My Holiday Project: Creating a New Massage Card Deck
I’m officially on holiday! And although that means taking some time off from teaching, courses and the usual work, it definitely doesn’t mean I’ll be doing nothing.
One of the things I really love to do during my holidays and days off is digital drawing. For me, drawing is one of those activities I can completely disappear into for hours. Put on some music or a podcast, grab my iPad and Apple Pencil, and I’m happy. But I’ve noticed that I enjoy it even more when I have an actual project to work on. I like having a goal and slowly seeing something useful come together.
Recently, I also launched my Aerial Massage and Aerial Thai Massage courses in English. Something I had wanted to do for quite some time, because it means that these courses are now available to people all over the world. Wherever you live, you can follow the lessons online and learn these techniques from home. And I thought that was actually the perfect reason to make this my holiday project as well. Now that the courses are available internationally, I would love to create even more visual learning material to go with them.
So, of course, I gave myself a holiday project this year. I’m going to create a complete card deck for my Aerial Massage course. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going through all of my course material and selecting the different massage techniques, positions and movements that I want to turn into illustrations. One by one, I’ll draw them digitally and eventually turn them into individual cards. And yes… that is quite a lot of drawing. But luckily, that’s exactly the part I enjoy.
My little creative corner at home.
What is a massage card deck?
If you’ve never seen one of my card decks before, you can think of it as a visual library of techniques. Each card shows a position, movement or massage technique. Instead of having to go through an entire manual or course every time you want some inspiration, you can simply take out the cards and use them to refresh your memory. But what I especially love about working with cards is that you can actually build with them. You can put several cards next to each other and create your own massage sequence. Move a card, replace a technique, add another one… and suddenly you have a completely different treatment. That makes the deck a practical tool for learning, practising and eventually creating your own massage sequences.
I’ve done this before… This isn’t my first card deck project. Over the years, I’ve created a lot of visual learning materials for my courses and books. I’ve drawn illustrations for my Aerial Yoga materials, created a Reformer Pilates card deck and made many of the illustrations that I use throughout my educational materials.
I’ve always loved combining teaching with visual design. Especially when learning movement or hands-on techniques, I think an image can sometimes explain something much faster than another paragraph of text. You look at the card and immediately remember: Oh yes, this was the position. This is where my hands go. This is how the movement starts. And that’s exactly what I want to create for the massage course as well.
So that’s where you’ll find me this holiday. Probably somewhere with my iPad in front of me, drawing lots and lots of massage techniques. There will still be plenty of actual holiday in between, of course. But this is genuinely something I enjoy spending my free time on. There is something very satisfying about starting with an empty screen and slowly watching an entire collection come together. By the end of my holiday, I hope to have turned a big part of the Aerial Massage course into a visual card deck that students can actually hold in their hands and use while practising. And I already know that moment when all those separate drawings finally arrive as a real printed deck is going to be one of my favourite parts.
Drawing on a boat in the beautiful Frisian Lakes.
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