Quick and Easy Watercolor Christmas Cards - Tree Baubles with Snowflakes for all kinds of Xmas makes

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Diane and my passion is painting and creating nature-inspired watercolours in my studio which are easy for you to do too. I share all my paintings with you on YouTube and on our website dianeanton.com you can find free downloadable sketches for all the videos to help you make the most of your painting journey. And if you'd like a little bit more we also have channel memberships with loads of perks for you So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. Hi everyone, Diane here. Welcome to my studio. Today we're going to do a little design that I've been working on for a while now which would be ideal for a Christmas card, a place card, a tag, just a little message at Christmas, anything like that. Really simple, easy to do and basically just a bit of fun. We're just going to do some baubles with some snowflake patterns and a sort of little Christmassy motif on it and what I'm going to be using today, I'm just using a little China palette that I've got here. It comes from a company called Medan I think which I got on Amazon. It's in my shop if you want to go and have a look at it. Really useful, I use this an awful lot and I use my tube paints and I just put the colours that I want to use most often and for this time of year I have found that these are the colours that I tend to go to in order to achieve something which is a little bit Christmassy like this and what I've got here, just to run through the colours, I've got my quinacridone gold which I usually can't manage without, that I find is my basic yellow. I've also got cadmium yellow here or another yellow would do. This is cobalt blue, a nice clean blue, turquoise blue there which I find is very useful for making interesting shades of green when you're doing leaves. Sap green which is the basis of most greens too. This is Winsor violet here, quinacridone violet would do or something similar to that. Cadmium orange and here we've got scarlet or cadmium red and alizarin crimson, so a warm and a cooler red. So those are the colours that I have available to me and I can make most things happen with those. I've also got my Astari colours set here from Kuretake, definitely needed that for Christmas, everyone needs one of those. I've got my Sigma uniball gel pens here, probably only going to use the white, so they're at the ready. The white ones, when you use them, don't press too hard because if you press hard then the ink doesn't come out. My brush is a number 7 round pointed brush, this one's got a nice point on it. I'm using a Maestro from Drawwell, you can also use their number 11-2 which is not quite so pointed as this one but it does the job fine and extremely inexpensive, you can get those direct from Japan if you want. Paper I've been practicing this morning on, this is a Labis Fidelis from Arches which is smooth on one side and slightly textured on the other. This is just Clairefontaine etival paper which is fine, it's good, it's not got so much character but it's absolutely fine for practicing which is what I was doing, trying to follow my own advice, practice on cheap paper, then try it out on something a bit more expensive, see if you can see the difference, and for this version I'm going to use my book of Hahnemühle bamboo mixed media paper. I always find it very difficult to make my mind up and then I mess the paper up by putting paint on it from my mucky fingers but if it's decent paper you can always wash it off. Now if you aren't particularly confident at drawing circles then just find yourself a nice convenient lid like this, something nice and round and you can just draw around it and that's a really good idea and I should probably do that actually because you know whilst I can do these things when nobody's watching me it's much harder when I'm recording. So let's just do it that way shall we to be on the safe side and a pencil and you can arrange the baubles however you like, I think I would suggest putting them on the paper before you do the leaves. So we'll just go around that like that and so there's bauble number one and then we want one slightly bigger so this will be number two, slightly bigger I think this one is, yep you can always rub the lines out afterwards, maybe we'll use that one again for this one behind and then we want another one over here you can vary the sizes more than this if you want but let me think I might make a smaller one there let's see if this is smaller yeah that's a tiny bit smaller so that's what I wanted so we put that one up here and then another one down here and I want that one to be even smaller still so this is this is the advantage of having loads and loads of bottles of this and that lying around plenty that one's too small plenty of options for lids that'll do I think oh yeah that would be fine I don't think there's anything wrong with that and then what we're going to do is we're going to put some greenery along the top and along the bottom like that that's all we need to do for the minute now we have to decide on what colours we're going to use I did a few different options I did red and green traditional colours I did something in subtle greens and blues a bit more stylish and then I did these ones in in blues that was the first one actually but I think I'm going to go with the traditional colour scheme because I'm traditional girl at heart and I'm going to mix up here some I'm going to mix some quinacridone gold with some cadmium red and the reason for that is I want it to be reasonably strong I'm just going to rub out that line there because that might show through the lines around the outside edges will either disappear or we'll be able to get rid of them after it's dry so we just fill this with red doesn't matter if your hand shakes a bit and it goes a bit wonky and I'm just going to put a bit of um windsor violet or quinacridone violet whichever one you have I'm just going to feed that in as well especially on one side to make it a little bit darker on one side and leave it a little bit lighter on the other side and then let that run and then I think maybe we'll do this one in a kind of mauve well it's obviously quinacridone or windsor I think it's the same just call it different things I think although I'm just going up as close as I can to the red one because I don't want to wait for it to dry and if I touch it obviously it'll run so we'll try not to do that so I'm just putting a little bit more darker so I'm going to pick up a bit of blue mix that with the quinacridone violet and then drop that in on that side also to give just a hint of three-dimensionality just make it more powerful this one is I hope going to be a little bit darker than the other ones that I did earlier now um the next one I'm going to do in gold so I'll be swapping to my um what do you call them starry colors I'm going to have to get some more of this soon I was saying to Tamsin the other day it's very rare for me to actually finish up a whole pan of paint you know the little half half pans that you get in a paint set because I tend not to um paint from pans the traditional small size is a bit too small for my style so I tend to use because I tend to use tubes and only use pans when I'm painting on holiday or traveling or whatever or in the studio because I know a lot of people do like pans because they're convenient I don't take up much space anyway what am I rambling on about now uh hardly I I don't know I can't remember ever having finished up a whole pan or half pan ever so yeah anyway I'm painting these two in I'm sure I have but I don't remember painting these two in gold I should have done and painting since I was a child and that's 60 years ago now um I'm painting these in starry gold two different shades this is more of a uh I don't know white gold or something white gold looks like silver doesn't that's like oh it's a platinum necklace this is oh it looks like silver to me whatever and then I'm going to use what's on my brush and mix it in with some of the red just to paint this one in a sort of goldeny golden red kind of thing you could do all of them like that if you wanted to you could mix starry colors into any color and you'll get a sort of metallic luster so there we are there's our four balls five um this paper is nice it seems to keep the color on top doesn't soak it up too much and that's a good thing let's put that out of the way there and now I'm going to um mix some dark green and I've got sap green here which on its own as I said isn't dark enough for the greenery so I'll pick up some quinacridone violet or winsor violet mix that with the green and a touch of turquoise and then I'll just test that on my test sheet here that's fine okay now I will move that out of the way and um what I'm going to do is using the point of the brush I'm just going to try to reasonably have to be perfect narrow line like that I won't do the one down the bottom yet because I need to I'll get a hand in it if I uh if I paint it and don't use it and then I'm going to put some little pointed leaves on here and I'm going to do them by pressing down on the side and then on the other side and the thing is when you are doing this kind of work when you're doing anything any kind of painting and you're using a different sheet of paper you will find sometimes that it doesn't behave quite the way you expected so you have to adjust what you're doing if you were painting on smooth paper you'd have a different effect so I'm not one to look for perfection or tidiness I think when people say oh I'm such a perfectionist I think sometimes what they mean is they like everything to be tidy and even and without flaw or variation and that's not particularly like nature is it because the beauty of nature is the variety and the um unevenness you know beautiful sky is not tidy beautiful garden shouldn't really be tidy anyway do whatever you want if you want it to be tidy let it be tidy but don't stress about it whatever you do let it be fun just go with the flow so there we are there's the top one and um question is now shall I do I think I'll just do the berries next so we just pick up some nice bright red and we're going to give each little oops trying not to touch the leaves let's just mop that up and then I can put some green on top of that when that's dry I think I've got a little bit too much wet there so we'll just dry that off a bit and just draw some berries where would we be at Christmas time without berries eh make them different sizes evenly all along I would say something like that woke up last night dreaming about bells Christmas bells and I thought to myself oh I really should do a painting of some Christmas bells because I haven't seen anyone doing that before and uh to me Christmas and the you know going to midnight mass and all that kind of thing was always part of Christmas when I was young and then we left England and went to live abroad and didn't ever seem to quite be the same but then that's made mostly imagination because you know as you get older things change don't they anyway um the bells yes I remembered that when I was at school and we had our art lessons and I was 10 11 I remember one year there was a competition for designing a Christmas card and I wanted to enter this competition at school and I was desperate to paint some bells I had this idea in my head of two bells and some holly and stuff like that I remember working on it for ages and ages and ages and it never came out quite right so I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about that and thinking I'm going to do some bells with holly and all that as a tutorial soon but not today so watch out for that I couldn't get the shape of the bell right I probably still won't be able to get the shape of the bell right there we are so that's uh there is I hate having to wash my brush out and waste all that paint you want to carry on painting don't you we put the green back in that one like that all right quit going over with the hairdryer and I think that's dry now and uh we might be able to risk erasing lines on the outside here just be really careful when the kuretake starry colour paint is dry it's much brighter shinier than it is when it's wet so have faith when the first time you use it don't um don't worry if it seems not to be bright because it does definitely go shinier as it gets dry marvelous things these paints I was really very uh lucky to have such lovely christmasy colours okay that will have to just brush that off with my shaving brush okie dokie and gold to tie the balls first of all to the bow and I'm going to do it very casually like that I'll just come up here straight up behind the leaf and do that and this one I've got far to go this one like that and this one so now they're all in place and then at this point now you've got lots of choices to do um I was thinking of snowflakes poor dog down the hill still tied up day after day I've reported her twice now the neighbour to the equivalent of the RSPCA here they phoned me and said oh well we will come out but don't know when and I think that dog is going to go crazy okay so when you're doing a snowflake they have six points and it's a little bit tricky because you have to find the middle draw a line and then divide it as evenly as you can into six like that doesn't matter if it's a bit off uh as mine always inevitably are I should measure it should get a compass out shouldn't I Tamsin but I don't so we're just doing some decoration on here which is reminiscent of um snowflakes I'm not going to say these are perfect at least they do have six points and that's the key thing really um let me think what shall we do here we could do a shape like that and then we can make them what you might call just embellished so it's snowflake theme I think I would tend to say for that and same for this one we're going to come down and we're going to go across in the middle and across there and we're going to hope that nobody minds if they're a bit weird I do find that dog very disturbing poor thing we've been taking her for a walk when we can but the woman doesn't like me to do it she gives me the finger if she sees me anywhere near her place and so I've been going out there and it's I don't think it's helped my blood pressure to be quite honest having confrontations with the neighbor over her abuse of a dog is not exactly what you'd call um calming but I'm not the kind of person who can sit by and just ignore something like that so I don't know how we're going to resolve it yet but it will be resolved the um the problem is here in France the a lot of people tie their dogs up outside okay changing the subject one final snowflake and I'm going to on this one just do completely non-snowflake emblems just anything whatever comes to mind whatever comes out the end of your brush or pen or mouth there we are so that will do for now I think and then one last thing here is we're going to pick up some dark gold on the paintbrush I can get it to and then we'll just put some nice wavy lines on these colored ones here and this one wants to be more silvery so we'll go for the lighter I think it does does it or does it want to be really dark let's see well that works that's okay I think compromise do both there we are okay and you could if you wanted to um come into the leaves and just put some veins in the center of the leaf symbols just to make them look perhaps a little bit more finished off optional when you use these pens make sure you don't press too hard I mentioned that before but just in case you missed it only press lightly hardly press at all and then you'll find that they'll work better so there we are oh I'll tell you what I do want to do I want to put a little bit of gold on this one I want to put some gold around the outside edges here lots of dots it's a dotty theme okay so there we are interesting design I think it would work very nicely for a anything really hope you enjoyed 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