
My process starts with a hand-drawn illustration, which I scan and clean up in Photoshop. From there, I import the artwork into CorelDRAW, where it’s converted into a vector image and colored manually. This year’s design was a four-color spot imprint, using only White, Green, Pink, and Brown—a challenge that required careful rendering to maintain depth and detail. The digital coloring alone took about 60 to 80 minutes, with the initial drawing taking up to an hour.
From Sketch to Ornament
Once finalized, the artwork is prepared for imprinting on a glass ball ornament, part of the Treasured Scenes line. The illustration is carefully translated to the curved surface, with special attention to color fidelity, placement, and finish. Each ornament becomes a miniature canvas, preserving a moment in time for generations to come.
Personal Reflections
This project holds deep personal meaning. After 20 years at Keystone, I’ve illustrated ornaments for churches, chambers of commerce, historical societies, schools, and countless other organizations across the country. It’s humbling to know that my artwork lives on in tens of thousands of ornaments displayed in homes from coast to coast.
Working on the Treasured Scenes series has allowed me to blend art, history, and storytelling in a way that feels both personal and enduring. Each ornament is more than a product—it’s a piece of someone’s story, and I’m honored to help tell it.
🚀 Want to commemorate your own landmark, tradition, or community legacy?
Keystone Specialties’ Treasured Scenes® ornaments are custom-designed to preserve what matters most.
Explore the collection and start your own series at: treasuredscenes.com .
Want to see more of my work?
Visit my Gallery.
