24 Quick & Easy Winter Christmas Themed Paintings with Watercolours

1. Welcome to the Class: Christmas is a season of being together, a season of giving and receiving love and kindness from each other. It is also a time to share joy and warmth, especially in tough times like these. I love spreading joy and happiness around me through art, through my watercolor paintings. I adore the medium of watercolors and the way it keeps me wanting to learn more. Every time I pick up my brush. Hello everyone. I'm Geethu, a watercolor artist and instructor who fell in love with watercolors ever since I can remember. You might have guessed by now what this class is all about. Of course, it is about Christmas. It is said that it takes 21 days for a hobby to become a habit and what if we could make painting a wonderful habit that we can't give up. Today on December the 1st, it's 24 days to Christmas. We're going to begin our journey painting a Christmas themed winter painting every day until Christmas. We will paint 24 different small and quick Christmas and winter themed paintings everyday from today 24. Because I don't want to overwhelm you with the painting process on Christmas day. That is the day for us to enjoy the lovely Christmas day with our families and be a part of the festivities. But there will be a surprise for you on Christmas Day so join me in this quick painting challenge to build that habit in you. If you are someone who came across this class after December 1st and there are only a few days left to Christmas, then you can still join me, choose your favorite painting among the projects, and join me in this count down to Christmas. Each painting will be less than 30 minutes because I want you to be able to fit this into your daily schedule and get in the mood for Christmas. First, I will take you through the art materials we need. Before we start each painting, I will take you through the colors that we need for that day so that you can be prepared with your watercolor palette. Are you a person who is just beginning your watercolor journey? Don't worry. All of these paintings are going to be quick and will give you a deeper idea about different techniques, as well as fill your hearts with everything related to Christmas. In December, your favorite month of the year. It is mine. Join me in this class and let us welcome Santa with our wonderful paintings. 2. Materials You Need: Let us have a look at all the art supplies that you will need for this class. It's absolutely all right if you don't have the exact same materials that I'm using, you can join me with the most basic watercolor paints, paper and brushes that you have. First let us have a look at the paper that I'm going to be using. This paper it is Arche's 300 TSM, 100% cotton paper. I would really recommend 10% cotton paper for landscape paintings because it really makes a huge difference in the way the watercolor paint flows on the paper. But I knew that the paper can be really pricey. Join me with whatever watercolor paper that you have. For this class we will be painting on a paper that is 5 by 7 " wide. That is the A4 size like this. Here I have 20-25 sheets of A5 size watercolor paper which is arches obviously. These are the papers that we will be painting. It would be better if you can find paper of all the same sizes so that at the end of 25 days we will have 25 beautiful paintings on similar sized paper. The smaller size paper will also help us in completing each of our paintings in less than 30 minutes so get your watercolor paper ready. The next thing we need and second most important thing obviously is watercolors. As you can see here I will be using watercolor paints from the brand Art Philosophy as well as White Nights. Art Philosophy is an American brand and White Nights is a Russian brand. But you don't need to have the exact same brand that I'm using. You can join me with the most basic set of watercolors that you own because for this series of paintings we are not going to need any fancy colors but rather very basic sheets. We will discuss all the colors we will need for the different class projects as you start each class project. This will also help you to get those colors ready on your palette as you start a specific project. Then of course we need watercolor brushes. We don't need any fancy brushes here all you need is a larger size brush, typically a size 10 or a size 12 and a medium-sized brush which could around size 8 or a size 6 and lastly a smaller size brush for the details. Either a size 2 size 1 or a size 0 and if you have then a synthetic brush which will also hold very less water as opposed to a natural hair brush so that we can work on the lifting technique and several of the wet-on-wet techniques. Additionally you can use a flat brush to apply water onto a larger surface area of your paper which will ease the painting process but it's absolutely all right if you don't have you can simply use your larger size brush for this. For the sketching process we need a pencil and an eraser you can use a normal pencil like this one or you can use a mechanical pencil like the one I'm using. I mainly use mechanical pencils because I don't have to worry about sharpening it and have to change the lead occasionally, I'm using a 0.5 millimeter stick for this pencil. Next we need watercolor palette. You can use any palette for mixing your paints. You can either use a plastic one, a ceramic one, or even a metallic one. Here I will be using this dinner plate which is my most absolute favorite for mixing paints because it's so easy to mix paints on a ceramic palette. The next thing you need is a board or some surface to tape your paper onto so I will be using this wooden board so it's made of plywood and you can use whatever surface you have, your tabletop, a magazine, a book or any surface to tape your paper on. It is better if you have some surface that you can lift because sometimes you may need an angle for working with the paper. That is, it is better if you can lift your board at certain angles like this one here. Then obviously we need masking tape to tape our paper onto the board so you don't need any fancy masking tape. This is just a normal masking tape that I bought off Amazon. I will also be using this masking tape to place under my board when I want to get an angle on my board and work with gravity on the paper that is my water will flow down with the force of gravity so that is another use for my masking tape. As I said this masking is not much fancy masking tape just a normal one that you can get in hardware stores and off Amazon. There will be a lot of snow in our paintings as well as white surfaces so we will need white watercolors or whitewash for the same. I will be using this whitewash which is permanent white from [inaudible] as well as this whitewash which is titanium white from Sennelier. You can use either of the wash or white watercolors that you own. Don't worry that you need wash itself you can also use watercolors It's absolutely fine. Then we need some tissue or a cloth where you can wipe your brush as well as paper. You can use any normal tissue or a cotton cloth anything is fine and lastly we will need some salt. This is just a normal table salt, the salt that we use for cooking. This will give us a nice texture and beauty to our paintings. Without any further ado, let's jump into the Christmas projects. 3. Day 01 - 24 Days to Christmas: Welcome to our first-class project. It's 24 days to Christmas, and this painting here is what we will start with today. Let us first see all the colors that we will need. Indian yellow, a dark green, indigo, burnt umber, and a red. We will also need white watercolors or gouache. Let us first start with our pencil sketch. It's going to be very easy and simple. We're just going to make the outline of our Christmas tree. We will quickly sketch the outline of a tree starting from the top left to the bottom middle. Just the shape of the pine tree, and then we will add some small circles inside the tree for the Christmas ornaments. As you can see, just place them randomly on the tree, just like you would hang them on a Christmas tree. That is all our sketch would be. We will first start with watering our paper because we're going to be doing the wet-on-wet technique. If you want to work with an angle on your paper, you can place something below the board that you have fixed your paper on, and then apply the water on your paper but just make sure to apply the water to the areas outside the pencil sketch that you have made. First, we're painting the background, and we will do the tree later. As you can see, just outside of the pencil sketch on the whole of the paper with water, I'm starting with my size 8 brush. We will be starting with burnt umber. What we're going to be using is a very lighter tone of burnt umber. Remember, this is the background, and we want our tree to be brighter on the paper. We're just lightly applying the burnt umber. Then we will take some indigo, and we will add it on the top. You can see it's just randomly, there is no specific rule. I'm just trying to apply some color onto the background because I just don't want it to be left white while my tree is there in the foreground. This is the reason I'm applying a mix of the burnt umber and indigo. As you can see, it's just totally random. Just outside of the tree, apply both of these colors together at random places. Even if you apply a very darker tone, it would turn lighter in the end once your paper has dried, and that is, the water has dried. But let's not make it that dark. You can see now, that's all for the background. I have switched to my size 10 brush, and I'm going to add some blooms on the paper. I'm just dropping some water that is splattering water, then we will add some salt on top of it. This is just going to be the basic table salt. We can see, just splatter some salt here. You can see in this angle here, just at random places, this would make the background look more interesting, and give it the appearance of snow. Before proceeding with the rest of the painting, we will have to wait for the background to dry. Here, my background has now completely dried, and you can see the beautiful effect and texture that salt has created. Now, let us paint the tree. I have switched to my size 10 brush, so you can use any larger or medium-sized brush that you own. First, we will start by applying water on the tree. Just water the whole area of the tree. Again, it's all right if you're going to paint on top of the background because here the background is lighter. We will start with a smaller brush. As you can see, I've taken my size 2 brush, and we will start with Indian yellow. You can use any yellow that you have, transparent yellow, Orillion, or Gamboge. Here, I'm painting the Christmas ornaments. This is not the original color that it's going to be on the ornaments, I'm just marking the spot where they are. Otherwise, after painting the whole thing, we will forget where those ornaments were, so that's why. I'm just moving ahead with yellow on top of it now. Just as a placeholder for those Christmas ornaments, so just mark them. As you know, your paper's wet, so it's going to flow, but that's all right. As I said, it's just as a placeholder for all of them. Once you have added all of that, now, I've switched to my size 4 brush. Again, switch to a medium-sized brush, and we will mix a sap green. The green I'm using here is a very darker green. That's why I'm mixing it with yellow to get a sap-green color. If you have sap green, you can go ahead and directly use sap green. Onto my wet paper, I'm applying the sap green. Remember, we had applied water onto our tree so my paper is still wet, and I'm applying sap green all over onto my paper onto the areas where the tree is. Onto the Christmas tree, just randomly as you can see, just some strokes. This is the lightest tone that is going to be there on the tree. As you can see, I'm just using my brush to create some random strokes, and it needn't have any definition right now, we will define the shape of the tree later. Right now just follow the pencil sketch that you have made. Just drop the sap green at random places, but make sure to skip the Christmas ornaments that we did with yellow. This is going to be the base tone on the tree. Then we will add a darker tone of the green onto the tree now, on top of the sap green. This is a very beautiful green from white knights. But don't worry if you don't have this green, because if you have sap green or any other green, you can mix a bit of blue or indigo to that green to get a darker shade of green. Just apply the darker green again. Here you can see I'm applying them at random places. My paper is still wet from the previous stroke of the sap green that I applied. Again, on top of the wet paper, I'm just applying the strokes totally randomly. Once this part is complete, wait for the tree to completely dry. You can use a hairdryer if you want to try it. I did use a hairdryer. Then I will take my size 4 brush, and we're going to add some slight details onto our tree. Again, as you can see, I'm going to take a very darker mix of green this time. I mixed my dark green with a bit of indigo and burnt umber. You can see it's almost similar to black, but not black. It has a greenish touch to it because we added more of green. Using this green, I'm just going to make the shape of the tree right now, so you can see my strokes. Use the smallest size brush if you want, because we're just going to add tiny lines onto our tree here. See, just some small random strokes. It's completely random and very simple. They're just going to be like small lines on our Christmas tree. If you ask me to recreate these exact steps, it will be impossible for me because it's completely random. Just have fun and enjoy. Then towards the left side, we don't want a lot of details, so just blend them. To blend them, just use a bit of water and apply on the paper. You can see that I've applied water onto the paper and that area just blended. All of these details and tiny lines would be towards the outside of the tree, that is towards the right side. A major part of our painting process is going to be this tree here. Just sit back and enjoy this process. It's just going to be applying this darker tone of the screen and making the shape of the pine tree, so just add some random strokes. You can see I'm adding more of the details towards the right, so that's just towards the outside of the tree. Towards the left side, I'm using water to blend my color onto the tree. But be careful about the Christmas ornament. We don't want to form a dark edge around it that is a hard line around it, so we'll just use water and we still can see some yellow paint through it. We will be adding the Christmas ornaments later with a more diverse color. First, let us finish this tree. Just very carefully and very slowly, we will add this Christmas tree. You can see my strokes as how they are. They're just very quick and random, nothing special about it. I will be using the same darker mix throughout for adding the darker tones. This is the darker shade on the tree and that is a mix of dark green from White Nights indigo from Art Philosophy and burnt umber from Art Philosophy. Very little of the burnt umber, more of the sap green or the green and the indigo. Just mixing all of these three colors, you will get a nice darker green shade. Towards the left, just blend them with water. Towards the right is what we will add the details, as you can see. I just read water onto the bottom part of my tree, but skipping the right side, because on the right side I want these tiny leaves of the trees. These are, obviously, the Christmas tree is a pine tree, so it's going to be a gorgeous pine tree adorned with Christmas ornaments standing outside probably in a winter day from the background with the amazing salt texture. That's why we added salt for the background. It makes it look beautiful with watercolors because somehow, the salt absorbs the water and gives a beautiful texture. As you can see, we're still painting the foreground tree. Using a smaller size brush would be the best for getting the best effects on the tree. This is because the tip of the brush will give a nice pine tree effect, will give the lines that is needed for the pine tree. Because if you use a larger brush, chances are that your strokes might be larger and you might mess it up. But don't worry, because trees can be of different types, different shapes, different sizes. It all depends on how you put your strokes, and they just need to be totally random, as you can see. No specifics, just randomly. Some lines all towards the outside of the tree. This is going to be the darker shade on top of the tree. If you want, you can add a more darker tone by mixing a bit more indigo, which would give a nearly darker green, nearly as dark as black, very randomly you can see. Now we will add snow onto our tree. Here, I'm using white gouache paint. Gouache is an opaque watercolor. That is, it's very thick and gives a very nice white. But don't worry if you don't have white gouache because you can also use your white watercolors. It doesn't really matter. Both are exactly going to be the same. Just using your white paint, whichever you have, go ahead and we will start adding some random strokes again on top of our tree, imitate the snow on the tree. As I said, this is a Christmas tree standing somewhere outside on a windy day and probably it has snowed on that day and there's no snow on our tree. Use a medium-sized brush and just add some small drops of white paint on your tree. This is how the snow is going to be on your tree. Just randomly small strokes here and there. There is no specifics. Make sure that when we're adding snow onto the leaves, that is towards the outside of the tree, that is on the right side. Just make sure that you apply them on the top because obviously, the snow is falling from the top and it's going to rest on top of the leaves. We don't want to accidentally paint it in the areas below the leaves. But it's going to be intertwined in the pine tree leaves. Actually, it's just going to be all right however you paint it. All we need to do is now to just add white watercolors at random places. It's just simple strokes with your brush. Remember to use a very dark consistency of white watercolor. When I say dark, obviously how dark can a white paint be? But what I mean is, to make it very thick so that you get a good nice white color on top of your tree because chances are that if you don't use a thick paint, it will turn lighter. As you can see already, the shades of white that I applied on the top areas of the tree, it's turning lighter, so that is why I said to use a thicker consistency of the white paint and to add it on top of your tree randomly. This will be the snow on top of the tree. We already added the snow kind of background onto our painting using the salt technique. Now, we just need the snow on our tree. As you can see, I'm applying a second stroke on top of my snow because they seem to have gone lighter. Do the same if you feel that your watercolor has done lighter, that is the white paint. It will turn done because of the darker background, so you might need to reapply the strokes multiple times to get the color correctly, that is to get it white. Professional watercolor artists usually use the white of the paper to get the effect of snow and other white objects. But here, we're just going to use our white watercolors because we don't want to leave the paper white and paint around the snow for such a huge tree. Lastly, we will add some splatters. They're not going to be really visible on the lighter background. But of course, we just want the snow to be there. Just splatter some white paint, so hold your brush and just tap it. This will drop the paint onto the paper. If you want, you can add some larger circles to depict larger snow crystals at certain places, and totally randomly, just some small circles. Now, we need to add the Christmas ornament. For that, I'm going to mix my white watercolors and going to create a nice color. So mixing white, a bit of Indian yellow and the red, the transparent red. You can also use cadmium red or whatever red you have. Mix it with a bit of the white watercolor. We're mixing it with white because this will give it a nice effect of that snow as well as will appear on top of our green if you accidentally painted over the Christmas ornament. All of those places where we marked the place for the Christmas ornament, now we're going to paint them with red, as you can see. Just some small circles. If you want to make it more diverse, you can leave some of them as yellow as well, because then that means it will have multicolored lights. That is all for our painting. It's complete. Our half magical looking Christmas tree is standing out in the snow. Isn't it beautiful? There you go, guys. Isn't it beautiful? I hope you all love your Christmas tree. See you all in the next class project. 4. Day 02 - 23 Days to Christmas: Welcome to our second class project. It's 23 days to Christmas. Today, we will be painting this Christmas ornament hanging on the branches of a Christmas tree. The colors we need, are Indian yellow, permanent red, rose madder, permanent brown, burnt umber, and green. If you don't have permanent brown, don't worry because you can mix permanent red and burnt umber and you will get the exact same shade. To get a darker green like this, you can either mix a sap green with indigo and you will get such a beautiful green. Let us start our pencil sketch first. What we need is to make the Christmas ornament first. It's going to be in the shape of a heart. We will simply draw the shape of a heart, but all we need to be careful about this one is that we don't want any hard edges. As in when you draw the heart, just make sure that you join them without any hard edges but rather curved lines. Then we add that small dark part of the heart, and then a line which shows that it's hanging from the branch somewhere on the top. This branch is not going to be seen in the picture, but rather is just going to appear from the top, but we need to show some parts of the tree. We will have some other parts of the pine tree. Just small branches, just add them, few lines. That is all our pencil sketch would be. Then we will start with our painting process and we will start with applying water onto our paper. I'm using my flat brush to apply water. Note here I'm applying water, but I'm avoiding the Christmas ornament. We need to apply water all around the ornament. Just make sure that not to apply water on top of it. We're going to be using the wet on wet technique here. That's why we're applying the water so carefully around the edges. You can actually use another pointed brush to cover the edges of the Christmas ornament. Like here, I switch to my medium-sized brush just to get the edges of the Christmas ornaments correctly. That is when applying water because it's very hard to obtain that with a flat brush. Once you have finished applying the water, we will start with the background. I'm taking Indian yellow and I will just apply randomly to the left side. This is where the branch was. As you always know, I need an angle on my paper because I love the water to flow down. Whenever I'm working with a wet on wet technique and I want gravity to act on my paper, I put an angle for my board. That's why I keep the tape underneath. But it's totally up to you whether you want it or not. Then the next color obviously is the dark green. As I said, if you don't have this dark green, you can mix a sap green or any green that you have with indigo or a darker blue, such as Prussian blue, and you will get a darker green shade. Just apply the green at random places. Remember our paper is wet and we're just applying at random places to get the wet on wet technique. Then mix the dark green with a bit of burnt umber, and this is what we're applying at the bottom part of the painting. This whole thing that we're painting right now is the background. That's why it's still wet on wet technique because it will be lighter after it dries. So whenever we apply the wet on wet technique on our paper, once it dries up, it's usually around one shade lighter than the shade that we applied. You can see here, I'm not applying it very darker tones, just a medium tone of the colors. It's the same dark green but mixed with a bit of burnt umber. Also the whole of the green just at random places because I just want it to be like the background. I will also add some red shade at random places. This is just to create a star contrasting effect in the background. Just take all your colors, apply it at random places. That's exactly what I did. There's no specific rule. This painting was really from my head, no reference picture. What I was just doing was I was just trying to get a nice background with a different mix of colors. I went with the basic Christmas colors, obviously, these four colors. Then I just applied it randomly on to the background. We want to do exactly the same thing. But also make sure to leave tiny gaps of white in-between because that will give a nice little contrast. You can see now my background has completely dried. After you finish with your background, we have to wait for it to dry. Then we will move with the foreground. I'm mixing permanent brown and burnt umber. As I said, if you don't have permanent brown, you can mix a red with a brown and you will get a nice brown shade, or you can also use burnt sienna. We will just draw some branches of the pine tree. Remember we marked our branches with our pencil, just the lines. So that is what we're going to add now with our brown shade. It's a mixture of permanent brown and burnt umber. Or you can use a mixture of brown and red for this because I just want it to be a lighter shade for now because we will add the darker tones later on. That is why I went with a reddish brown, so you can also use burnt sienna instead as I said. Once you've finished with adding the background stems, we will add a darker tone on top of it, so this time it's burnt amber which is a shade darker than the permanent brown. Next, let us paint the foreground pine tree branches. For that I'm mixing green here, sap green because I'm not using sap green but all I'm using is the Indian yellow and the dark green that I have which is from White Nights. But we need sap green to get our branches of the pine tree, the leaves on our pine trees, so that is why I mixed a bit of yellow into the dark green to get a sap green color, and then we will apply it on the tree in the shape of small pine tree branches, so you can see it's just totally random small hole sheets protruding out from the branch outwards from the ranch. Then to get a darker contrast we will also use the dark green, so this is why using a mix of colors is useful. If I had used sap green here I would also need a darker green to get that darker shade on the top of my tree. That is why I'm using green here and then I created sap green. If you're using sap green then create your darker green to get that nice contrasting shadow effect on your tree. There would be lighter leaves, there would be darker leaves, so that is why? The darker leaves are because some of the leaves would be under the shade as in the shade from the other leaves on the same branch. That is why we need a mix of those greens. You can use even more mix of greens if you have like a different shade of green as well, it would give a nice beautiful contrast. In the painting always what's important is you're getting different contrasting colors that would give it a nice effect. If you have viridian or emerald green, you can also add that to this and it would increase the contrast in your painting. You can see I'm using a size 2 brush which is like a smaller brush, or you can use a medium brush and use the pointed tip. Just randomly paint the leaves on a pine tree, so this is really close up picture of the pine tree which is why we need the leaves to be in a closer look. Usually when we drove pine trees they are as a whole tree and it's very easy to draw the branches right. In this case a pine tree is really close and we're looking at its single branches as in there are three branches here and that's what we're looking at. That's why it looks like tones on a tree, so just add randomly. There is no specific rule. I'm just using my brush and using swift, downward and upward and different kinds of brushstrokes in all directions simultaneously to get that pine tree leaves on the paper. You can see there is no rocket science, it's just simple strokes, and in all the directions that would give the perfect tree that we need. Just different shades of green as you can see I apply both the sap green and the green together at random places, and this adds the nice contrast to our tree as I said. There you go. Almost added it to all the branches. Just quickly at certain places. Now, we need an even more darker shade. Remember I said that the more contrast there is the more beautiful it looks, so mix a bit of burnt umber to your dark green that would give an even more darker shade. Use that and just apply it at random places but I'm very careful here. I'm not applying it to almost all the places, just do very little places just here and there and as small tweaks. This can be even the small branches or the small surfaces on a pine tree, just very randomly and simple strokes at random places, totally random places. Once you're done with that, so that's all with our pine tree. Now we have to paint the most important part of all which is the Christmas ornament, which is the beauty of this picture. We will first paint with wet on wet on the Christmas ornament before we add in all the shadows to make it look like a three dimensional look. That is why I'm wetting the ornament, so apply water onto the whole of the heart, the heart shape. We will start with Indian yellow. Using medium-sized brush and take Indian yellow and apply it almost to the left side, but I'm trying to leave a gap there, a white gap for the highlights. These are the two surfaces on the heart, so you know on the left side and the right side as in the left heart and the right heart part. That's why a bit of yellow on the right and then we take the permanent red, you can also use cadmium red or vermilion. 5. Day 03 - 22 Days to Christmas: Welcome to the third class project. It's 22 days to Christmas and today we're going to be painting this beautiful painting. The colors we're going to need are Indian yellow, green, burnt umber, indigo, permanent red, and Payne's gray. Let us first start our pencil sketch. We're going to be making the Christmas ornament, so we need to make the circle. As you can see, I'm using a candle here. You can either use a compass or use whatever object you have in your house to get a nice circle. I couldn't find my compass, I just used whatever I could find right in front of me and it was this candle. What we need is, we need three circles. Two small circles, one at the top, one at the bottom, and half of a circle towards the right. Then we need to add the top portion of the Christmas balls, the Christmas ornaments. It's going to be like a cylindrical shape with a hook on the top. This is where the thread or the hanging part will attach to. Then we just add few branches. It's going to be yesterday's painting where we added few branches. But we don't need to be exactly the same. Just random branches and some line to the top for the thread. Next, we will start the painting process. Again, first we will paint the background and it's going to be a wet-on-wet method. The background is always a wet-on-wet for me. Here, the circle on the top, that is the ornament on the top is what is going to be the attraction of this painting which is going to be the main subject. That one we will paint later. The rest of the areas are going to be background. Let us apply water, and it's okay to apply water on top of the other ornaments as well because they're not going to be that detailed, neither are they going to be blurry. We will add the details later on, don't worry. But for now, apply water and use a medium-size brush to apply water around the Christmas ornament. We will start to add Indian yellow. As you can see, I'm making small circles on my paper. This is how we are going to get the bokeh effect on our painting. Bokeh effect is like an effect when you take photographs, you see those small circles on the photograph, that's what is called as a bokeh effect and we're trying to get that on our painting. First, Indian yellow, and some sell goods using the Indian yellow. Then let us make sap green. You can use sap green directly if you want, if you have. I'm mixing dark green and Indian yellow to get a sap green. We will make a circle outside of the first circle that we made. Remember that this is the wet-on-wet technique. Onto the wet paper, we're doing this. Around the circular painting part that we made with the Indian yellow, around that we will add the sap green. Since the paper is wet, it's just going to spread a lot, but don't worry. Just remember when you apply the water you need it to be even, otherwise it will spread a lot. Then we will also take some permanent red or scarlet or vermilion. You can use whatever red you have, transparent read, anything, and we'll also add some circles and some few drops of red at certain places. Around the red also, we will add the sap green. Then we will add a darker green around in the other areas where there is not the bokeh effect. The whole of the background is going to be now with a darker shade of green. Since we're painting the background, we will also add in the other Christmas ornaments to give it the blurry effect. Paint the rightmost Christmas ornament with Indian yellow and the bottom one with transparent red. Let's paint the whole of the ornament with red, one with red and one with yellow. Again, because there's water on our paper is going to spread outside, but that's all right. We will just add the rest of the background with green. Around the ornament, we will add green. When you apply green you can see that the red color that we applied on the ornament stays in place because there's already a green at the outer edges and now it cannot flow all the way outside of the ornament. Then taking more of the darker green. This is the same dark green that I used yesterday. It's from White Nights. If you don't have a darker green like this, you can mix a sap green or hookers green with indigo or a dark blue such as Prussian blue, which will give a nice darker green, or you can also try mixing a green with a little amount of black to get a darker green. Now you can see I've covered the whole area of my paper with green. Because I'm working on the wet-on-wet technique, I'm going to reapply all of the colors that I just did. This will give me the nice vibrancy and will also keep my paper wet because I'm reapplying the strokes. My wet brush will make sure that my paper stays wet. This is how we can do wet-on-wet, that is to reapply your strokes quickly before they dry. Then here I'm going to make a very darker version of green. I mixed indigo to my green and I get a darker green. This is why I said that if you want a darker green, mix indigo with green, and if you need a more darker green, mix more of the indigos, you'll get a very nice dark green. As you can see, I've made very nice mix of dark green by adding a little bit of indigo onto my dark green. We want to give a nice dark background. This will give a nice dark contrast and make our Christmas ornaments pop out in the painting, so that is why. At the bottom areas, it's going to be really dark and the rest of the places, it's going to be a dark green. It's just basically a blend of all of these colors. I know that this painting can be quite tough because it's very hard to work on the wet-on-wet technique. But don't worry, the most important thing is that even if your colors don't blend, when we add the Christmas ornaments on the top, it's still going to look beautiful. The key thing to get a perfect blend on the paper is to make sure that your paper doesn't get dry while painting. That is the main reason why I reapplied my yellow paint. Onto the areas where you want to apply the paint, make sure that you don't add more water. As you can see, I'm not dipping my brush in water, but rather just picking up more of the paint and applying onto my paper. Darker green on all the corners and certain places in the middle, and the rest of the areas, it's going to be the same color, green and yellow and a bit of red. This is why I recommend using 100% cotton paper, but don't worry if you don't have that. Just be careful to not let the paper dry. If indeed your paper has dried, reapply water on the whole of the paper after it has dried. Here you can see the trick that I'm doing. My yellow portions and the green areas were getting dry. I reapplied paint on top of it quickly so that I'm re-wetting it. That is all for the background. Once the whole background has dried, we will start to add in the details. Let us paint the yellow ornamental right now. I'm taking more of Indian yellow and adding on the top. Notice here that I'm not going to be painting all round to the edges, just the middle areas. I reapplied Indian yellow, and now we will add a darker shadow using burnt umber. Using burnt umber, apply a stroke like this towards the right, somehow a hook shape. This is the shadow on the ball on the Christmas ornaments. Remember when we painted the Christmas ornament yesterday, we added in the highlights and the shadows, and it made the ball look really original and real, and gave it a three-dimensional look. That is exactly what we're doing again here today. We're adding in the darker tone, darker shadow, and we will do the same with the red ornament at the bottom. Reapply water. I'm applying water, but again, leave some red space towards the outside because we don't want a hard edge. Then I'm reapplying permanent red or transparent red just towards the inside, so you can see there is that slight gap towards the outside of that ball that I've left. We're not painting that area. The darker tone here would be to add burnt umber. Mix a bit of red into your burnt umber, which will give a darker tone of the red that we need. This is what we will add for the darker shadows. Add it on the top. I had reapplied the red color on the top so that area of the paper is wet, and onto this wet paper, I'm adding the mixture of red and brown. This makes it give the nice wet-on-wet technique again. You can see I just made some random shape onto the ball. This is how the light is on that, and you can add a further darker tone to it by adding a bit of Payne's gray to the same mixture of red and brown. Here, the darker tones are going to be towards the right side. The same way as we did with the yellow ball, you can see that the darker tones were towards the right side. Here also it will be towards the right side, so that is why the darkest tone mixed with Payne's gray, burnt umber, and red will be towards the right side. Now let us get to our main focus in this painting, which is going to be this Christmas ornament at the top. Wet-on-wet, again, let us apply water to the whole of that Christmas ornament very carefully along the edges because here we have to touch the edges because we left it white in the beginning. The whole of the Christmas ornament, apply the paint. We will be applying transplant red. Carefully, apply the red tone along the edges here. As I said, we have to be careful along the edges because we don't want to ruin the background. Add in the transparent red or the permanent red. It's both the same. Or scarlet, or vermilion, or whichever red shade you have. Very carefully, use a smaller size brush or the tip of your brush when you're painting along the edges. This exercise will also help you in gaining that better brush control to draw along the edges, along the curves. so this would be really helpful for you. Now, let us add the darker tones. What we're going to be adding is the same as with the other red ball. We're going to be adding a mixture of red and brown first for the darker tones. Just at certain places. You can see where I'm applying the straw because of the light reflecting on my paper because the paper is wet. The wet surface is actually reflecting the light. Apply the paint a little on the top left of that ball, and then towards the right bottom part. That is the right side is mostly where there is the light, so that's what we're applying. You can see that there is that yellow bouquet that we painted right beneath that ball. That yellow brightness is going to brighten up on our ornament as well. That is why I left a slight gap of red at the bottom without a shadow. You can see right there. This is because that area is going to be bright. It's not going to be in shadow. The rest of the areas is what is going to be in the shadow as I'm painting. Leave that little bit of red at the bottom. Then keep adding the darker tones. You can add an even darker tone by applying Payne's gray to the same mixture, just like we did with the previous ball, previous ornament. Very carefully, and very careful along the edges, of course. Add in the shadows. But as you can see, the other areas are starting to dry so we need to blend that onto the red surface otherwise it will form dark edges or hard edges, as you can call it. You can either use water or you can use your brush to blend it. At the bottom there where we left a slight gap without a shadow, you can see that I added a bit of Indian yellow to it. Now, let us paint the dark part of the ornaments. I'm painting with a mix of Indian yellow and a bit of red, so it's like a very lighter tone of orange, or you can just use Indian yellow or a queen gold shade. We will paint all of the ornaments with the same shade and you can mix a bit of the burnt umber on top of it because this one will also have the shadows. The shadows for the Indian yellow would be with the burnt umber. Just a bit on the top such that the Indian yellow is also seen through it. Not on the whole, just some few lines on top of it. You can see mostly towards the right side because as you can see from our picture, all of our shadows are to the right side. Now we will paint the pine trees. For that, I'm going to take my dark green. Again, this green is from White Nights. You can use a mix of sap, green, and indigo, or any green for that matter with indigo, you'll get a nice dark green. I'm just going to add some pine trees, some random leaves for my Christmas tree. Very randomly, just some lines. They're not going to be very detailed, but a very few branches of the trees. So just draw some lines outward from the main center line. This is how it is going to be. We don't need a lot of branches. We're just going to show a very few of them, two or three of them. That's it. Small lines protruding outward from the center line. That is how it will be. It's almost like how you would paint a palm tree. This part, because we're looking at it at a closer angle of the pine tree, it looks like palm leaves. Just quickly add in some leaves. If you want a darker green, you can also mix dark green or any green with a bit of black as well, and you'll get a nice darker shade of green. Once you have done adding that, that will be all for the pine tree. We don't want it to be much detailed. Next, we will take our white watercolor or white gouache. It doesn't really matter which you're using. Both will be fine. What we're going to do here is we're going to add the line on the top of the ornaments. This is going to be the thread or the hanging part of our ornament. Very lightly, because these need not be clearly visible. The one on the top, all the way to the top, and the one for the bottom, just somewhere disappearing in-between the leaves and the other one, disappearing somewhere in between the edge of the paper. Now let us create our bouquet effect a bit more contrasting. Let us add some white circles in the center. You can see I've added a white circle to all of the bouquet circles that we did with Indian yellow. But now it looks kind of odd. What we need to do now is we need to blend the edges. So dip your brush in water, remove any excess water, then just slide across the edges of that circle. Our paper is completely dry, and when you slide across the edge, it will soften that edge and remove any hard edge that we did by painting that white watercolor. Now you can see that that white looks as if it has blended in with the yellow and the bouquet effect looks really beautiful. That is what we're doing. Just blend it. This is known as the soft dunning technique. Softening the edges of course. That is all. Now let us add some few dots here and there, some highlights on our Christmas ornaments. That will be the final details just to add few circles randomly here and there. You can see I'm just adding few circles, few lines on my Christmas ornaments. It's like there are some lights on the Christmas tree and that is being reflected on our Christmas ornaments. The same way on all the three of them. Just a few highlights. Even if you added a very thicker consistency of white, it's going to turn lighter once it dries, so it will become completely fine. That will be the final details in our painting. Adding the white to random places and that will be all. Let us remove the tape and look at our final painting. This one, as you can see, is with a darker background as opposed to the lighter ones that we did. I hope you like it and thank you for joining me. 6. Day 04 - 21 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 4. It's 21 days to Christmas. Today, we will be painting this painting. Let us have a look at the colors that we need. We're going to need Indian yellow, green, transparent red, burnt umber, indigo, and cobalt blue. You can use any other blue. We also need whitewash or watercolors. This is actually the reference picture that I used for this painting. I changed it a lot. But this is the picture. I took this picture from my own Christmas tree. This Christmas ornament that you actually see here, I made it myself and I painted them using wash on wooden blocks like these. So wooden ornaments. I got it off Amazon and I made these letters. The G is for me, my name, and the S is for my husband's name. There are a few others to. You can see this one is a snowflake. This picture is what we will paint today. Let us first sketch out the ornament hanging on the tree. Just make a basic circular shape. It needn't be perfect circle. It actually is hanging at an angle. So it can be slightly distorted. Then because it's hanging at an angle, we will need the right side. The part of the wooden ornament. I will upload the picture to the references, that is the resources section here, so that you can refer that. I will also upload this picture, so that you can also refer that. Then we will add the twine or the threat that the ornament is hanging on. Just twist it. As you can see in the picture, it's slightly twisted in the photo that I took. This is not there in the picture, but I thought that it would be better if we add something else in it as well. As for the letters, I made these for all the different letters of the alphabet, so that you don't have to paint a G. Choose your letter, maybe whatever letter you want. It might be the letter of your name, of your child's name, of your husband's name or whatever. Choose from this and paint it. I will upload this to the resources section as well. As you can see, G is missing from these letters. This is because I will be sketching out G and you can follow this process here if your name starts with G or if it is the letter that you want to sketch. This is the fun part in this painting because you're going to do something for yourself. Maybe you can give this to someone with their letter on as a Christmas card or make a postcard for someone, anything you want. That is why we're doing this today. Add some background for the pine tree. Now, we'll start painting the whole background first. I'm just going to wet my paper because here we're going to do the wet on wet technique. Wet the whole of the paper. I'm using my size 10 brush. Use the larger size brush or even a flat brush and apply the whole of the paper. Just only the two Christmas ornaments, we wouldn't apply water on that. We will paint later on. Along the edge of the wooden ornament, we have to be careful because we don't want water to go inside it. Then I'm going to start with Indian yellow. Apply the Indian yellow to some places where you want it to be lighter. This is just totally random. I'm just adding a blurry background. If you look at the picture, you can actually see everything in detail. But that's not how we would do in a painting. In a painting, you'd choose the subject matter that you want to focus. Here, I've chosen the two ornaments that I want to focus on. That is why the rest of the other things are going to be blurred with very minute details. Just areas where it is likely lighter, I'm adding the Indian yellow and to the other areas, I'm adding sap green. I made sap green by mixing my darker green with Indian yellow because that would give a nice sap green. If you have sap green, you can directly use sap green. If you want to get that darker shade of green, mix any green you have, such as a sap green or Hooker's green with indigo or Russian blue, you would get a nice dark green. You can also see that to some of the areas with my larger brush itself, I'm applying the strokes onto the wet paper, such as the leaves of a pine tree. If you look at the top portions, I applied them as the leaves of a pine tree. Just make the strokes similar to drawing the shapes of the leaves of the pine tree. It's going to spread around and even truly mix the whole thing. But that's all right. We just want it to be blurred. You can see those white gaps at the top area because I made the shape of the pine tree, but it's already gone, or blend together. You can see that, but there's still that whitespace remaining. Then to increase the focus on our Christmas ornament, we need to make it with a nice contrast. I'm adding a darker shade of green onto the areas next to the ornament that is right below the ornament. To get that darker green, I'm mixing indigo with green. As I said, you can get a darker green by mixing indigo and green. If you need an even more darker shade, mix more of the indigo with the green. Or you can also mix black and green together, so you will get a nice dark green. If you have a lot of shades, then you can also use perylene green if you have one. Apply it at random places where you see the darkness. These are the shadow areas that is the space between the leaves of the pine tree, but deeply nested inside. You can see I'm adding some shapes, some lines to form the pine leaves. Here I have switched to my smaller size brush because I think that if you use a smaller size brush and use the wet on wet technique, we might get a bit more shapes for our pine trees, I mean the leaves of the pine tree. Observe here, I'm adding the strokes and onto the wet paper itself, I'm adding the leaves of the pine tree. The whole thing is going to be the background. It's going to be blurred. Whatever you do with the background, that's fine, because this is not the main focus of our painting. Don't worry about it. Keep adding some shapes, some leaves. It's just basically how you would draw a palm tree. How would you draw the palm leaves? There's going to be a single center stem and then some other lines coming out of the center stem. The same way, add the leaves. Use a mix of different versions of green, and for these leaves, use the darker green. When you applied sap green at first, now you're applying the darker green on the top. That would make these shapes more visible. They're just going to mix. I know because the paper is wet, but that's all right. Now let us add two tiny drops of red shade onto our tree. This was part of my pine tree. So it was already there. It's the holly plant. This is the fruit of the holly plant. You might have seen it, some small red berry shaped. That's what we're adding. I also thought of adding a distant Christmas ornament, some red balls hanging in the tree. As you can see, I added it on top of the green. So it's mixed with the green to give me a brown shade also, which contributes to the nice shadow that it should have. Add the line of the holly fruit as well with burnt umber. All of this is just wet on wet and use the same burnt umber to draw some lines here and there. This would be the branches of the pine tree. Branches means the branches within the leaves. Just very lightly, that's all, and from this same branch, this would be the center stem. As I said, the same branch. You can add more leaves coming out of it. That would be all for the background. Once the background has dried, we can paint the Christmas ornaments. Here, I'm using a medium-size brush, and I'm going to mix cobalt blue with a bit of white watercolor or whitewash. This would give a nice lighter shade of blue. We want the blue to be very light. We just want to imitate the gouache paint. That is why we are adding white to it, so that we get a very nice white tone. Do that blue. This is why I said you can use any blue. Here what we're going to do is we're going to paint all around our letter and Christmas hat, Santa's hat on our letter. All around, but remember to leave that space for the wooden ornament. So the sides of it, the inside part is the only part where we're going to paint. The outside part, we need to paint the wood ornament. Apply the blue color all around the letter that you are going to paint. This painting is going to be very simple and this Christmas ornament is going to be even simpler than the background. It's just very easy. All around, just apply the blue tone. If you want to change the color of that ornament, you can also do that. You need not painted with blue itself. It's totally up to you to choose the color that you want. Now, let us paint the Santa's hat and also the Christmas ornament at the bottom part. The Christmas ornament at the bottom is the one that I showed, the one with the snowflake. I thought that we'll place it right here at the bottom. Paint the whole of that ornament with red. Then we need to mix a bit of burnt umber because I think that red is too bright, so mix a bit of burnt umber and add it to the whole of that ornament. Next we will paint the hat on the letter that we added. The whole of the hat just paint with the transparent red. You can also use scarlet, vermilion or whatever red you have. It doesn't really matter.The whole of Santa said we have to be very careful with the shape here because we don't want to destroy the shape of the hat and go on top of the blue that we applied. For this Santa's hat the other areas of the hat. We're just going to leave it white here because there is obviously no need to paint that because it's white. There needn't be any shadows because this is actually like a Christmas ornament that you painted and it needn't have any shadows. Then on to the letter added with burnt umber. Just trace out with your brush the letter that you are adding onto your ornament. The letters that you need to trace out, I've added it into the resources section. You can check that out. You can download it and copy out your letter that you want to do. For the wooden part, I'm going to mix a bit of Indian yellow and burnt umber and a bit of red. This gives me a lighter brown shade. I'm just trying to limit the number of colors that I use in this painting. This is the reason why I'm mixing all of these paints. What I mixed right now was the yellow, red, and brown together. I got a lighter shade of brown and using this lighter shade of brown, I'm going to trace all around that wooden part. This is the wooden area of my ornament that's visible. If you have a lighter brown, you can also use that lighter brown directly. You need not mix these paints. But I really think that mixing paints adds a beauty to our paintings. Then we will take burnt umber or a darker brown. You can also use Van **** brown and we will paint the edge of the wooden ornament. As I said, this wooden ornament is hanging at an angle. There's that edge of that wooden ornament. That is what we're adding right now. When you add this to your painting, that is what gives it the three-dimensional look. Rather than appearing flat, it now looks like a real ornament. Add that with burnt umber. Now, we need to add the same shade of lighter brown to the other wooden ornament as well. Don't forget that. But before that, let us add the twine that is the thread. I'm using the same brown shade for the thread here. The lighter brown that I mixed using yellow, red, and the burnt umber. You can see I'm mixing that same shade again and I'm adding it on top of the other ornament, the wooden area of the other ornament. Now let us also add the thread for the other one. This one is going to disappear out of our painting, just a line towards the outside and now let us add a bit of those leaves in the foreground as well, because we don't want the whole thing to be in the background. There should be some things that are visible in the foreground. That is why take a darker green shade and apply in the shape of the leaves of the pine tree. Just random and add two of those that would be all. Here mix a darker shade of the red by mixing red and burnt umber together and add the shadows for the Santa's hat. But I feel that here the Santa's hat is a very lighter tone of red and I want it to be vibrant. I'm just adding a bit more red on top of it. But if your hat is already vibrant, you can skip this step. Don't worry. Now, we're going to paint with white watercolors and add some snow on that ornament. Just make tiny circles with your white watercolor or whitewash. I'm going to switch to a smaller size brush and I'm going to make a snowflake on the left side of my letter. The snowflake would be like a star, star shape, but then the edges would have some lines. That's how it would be. But it's going to be very tiny here, so it doesn't matter. Then add the other small circles, the snowflakes, small ones. Once you have done that, we will add the largest know flake onto our red ornament. This is going to be again the same shade. Make it like a cross, it's like a star. It's going to have those four lines and half of it is towards the outside of the paper, so you don't need to paint the whole thing. We will make cute shape of our snowflake only to the areas that are visible and then we'll add some snow droplets as well. This is just something fun. You can add something else onto it if you want, maybe another letter in the corner, it's all up to you, whatever you want to do. Then finally, we'll add some details onto our wooden block, just the sides of it because it's not going to be flat. It's a wooden ornaments. There are some tiny wooden details on it. That's why I'm adding with a dark shade of brown, burnt umber and we also need to add some details onto the thread or the twine. With burnt umber and using a very small brush, typically a size zero or size 1, just add some few lines on top of the thread. It's just that thread, like you see in the picture. It has some lines on it, that's it. Once you've done that, our painting is complete and we can remove the masking tape. Here it is and thank y'all for joining me today. 7. Day 05 - 20 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 5. It's 20 days to Christmas, and today we're going to be painting this beautiful painting. The colors we're going to need are transparent red, burnt umber, green, Indian yellow, and indigo. So let us start with our pencil sketch first. So there's going to be a door in the top-left corner, and that's what we're going to be adding with the help of a ruler. Just make some vertical and horizontal lines so it's just only the part of the door that's going to be visible. So we will make those lines with our ruler, and then towards the front of the door, there's going to be the steps. It looks like it's the entrance of a house or something, and there's a pot on the step in which there's a Christmas tree. So it's a small Christmas tree sitting on top of the pot. So let us add that just the base of the pot and then just the outline of the tree and some Christmas ornaments on the tree. So just a few small circles. The exciting part of this picture is the boots that is on the front porch of that house. So it's just basic simple shape. So we're going to add the curved boots on to the front of that door. This is the only part of the sketching process that might be a bit tough, but don't worry. What I'll do is I'll upload this painting to the Resources section so that you can refer to the image and make the sketch of the boots. So a pair of boots on the front step. There's two oval-shaped circles at the top, that is the top part of the boots and then obviously the sole, the base part. Then these are going to be covered in snow. Even if you don't get the shape correctly, it's going to be fine because we'll just add some snow on top of it. So that's also another thing that you can do. If you don't get the shape correctly, just add snow on top of it. This simple sketch is what is going to be our sketch for today. Let us start painting. Here here we're going to go directly with the wet-on-dry technique, no wetting the paper. So we just take transparent red or any red basically because it doesn't matter, it's just the door, so the color is not much of importance which red to use. So transparent red you can even use pink shade if you want, but I just think that it will just match the whole picture if you're using a red shade. So apply transparent red on top of the door. One thing is that towards the bottom surface of the door, we want to add some snow, so it is better if we can leave that space right in the beginning itself so that we don't have to add it later on. But if you find it difficult to do that, we can add the snow later on with white watercolors or white gouache. So you can see that tiny curve that I have made. So these are the surfaces on the door in which they snow can settle on. So that's why that area would be white. So you can see how it is after I've painted the whole of that door in just a moment. So you see on the top part there, there's that slight, small triangle and few white spots. So that would be the settled snow on our door. So that is why I said, if you can leave white at the beginning itself, it would be great. Otherwise it's not a problem at all because we can add it later on. 8. Day 06 - 19 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 6. It's just 19 days to Christmas as of today and we will be making this painting. The colors we will need are a violet or purple, a dark green, Indian yellow, burnt amber, rose madder, permanent red, cobalt blue, indigo and orange. These are some of the color mixes that we will be doing for this painting. Don't worry, I will explain as we need them, so let us get sketching first, so this is going to be a cute snowman and the snow woman. Usually most paintings just contain a snowman, so I wanted to add some more extra element to it that is an extra subject, so here is a very cute little snow woman. Maybe their husband and wife. Doesn't it look really cute together? All we need are, we will sketch out their shapes, try to make them as balls joined together. You can see each of their body is like three balls joined together and then below the first circle we will need to add the scarf of the snowman, so it's going to be in-between the joint of the two that is the head and the body, so this is very simple pencil sketch. As you can see, there is nothing to worry about and add a few buttons to the body of the snowman, and we will do exactly the same for the snow woman as well. Let us have the scarves in different directions so as if it's waving in the wind. For the snowman, the other side of the scarf is not visible, maybe because it's on the other side or it's going out of the picture and for the snow woman, so there's two hanging parts, one towards the right side and one flowing in the wind. Then we will add the hat on top of the snowman. Remember this is not going to be like sitting on top of the circle, so we have to add the hat in a around one-quarter top part of the circle and then just earrings off the top most part of the circle and obviously too small eyes and a carrot and then the mouth which will be some stick, so that's how usually snowmen are made. We will do exactly the same for the snow woman as well, so there's going to be two twigs as hands for both of them. One hand of the snowman is actually going behind the snow woman, so it seems they're out in the snow hugging each other that's why this is so cute, I really love this one. Then let's add a beanie hat on top of the head of the snow woman and two small eyes and the carrot nose and the twig mouth. That would be all for the pencil sketch for this. Let us start painting, so I'm taking my size 10 brush and I'm going to wet the background. Here the background is just going to be something totally random, so let us apply water. We are going to skip the snowman and the snow woman and also remember to skip their scarves, so apply water to all the other areas. We are applying water because we're going to work on the wet-on-wet technique, so when applying water, just make sure that you apply water evenly to all the places. If your paper is not 100% cotton paper, you might have to apply water multiple times to make it stay wet for a longer time, then I'm switching to my size 8 brush and here we're going to use purple. I'm using ultramarine purple, so it's a very nice granulating purple color, but don't worry you can use any purple that you have and if you don't have purple, you can just mix red and blue together to get a nice purple shade as well. Here we're just going to mix several of the colors together and get a very nice background. First I added purple and then now I'm adding green and then burnt umber, so this is just totally random and I just applied the colors all the way whatever came into my mind at the time of painting, so there is no rule just apply all of the colors together. We're just trying to create a different blend of colors something soothing to the eye. If you ask me to recreate the exact same thing, it would be difficult for me even because the next time I do it, I would be applying the colors differently. All of these shades that is a purple shade a green, a yellow, a bit of red, a bit of burnt umber, I applied all of these to the background, but when you reach towards the bottom, we have to stop somewhere there and start adding blue because this is the snow at the bottom part, so the top side that was all the background somewhere in the distance, some colors, but at the bottom we need to add snow, so here I'm adding cobalt blue. If you feel that your color is getting lighter, you can add more colors because once this dries up, this is going to get even lighter than what it is right now, so that is why try to add more colors if you want, and to make the background interesting I added a bit of splatters as well, so you can see first I added a splatter that is just water and then we will also add some interesting splatter that is green and yellow as well but we don't want any splatters on our snow woman and snowman, so cover it up with a tissue, then next I'm going to take them indigo or Payne's gray and we're going to add it right below the areas of the snowman and the snow woman. This is their shadow on the snow and also the other shadow areas of the snow, so that would be all for the background and now let us paint the snowman. We will paint their bodies first and here again we're going to do the wet-on-wet technique, so remember we're painting this after the whole background has dried, otherwise your paint and everything will flow because your paper is still wet, so wait for it to dry before you start. Then after applying the water on the body, we will start with cobalt blue. I know the snowman is white, but we can just leave it white we need to show some shadows on it so that it appears real, so add some cobalt blue and then using water, just blend it to the bottom part. The bottom part is the background, but it is the snow area, so just blend it towards the bottom part and here you can see I'm applying cobalt blue, but I'm leaving white gaps and mostly I'm applying at the areas of the pencil sketch mostly in the corners and towards the center also we need to apply more paint. Apply indigo or Payne's gray both are fine. All the areas where there is a split between their bodies, we need to add the shadows, so again at the top part, you can see I applied a line and I'm blending it with the body. This is mainly because the shadow from the scarf, so the shadow is on the body of the snowman, so it casts a shadow on the body, so that is why there is that slight dark line which is the shadow of the scarf of course. Next we will paint the snow woman again, wet-on-wet technique so apply water and here as soon as you apply water, the paint from the snowman is going to spread onto her body as well. That's fine we will paint shadows later on and adjust everything, so here blend it again with the background that is the bottom part at the ground. Take cobalt blue and apply on the body of the snow woman as well at random places and mostly around the pencil sketch. Also at the joint between the two, snowman and the snowwoman. At the joint, there needs to be a darker shadow because it's like a joint area in-between, so that area would be under shadow. Apply darker tone there. Here you can see for the darker tone, I'm using Payne's gray. You can also use indigo. The lighter tone of the snow would be cobalt blue and a darker tone of the snow would be Payne's gray or indigo. Make sure to apply paint on the areas joining the different parts of the body of these two. The shadow areas need to be darker. The joined area, add more of the Payne's gray, but right now it's all blending on top of the snowman. But don't worry, we will add it properly later. Then we will paint their faces as well. Again, we'll have shadow from the hat. We need to add the shadow areas, apply water because we still have to work on the wet-on-wet technique. Use a smaller sized brush because their faces are small. I'm using a size 4 brush here. Leave some white spaces and mostly the shadow areas would be right below the hat, the same way for the snowwoman as well. Instead of cobalt blue, you can also use any other blue such as ultramarine blue or royal blue. Once you have added the lighter shadows, we will add the darker shadows with indigo or Payne's gray. I'm using Payne's gray here. Now, let us paint the hat of the snowman. I'm going to take Payne's gray. Here, I'm going to take a very darker tone of Payne's gray. I'm using Payne's gray because the darkest tone of Payne's gray looks like black. If you don't have Payne's gray or if your gray is not as dark as this, then you can use black. But remember to use a medium tone of black because don't make it literally black because we need to add some shadow and some light and darkness into this hat. That is the reason why I'm using Payne's gray. Apply the Payne's gray onto the hat area. Here you can see I'm using the wet-on-dry technique. I did not apply water at first. Next, we'll paint the beanie hat on top of the snowwoman, so that would be using red. You can use any red, scarlet, permanent red, transparent red, it really doesn't matter. This is mainly because, as you can see, these are just made out of snow. This hat, it can be any color, so it has no significance. If you want to change the color of the hat to a different color, that's also fine. Then the scarf, that is also going to be with red, but to make it a bit more interesting, what I did is I added a bit of rose madder. Rose madder is PR83, which is nice rose shade. If you don't have rose madder, you can add any other pink or rose to your red. More of red. That rose I added, is just to make that paint a bit more interesting and to make the color slightly different from the color on the beanie hat. Apply the same color to both of their scarfs. It is all wet-on-dry technique. I'm simply applying the color to the whole area. Now you can see the whole thing looks flat, but obviously what makes it interesting is when you add shadows. We will add that later on. First, let us draw the other parts. Taking orange, add a little nose to our snowman and snowwoman. I'm not adding the shadows right now because those areas are still wet and we have to wait for it to dry. While that dries, we're painting the other things, which is the things on their faces. I applied orange but we cannot leave it to be orange. There's going to be a shadow on that nose as well, so that is what we added with burnt umber. Then the buttons on their body. That would be with burnt umber. You can also use Van **** brown, transparent brown, or any dark brown that you have. Use the same brown for their eyes and their mouth as well. The mouth, draw it like the shape of a twig, add some branches if you want, small, tiny branch. We will do the same for the snowwoman as well. The twig mouth and the button eyes. Here the snowwoman's eyes, you can see I made them a bit less circular and semicircular which makes it a bit cute and looking at the snowman. Add the red part of the snowman's hat with transparent red, permanent red, or scarlet. Now here what we will add the shadow for the hat, as I said. Here, now we have to take a very darker tone of Payne's gray. If you had used black, now is the time to use the darker tone of black and add it to the top. Just to the top area, that is the top semicircle, and then towards the right side. It seems as the light is from the left side and so the right side is under shadow. We add that darker shadow to the right. All of the right areas of the hat, add a darker tone of Payne's gray or black if you have used black, but don't just leave it on like that, blend it with the underlying layer using water. The right side would then be really darker. Next, we will take some red again. Now, we're going to add the shadow for the scarf. We need to get a darker version of red. For that, I'm mixing red and burnt umber together, that is, mix your red and brown together. This will give the nice darker shade for the red, for the shadows. This is what we will apply on top of the scarf. Once you apply these darker tones on top of the scarf and add in these shadows, you will see that the scarf now appears to start looking like real. Coming to the most important point in a painting, light and shadow. Depicting light and shadow in a painting is the most essential part. This is why I always talk about shadows. Adding those darker lines on the scarf. You can already see there is depth in that painting. It now really looks like that scarf as there, popping out of the body of the snowman and it doesn't look flat. That is the same thing, what we want to achieve on the snowwoman's scarf as well. Adding those lines, so it will seem like the folds on the scarf, it is the fold on the cloth. Add those lines and some of those lines blended to the background by using water or using the underlying color which is red. So you can see how the scarf now really looks real and it has got a depth. Adding shadows is all about adding a darker tone of the color that we used. So here that is the reason why I'm mixing burnt umber with red. But that is also another way you can do it, you can also mix the complimentary color with it, but let's all get to that. Let's just mix burnt umber to get that darker shade for the shadow. I'm also adding some red lines to the end of the scarf because if you've seen scarves, they obviously have those hanging threads at the end, so that's what you can add with burnt umber. Now we need to create a black shade. So for that, I mixed burnt umber and Payne's gray, which will give us a nice dark shade, and either using that or either using Payne's gray, we will add some lines on the beanie hat, so it's like a woolen hat, woolen beanie hat on top of the snow woman. Just some texture on it to show the woolen texture. So you can either use black, you can use Payne's gray, or you can mix a gray using burnt umber and Payne's gray. Here I am also adding shadows to the buttons. So as I said, the light is from the left side, so all the shadows towards the right right side. So observe I just made a small semicircular shape at the bottom right corner of each of the buttons, which gives a nice shadow. So let us add a bit more dark shadows to the face of the snow woman. You can see I'm applying Payne's gray, but then I'm also blending it with the background. If you just apply the tone all over it, it's going to appear weird, so we need to blend it with the background that will soften the edge, and remember, I said that the gap between the snowman and the snowwoman should be a bit more darker because that's where they stand and the light is blocked by their bodies, so we need to get that dark as well. So apply Payne's gray and then use water to blend it to the background. You can still apply the water and just blend it to the background. Now you can distinctly see the difference between their different bodies, that is the body of the snowman and the body of the snowwoman as well. You can distinctly see that, so that's why that shadow is important. Like here, what happened in minus after blending, I lost some of the cobalt blue color that I applied earlier. So I'm reapplying the cobalt blue color. When I painted the background, I missed out this area between the hat and the side of the paper, so let's just add some color there and also towards the right side. If you applied paint here earlier, then there is no need to do it again. Obviously, I did not do it, so that's why I'm adding paint. You can see next to the background there it's green, so that's why I'm reapplying green. You can add some water droplets to get your Bloom effect. Just use the same colors that you used for the background at first, any areas that you have skipped while painting the background. Always, even if we have missed out something, we can always re-add them, provided that you just use water to blend it to the area nearby. Now let us add the hands for the snowman and the snowwoman. The hands are going to be shaped like a gouache because mostly snowmen are made of snow and any materials that you can get, such as twigs and branches. So add a twig for their hands. You can see I'm adding the small branch as well because it needs to look real, and add the other hand as well, and observe here that while I painted the background, I did not leave a space for the twig or the branch and just painted over it. The reason for this was I knew that I was going to be painting it with burnt umber, that is a darker shade. Now let us add some snow on their hands and on their bodies. We're going to use white watercolors or white gouache. I'm using white gouache paint here. You can also use white watercolors, it doesn't really matter, as I always say. We will add snow to certain places, just some places they're already made of snow. So this is accumulated on their bodies from the snow falling, some on top of their hats, on their scarves, that is any areas where the snow can settle on. Obviously the snow will settle on their bodies as well, but that's already snow, that's already white, so that doesn't matter. But the other areas which we added to make their bodies, that is the scarf, the buttons, all those places, that's where the snow will accumulate on. So that's what we're adding with whitewash or white watercolors. It looks like it's just started snowing, that's why otherwise they would have been covered in snow. Lastly, add some splatters onto their bodies and the whole of the paper. I use splatters like this. That is, by dipping my brush in the paint and then tapping it with one finger. The main reason why I do like this is because when I use just one finger, I get splatters in waiting sizes. If I were to use two brushes, my splatters would be really small, so that is all. Once you're done with this lattice, that's all, we can remove the tape to see our final painting, and here it is, isn't it really cute, the snowman and the snowwoman together? Thank you guys for joining me today. 9. Day 07 - 18 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 7. It's 18 days to Christmas from today. It's exciting, isn't it? Today we will paint this Christmas tree through the window. Let us have a look at the colors. We will need transparent red, Indian yellow, green, burnt umber, and indigo. Starting with the pencil sketch, we're first going to make the outline of the window. I will upload this painting to the resources section so you can download it for the reference picture. This project is going to be slightly longer than 30 minutes. I hope it's all right, but we're going to have real fun painting this one. This is also one of my favorites. It's really amazing to see that Christmas tree through the window after you've painted it, trust me, you will love it. First we need to make the outline of the window. It's just going to be basic lines using your ruler and pencil and the window divider in the middle. Just make sure that you'll get the exact number of lines as they are in the reference, which I have added to the resources section. In order to download the image, you would have to login to Skillshare from a browser or a PC and go into the Projects tab where you will find this picture to download. Once you have the reference image in your hand, it's going to be pretty easy to make the sketch because it's nothing other than simple shapes and lines. Just a rectangular box for the windows and some additional lines for the window seals. Then there's going to be a tree in front of it, and in front of the window at the bottom bar, it's going to be covered in snow. It looks like it's still snowing and the snow has settled down at the bottom part covering all the bushes and shrubs in front of the window. That's what we will be painting. Through the window we're seeing a Christmas tree. Just make the rough outline of the Christmas tree. If you have been painting with me on the other class projects in this Skillshare class then I'm sure that now you can make the Christmas tree very easily. Inside the Christmas tree, we will just add few small circles for the Christmas ornaments hanging on that tree. I'm really sure that you're a pro at this now. Then we need to add the window bars. Again, just use your ruler and make the lines. Or you can also use just your pencil and do the rough sketch. That will be all for the pencil sketch. Now let us start painting. I'm going to take Indian yellow and I'm going to paint the Christmas ornaments first. This is just going to be wet on dry. We will be painting a mixture of red and yellow for these Christmas ornaments. Some of them you can leave yellow, some Some them make it a mix of red and yellow. Just add it to the other side of where you have applied the yellow. That is half of the ornament apply yellow, half of the ornament apply red. It's not going to be clearly visible. Because it's just a very small one. Some of them can be read and some of them can be fully yellow. It's just, we're trying to mix up these two colors for the ornaments on that tree. It's just very basic, very simple. Because it's going to be not clearly visible, we don't need to add too much details, but I always prefer to add a bit of shadow to it. This dark shadow is going to be obviously with the red and brown mixture, red and burnt umber. That's it. Then we will start painting our tree. Here again, I'm using a darker green that I have. I'm mixing sap green by mixing a bit of yellow with the green. If you have sap green or Hooker's green or any other green for that matter, you can use it directly. It doesn't really matter at all. Here I'm using the wet on dry method to get the Christmas tree. We're just going to do small strokes in the shape of the leaves. It's better to use a smaller size brush, ideally a Size 2 or even a Size four. Size one would also be fine. What we will be doing is we will skip the areas of the window, just that center bar. The other bars on top of it are fine because that would be with a darker color. Since that is going to be a darker color, we can always paint on top of it. That's fine. But leave the center bar area. The rest of the areas just make small leaves in the shape of the tree that we had made the rough sketch of. Just quickly you can add different versions of green to your tree because that would make it look more interesting. This is the primary reason why I'm trying to mix a green by using my yellow and green. When I mix yellow, it would be lighter and when I don't mix yellow, it would be a darker green. If you want to get a slightly lighter green then what you already have, just mix a bit of yellow into it. This is why I said this video is slightly longer than half an hour, but not much. I have sped up the video here at this point just by 1.5 times because the process is just similar. On top of the sap green, we're adding a darker green, so some darker leaves on the tree that would make the tree look more interesting with the different color contrast between all the greens. That is why I said, now make a dark green. But if you don't have dark green and your green is very light, you can mix a bit of indigo to it and you'll get a darker green. I've already applied the green that I have. Now I want to add an even more darker shade of green. I've mixed it with indigo and I'm adding it randomly onto my tree again. You can see it's totally random at certain places. This makes it look more real with the different color tones on my tree. It's just totally random so you don't have to worry about anything. Just remember to leave that space in the middle for the window bar. That's the only thing. Then after painting the tree, we will paint the inside of that window. That would be some corner of the house visible, the wall of the house. It needn't be much detailed. This is why we're going to use the wet on wet method to apply water to that area first. But remember not to touch the tree area because your paint might be wet and it might flow. Just skipping the areas of the tree, apply the water. Then you can apply Indian yellow and mix a bit of burnt umber to it so that you get some what's like a lighter brown shade. It can't be said as lighter brown shade. It's like a yellowish brown shade. This is the color of the wall probably of the house. That's what we're adding. Using this yellow brown shade, apply water first and then add this yellow brown shade onto the wall. You can see I've just applied in the corners and the areas next to the tree is almost as white. It needn't be that detailed and we need not go to the areas near the tree. That's completely all right. You can see I'm not touching the tree part, but just blending my yellowish brown to the inside of that window. That's it. Remember to not make any dark edge with the color. Just blend it using water. Then once everything has dried. My window has now completely dried. We need it to be dry because we're going to paint right next to it. Here I've mixed yellow and brown together, this time more brown. That is why the color is different. This is like a brownish, yellow now. It's just a tiny bit of yellow into the burnt umber. We will be working with different browns here. I'm only using burnt umber and yellow, and I will be making different browns. This one is a tiny bit of yellow into the brown. We will paint that gap between the windows. This is like the outside part of the window. You can see there's a gap in that area where I've left. That gap over there, we'll paint it with a different brown. Just follow me along in this process. Don't worry. Towards the right side, I'm applying a medium tone of burnt umber right now. Use a medium tone of the brown. It's not a darker tone, just a medium tone of brown. But you can see clearly that this brown is different from the other area where I applied the brown mixed with a tiny bit of Indian yellow. Then now we can slightly make our brown, a bit more darker. This darker brown is what will go into the center of the window seal. Just be careful that we paint the window so very carefully because these are like structure of a window, so it has to get the shade correctly. Just follow along the pencil sketch. If you've made this pencil sketch very nicely with the ruler, then it's not going to be difficult. It's just getting nice brush control. I'm sure that this part of the painting process will also help you in getting that brush control in following a pencil sketch over a line, like in a straight line. This would be a really helpful exercise for that. Then we will use the same medium tone as in slightly darker medium tone of the burnt umber or the brown, and we will apply it to the gap where I left at first. This window is shaped in such a way that the person is looking at it from the right side. The wall part of the window, we see it only on the left side. That is why there are more lines on the window on the left than on the right. That means the person is standing slightly towards the right and looking at the window. That's why we see more lines on the left. The same burnt umber, we will also apply to the top area as well. When you apply that burnt umber to the top area, that part of the window is complete. You can see that forms a whole section that rectangle with the bar in the middle. So that's the window complete for that part. Then there's going to be some slight part visible at the bottom. Just follow me along here. The rest of it is going to be covered in snow. Just paint a very tiny bit of that burnt umber at the bottom. That's it. At the top part of our window, we will start applying brown again. Let us just start applying our burnt umber or brown. The only thing left to paint on the window is now the top part and on the left, and also a slight line on the right. Here I want a darker mix of burnt umber. I'm mixing Payne's gray with my burnt umber. A little bit of Payne's gray. You can also mix a little bit of black. This would give a darker tone of the brown. Darker tone isn't like a sepia. If you have sepia, you can also use sepia. I do have sepia, but I wanted to limit the number of colors I'm using for these paintings, which is why I did not use so many colors. I also thought that this would be a very nice color-mixing exercise for you all, that is you don't want to work on a limited number of colors. Mix Indian yellow and burnt umber together, you'll get that brownish-yellow color again, and then add a bit of red to it as well. Now it becomes like a burnt sienna color, and I'm switching to my medium-sized brush or my larger size brush. Now we're going to paint the wall on the right side. You can see the color that I've made. It's like a burnt sienna. If you have burnt sienna, you can use that as well. But I wanted to mix a burnt sienna color. What I did was mixing Indian yellow, brown, and red together to get that darker shade and this is what we will apply to the wall area on the right. Remember to leave the gap at the bottom for the snow. It's like the snow has settled at the bottom part of the house. As I said, burnt umber, red and yellow together for getting the nice brown shade, and we will apply the same color to the left side as well, so the left wall of the house the same color. You can see here, I have left the gap on the right side of the window as a slight gap is white because we need to add a different brown there that is also part of the window. But for this one on the left side, we have already painted all the parts of the window. Just follow along the line of the pencil sketch all the way to the window. Trust me, had a real difficult time painting this window following along the pencil sketch because to get a structure like this because usually when I'm painting something like this, I have my head bent over close to the painting and looking at it. It was really difficult for me with the camera on the top and I had to sit without my head coming onto the paper. Just to get a nice touch to that wall, just add a bit of burnt umber on the top as well onto the wet paper. Now, we need to mix that darker brown shade. You can also use sepia. But if you don't have sepia, you can mix this by mixing burnt umber and being scraped. Or I'm mixing a bit of black into burnt umber, you'll get a very darker shade of brown. You can also use Van **** brown and brown is a really nice dark brown. Again, very carefully, we will apply to that part of the window, so follow along the pencil sketch. We first already painted this with a lighter brown which is going to add a darker brown on the top of it now. A medium-sized brush or a smaller size brush would be ideal to paint along the line in such a short area, so also that small gap that we left between the ball and the right side of the window, that one also we will paint with this darker shade of brown. You can see now our window is already coming into shape, isn't it? But it's still missing the window bars, so that's what we need to add. These window bars, we will be adding it with the same darker tone, so this is what I said when we were painting the tree that okay to paint over the pencil sketch of the window bars because obviously, we're using a darker tone. Use this darker tone of burnt umber and Payne's gray mixed together. It will be almost similar to black, but not black because it's got brown in it. Using that made the window bars, so the lines on the windows, so don't worry that you need to have the exact same number of windows bars as I do, no, it's totally up to you, and it's alright, but just make sure to make it evenly spaced. Then, the lines in the middle as well, for both the sides of a window. Again, this part was really difficult for me to paint without having my head leaning on top of the paper. But I think it's a really good exercise that when we're trying to paint it at different angles, we get more brush control in our hands. Next, we're going to paint that bottom part where we see a slight part of the wall below the window. For that, I made a transparent brown color. This is, I'm mixing red and brown together so you get a nice reddish brown shade, and using that, what we will paint is the bottom part of that window. Next, we need to mix that darker shade of brown again to paint that tree branch in front of the window. I'm mixing a dark brown shade again. As I said, you can either use sepia, Van **** brown, or mix burnt umber and black together or burnt umber and Payne's gray together and only very slight part of the tree is going to be visible and few branches. Use a medium-size brush or a smaller sized brush and we will add few branches here in front of that window. You know how tree branches are, they're supposed to be thin towards the outside. When you go nearer to the main trunk, they get thicker. So this is why. Just make sure that all your thicker branches or the thicker side of that branch is towards the center part of the tree, that is the trunk, and as you go outside of that center branch, it should be thinner. But they're needed to be straight lines, you know how tree branches are just random. Add some small branches here and there. That's it. I'm going to add another branch to the left as well. You can add many branches as well here and there and adding that branch on the left. This is from the top to the bottom. This seems like one of the branches at the top part of the tree is hanging towards the bottom side, so that's why we see it on top of the window, hanging in the front of the window. You can add mini branches here and there. Once you have done that, that would be all for the tree. Next, we will paint the bottom part. At the bottom part, there's going to be just small, tiny parts that are visible through the snow. At the left part, add a little shape with brown again. It's just something that's visible through the snow, something that's there in the front of the house. We don't know what it is, it's just unclear. Then mix a darker shade of green by mixing green and indigo. We need the green to be a really dark shade. Then just make some small leaves shapes in the snow at random places. This is some bushes and shrubs that is there in front of the house, but it's covered in snow, and only the top part of those bushes and shrubs are seen through the snow. That's why we just painted the green at random places. Then again, on the right, there is something that is visible through the snow. We'll just add a shape with burnt umber, some random shape. It could be probably, the fence of the house. We don't know what it is, it's just random. Once we have added that, we need to paint the snow. I know the snow is white, but we need to add the shadows. Apply water to the snow area. Just remember to not touch the leaves, otherwise, your green will blend into the whole snow area. We don't want that. Just apply water to all of the snowy places. We just need to add the shadow. For the shadow, we are going to be adding a lighter tone of Payne's gray. Just apply Payne's gray at random places. This is just the snow that has settled in front of the house all the way up to the window. It looks like it has snowed for many days or many hours, and it's got three feet of snow, which is why all those things in front of the house are covered. Just using a very lighter tone of Payne's gray, apply it random places and also to that area of snow right in front of the window. When you use wet on wet for snow, it makes it look real, and some places are left white, and those Payne's gray areas are the darker shadows. Now we need to blend that burnt umber portion that we painted at the bottom to the snow. Just use water and just try to blend that into the snow areas. You can also use a bit of the lighter tone of Payne's gray and add it so that you don't form any dark edge there. You can see how that it is. It's not very clear there. The burnt umber and the Payne's gray has just mixed on to that snowy area. It's just going to be very blurred part. We will also do the same with the bottom part of the tree. Because it need to look as if it's blended into the snow that is coming out of the snow. Add brown or Payne's gray to that area where the tree is emerging. Then, finally, we need to paint the snow in the other areas. Here again, I'm going to use my white gouache or white watercolor; whichever you have, you can use it. Now we'll add the snow that's settled on top of the trees. Just the same way as we have painted in the other projects, if you have been following along, just add the snow onto the tree, on the top of the branches, of course, because that's where the snow is likely to settle on. Not on all the areas, but just at random places on to the tree. So on horizontal surfaces where the snow has a place to settle on. The next thing is those window bars. Each of those bars will have snow silt. Make it like a slightly small triangular shape to the left side. The left side of each of the window bars will have slightly more snow, and the horizontal surface will have lesser. You can see how I'm painting a bit more on the left side towards that center bar, and then lesser towards the right. Each of those snow part, as I said, more on the left side of it and then a bit flatly onto the right side. We will do the same for all of the window bars. Remember to use a thicker consistency of the white paint; otherwise, it will blend with the underlying colors and we may not get it as white. I really love adding this new part. That's my favorite part in a painting. It is just really a fun process, isn't it? Of course, my another favorite part is adding the snow falling of course, that is adding the splatters in a painting. We will do just that here. But first, let us add the snow properly in other places. Here comes the splatters. So the snow is still falling guys so that's why we need to add the splatters. Use your brush and then using your one finger or you can use two brushes. I use one finger for adding the snow. This is because when you use one finger and tap onto the paper, you get the white splatters in different sizes. If you use two brushes, all of those platters will be tiny and very small. But here it's snow, so I want them to be in different sizes, that's why. Once you've added the snow, our painting is complete. Let us remove the tape to see our final painting. I really love each of these Christmas paintings. I hope you do as well and thank you for joining me today. 10. Day 08 - 17 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 8, it's just 17 days to Christmas. Today we will be painting this gorgeous painting. The colors we will need are Indian yellow, Payne's gray, burnt umber, viridian green, transplant red, indigo, cobalt blue, and a dark green, and also white watercolors or gouache. Let us start with our pencil sketch. This is like a snow globe ornament. It's not going to be a globe, but rather in a different shape. I've seen everyone paint the globe all around, and I wanted to have the shape of this one slightly different. That is why first, draw the base. For the base part is just going to be like an elliptical shape. We will have the top part by having a curve and then two lines, parallel lines joining the bottom base part. That's how the pencil sketch would be. Is just going to be very simple and basic, don't worry. Inside that globe, we will have a tree, a Christmas tree, and a small house. Just make the outline of a small, tiny little house. Maybe it's a house or a barn standing out in the snow. Then some trees at the back as well. The pencil sketch is ready basic and simple. Towards the front of this ornament, just to make it interesting, let's add some leaves. It's maybe some part of a Christmas tree. Then now we will paint the background. Here the background, we're going to be painting using the wet-on-wet method. Let us apply water. We're going to wet the whole part of our paper, but just not that ornament. It's a snow globe. Let us call it snow globe. Apply water all around the snow globe. I'm using a larger size brush to cover a larger area. You can also use a flat brush, but just make sure that you follow along the lines of the pencil sketch of the snow globe. This is for painting the background, of course. Very carefully along the lines. Then we will start applying the paint. First we will start with Payne's gray. This is just totally random. I'm just adding a very vague background, something, whatever came into my mind. Just apply the Payne's gray all over at certain places. You can see I applied a bit on the right side, then I'm applying on the left side as well. Just here and there. Now we will fill the rest of it with other colors as well. The Payne's gray applied nicely. It's all right even if you apply a darker tone because this is wet-on-wet, it will get lighter after it dries. Always remember that. The next color is burnt umber that I'm adding. Add any darker brown. Just remember this. Whenever you apply a darker tone onto a wet paper, it will get lighter after it dries. You have to keep that in mind when painting the wet-on-wet technique. Add the burnt umber. Just remember that towards the bottom side we need it to be burnt umber itself because let's have the base with the burnt umber. It seems like it's resting on some surface, burnt umber surface. I wanted it to be a little bit of different brown. I added a little bit of Indian yellow to my brown. I got a brownish yellow shade. This is what I will be adding to the base area. Then towards the extreme bottom part, we will add burnt umber. It's just a total mix of all these colors. You can see I just added the brownish yellow onto my paper. Then I'm also adding burnt umber. It's just trying to get a blend of these colors on the paper. Then we will take Indian yellow, and fill in the other areas where we have left a tiny bit of white on the top. You can see that the Payne's gray that we applied is already gone very lighter. This is why I'm re-adding the Payne's gray on the top of it. Remember my paper is still wet, which is why I'm adding. If your paper has dried, don't apply the shade. Wait for it to completely dry, and then you can reapply water and then add shade on top of it if you want it to be darker. Otherwise, don't work on it if it has dried. Then switching to my medium-size brush, I'm going to add some water blooms. You might have understood by now that I really love these textures and techniques for depicting different backgrounds. I'm just dropping water onto my painting. This created blooms on my paper. You can see after it has dried, it's created these nice little blooms. Once after everything has dried, now we will paint the rest of the painting. I've taken my size 2 brush. It's a very smaller brush because we're going to paint that [inaudible] tree inside that snow globe. Let us take viridian green. You can also use emeralds green. This is a green that's available in almost all of the pallets out there. But if you don't have this green don't worry, you can use any green that you have. The Christmas tree necessarily doesn't have to be in emerald green or viridian green itself. Add that pine tree in front of that house with the emerald green or the viridian green. You can see I've applied smaller strokes and smaller leaves and I've left a lot of white gaps in-between. This would contribute to the snow on the pine tree. Just quick, smaller shapes of leaves of the pine tree, that's it. Pine leaves simple. Also remember the tree at the back of the house. Don't paint all the way to the bottom because we need to add that house later on. Adding that pine tree, then let us paint the house. I'm taking transparent red. You can also use scarlet, vermilion, or any red. It doesn't really matter. This is just the house or the barn, and it's just in a red shade. That's it. Add the red to the areas of the house. You can see I've left that tiny space for the door of the house. Here on this side, we will also leave a tiny space for the windows. You can see that towards the base of that barn house, I have not added a flat line, but rather some quick random shades because it's snow in that area, and it's not going to be in an exact flatline. That's what we have to remember. Then next using Payne's gray, let's add some shadow to the snow on top of the house, so I've added using Payne's gray and then I'm just going to blend it with water, so you can see just really totally randomly. Just blended it onto that white area. Now that whole thing looks as if it's real, doesn't it? The next color is burnt umber, and we'll mix a bit of Payne's gray to it to create a darker shade of brown, you can also use sepia. Using these, we will paint the door and the windows, so just remember, don't paint the whole thing, leave certain white gaps, so this will contribute to the snow. Now, let us paint the rest of the snowy areas in front of the house. First, wet that whole area at the bottom part of the inside of the snow globe. For adding the shadows on the snow, always use the wet-on-wet technique, then add cobalt blue. Very lighter tone of cobalt blue, and just apply random places, and observe here, I'm using a smaller size brush. If you want to add a bit of darker shadows, add indigo on top of it, so you can see I've added a darker shadow to the areas at the bottom, so this is like the closer end of the snow globe. I'm also just going to blend the snow on top of the house again. Now, let us paint the inside part of the snow globe. The snow globe inside part, it's empty, but then we can leave it white because this is standing on a surface in which there is a background of yellow, brown, and the Payne's gray that we applied, so all of these are going to be reflected inside it, that is, the background has to be seen through it, so that is why I'm applying water because we need to work on the wet-on-wet technique. We'll start with the Indian yellow and do the wet paper we'll apply Indian yellow at random places. Remember, this is the reflection of the background, so the reflection, or you can say it, what is seen through that snow globe, so that snow globe is transparent, that is, if you've seen a snow globe, the outside of the snow globe is a transparent material, but if you place it on a surface, you can see what's behind it, so that is why we're adding the Payne's gray and yellow to it. You can skip the burnt umber, but if you want, you can also add burnt umber to it, and just blend all of it together, and observe here I've used a lighter tone of the Payne's gray and the Indian yellow, so it's not going to be as dark as the background. Now let us paint the base, and for painting the base, I'm going to work on the wet-on-wet technique again, and I'm starting with Indian yellow. Again, the base, some parts, we'll have that yellow reflected, so that is why I first applied Indian yellow. I always keep telling this in watercolor paintings it's all about light, shadow, reflection, colors, so you can see that on the top of our painting directly about that yellow color, so it can be from some light source there, some shiny lights on the top, that's why there's that yellow. That yellow light needs to be reflected on our other subjects as well, so that is why I added yellow and then painted the rest with burnt umber. Next, to paint the base of that snow globe, we will make strands but in red and brown together, so it's transparent red and burnt umber together we'll get a nice permanent brown shade. Add a little bit of Indian yellow or any yellow that you're using to it as well, and we'll get a nice burnt sienna shade, or you can also use burnt sienna directly if you want, and this mix is what we will add onto our bottom bass part of the snow globe. I really love mixing my paints because it gives an interesting shape to that color because all of these colors would somehow separate out after it dries and it looks really beautiful, so that is why you can use a different color mix, or you can use direct pain such as burnt sienna. You can see on top of the mix of the brown that I created, I'm adding a darker shadow with burnt umber, so here I'm adding darker brown on top of it towards the right side, then I'm mixing a dark brown by mixing burnt umber and Payne's gray together, and this is what we will use to paint the shadow. Here the shadow is going to be towards the right side, so the bottom-right side, and using this darker shade, we will make a curved, somewhat circular shape for the shadow of this snow globe. Remember, it is the mix of burnt umber and Payne's gray, you can also use [inaudible] Appiah or Van **** brown. Then once you have added the shadows, you can see the edge of the shadow is really sharp, so we're going to soften it by using water. Dip your brush in water, and then just soften that edge by softening technique, so it's just using water, you will see that the edge gets softened, so that's what we're doing. Now we need to paint the rest of the snow globe, so the edge of the snow globe to give that transparency of the glass, so we need to add some lines, and this I'm adding with Payne's gray. This is not the outer line but the inner line of the snow globe, so you might not have made this with the pencil, but just follow along the first outer line and leave a tiny space and make this inner line along the snow globe. Then we will also mark the outer line, so here remember to use a very nice little small brush, so we need the tip to be pointed and the line needs to be thinner, so make sure to use a size one or a size zero brush for this, or if you don't have try to make the thinnest of the lines possible with the smallest of the brushes that you have. Follow along the line of the pencil sketch. Now you can already see that the snow globe appears to be having a transparent surface and like a glass, so that is what we were trying to achieve. Then we will take Payne's gray again and we're going to add a curved line towards the inside. This curved line would again act as a reflection and would give the appearance of that transparent snow globe. Now let us mix that darker brown shade again by mixing burnt umber and Payne's gray, and add some lines to the base of that snow globe. The base, as of now, it looks really flat. We want to make it interesting. Have some texture. It looks like it's a wooden base. Just add some texture depicting wood. Just few random lines onto it. Then another thing is, the snow globe needs to have a shadow on the top as well. Just right below the transparent part just add it with this darker brown shade, and then soften the edges. The same way as we did with the other shadow, we'll do the same. You can see now, this looks more interesting and real. Next, let us take more viridian. Now take a darker tone of viridian and I want to apply a bit of darker tone on top of my trees. I always love to add different colors to my trees. Apply at random places, this darker green. Next, we need to add some snow inside the snow globe, but this snow is going to be a bit different than the background. That is why I've covered the rest of the background with tissue and whatever paper I could find, and we're going to add tiny splatters into it. You can see, I've added tiny splatters. For adding the tiny splatters, you can see I'm using two brushes. If you use splatters and make them with one hand, the splatters would be larger in size. For tiny splatters use two brushes. Now we have got the nice splatters inside and let us add the things in the front. I cover this snow globe because I wanted those splatters to look as if they are inside the snow globe. We will be adding snow and splatters later onto the background, but they will be different. But for now, let us add some things into the front part of our painting. I'm just going to add some pine leaves. These are just simple shapes. Make them with sap green, hookers green or with whatever green you have, just add them onto the front part. It appears there's some Christmas tree or Christmas branches lying there right next to it on the surface that this snow globe is resting on. We needn't it to be detailed. Just very rough sketch. Use different kinds of green and just add these lines. I'm only adding these to make it interesting because just the snow globe in this painting looks odd with nothing in front of it. If you add the branches to it, we might make it more interesting. That is why I'm adding. First I added with sap green, and then the next color we will add is with a darker green. You can see now how it looks. It looks interesting. Let us add another one to the bottom as well. For adding these leaves, use a smaller size brush and just some lines in the shape of a leaf, you can see that. It's similar to how you would draw a palm tree. Every time you use a lighter shade of green, don't forget to use a darker shade on top of it. Next, with permanent red or scarlet, let's add some small Christmas fruits. That is the fruits of the holy. Just make these small berry shapes with your brush. You can see, I've just made small circles and we will add it to both the sides. Any number that you want. I added three on the left, and I'm going to add four towards the right. Let us join them together with a branch. I'm going to use burnt umber for that. My berries are still wet. When I'm adding the burnt umber on top of it, they will blend a little with that transparent red and they would create the shadow that I always add with a darker brown. You needn't add any shadow here. Then, using sap green again, just make some random leaf shapes at the bottom part of the berries and let's add some interesting texture here. I'm going to make some splatters with sap green. Take sap green with your brush. I'm using a larger size brush and I'm going to add some splatters. You can see towards the bottom and I've covered up my snow globe because we don't want any splatters on the top. Add some splatters with sap green and I've also added some with burnt umber. Then this is something interesting I found out recently. After adding splatters, blend them with a brush, just at random places and also use some shade that you used for the splatters. Here we used burnt umber. Just blend them and only at certain places. It looks the splatters are there but mixed and also some places are blank. This gives a very nice, interesting texture to our painting. This is something I recently used in one of my paintings and I really loved it. Then on to the top, add some splatters again. Here because the paper is wet, it would create a very beautiful mix of wet on wet and wet on dry splatters. Then once everything is dried, we will add the background snow splatters. Here we don't want splatters inside our snow globe because these splatters are going to be large because I'm using a larger size brush to get splatters. Using your white gouache or white watercolors, splatter paint all around. Then we will also add some interesting splatters here. I'm going to splatter with Indian yellow. With whatever yellow that you've been using, add some splatters. This makes this painting more interesting because those yellow splatters might be tiny bits of lights in the background. That's what makes it more interesting. Then, once you're done with the splatters, remove the covering on your snow globe and your painting is done. You just have to remove the tape to see the final beautiful painting. I hope you like this painting as well as the new technique that I shared with you. Here's the final painting, and thank you for joining me. 11. Day 09 - 16 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 9. It's just 16 days to Christmas. It's getting exciting. Today we will be painting this lantern in the snow. The colors we will need are Indian yellow, Indian gold, permanent red, Payne's gray, cobalt blue, burnt umber, and green. Let us first start with our pencil sketch. We will sketch the lantern in the snow. Don't worry, I will upload this image into the resources section. You can download the image in a PC or browser from Skillshare and use that as a reference to make the lantern. It's just going to be a simple picture and very easy to sketch the lantern using a ruler. The left side would be slightly slanted because of the direction in which it is laying on the snow. Then on the top of the lantern, we will add few Christmassy things. That is a few mistletoe or holly leaves and few pine cones. Just to make it interesting and give it the Christmas feels and wipes. Even by adding just a small part of these Christmas things, we can make one painting totally into the Christmas mood. That's what this is all about. It's just a lantern and standing out in the snow. But then adding these little things to the side of it makes it completely into a Christmas painting. Once you have done with the lantern, that would be all for the pencil sketch. just the top part of the lantern and then a small hook on the top. I'm adding the hook in the shape of a question mark. Then we can have some things inside the lantern, as in the lines on the lantern. To get it correctly, we need to add diamond shape in the center. What I did to make that a is to draw a grid line in the center, that is across in the center so that you can get the measurements right. We'll do the same for the left side as well. But note this, the left side, it is going to be thinner because of the perspective that is the angle at which that lantern is lying on the snow. That is all for the pencil sketch. Then we will use a flat brush to apply water on the whole area on top of the snow part. The bottom part is going to be the snow, and the top part is going to be the lantern and its lights. Use a medium-size brush and we will start with Indian yellow. We will start by applying in the center, but remember to leave that slight gap of white there. This is going to be the light inside the lantern. Right in the middle of the lantern, leave that whitespace, then start with Indian yellow all around. Then we will also add some bokeh effect to this painting. You might have understood by now that I really love the bokeh effect in paintings. It just adds, beauty to our paintings, and this one has lantern in it, and it will just make it really beautiful. For that, use your brush to make these small circles and lead that whitespace in the center. Next, we will take Indian gold and we will apply it to the side of the yellow, that is towards the outside of the lantern. Don't worry if you don't have this Indian gold color, you can always mix this Indian gold color. To get this beautiful Indian gold color, all you have to do is try and mix a bit of brown and orange, and the yellow together and you'll get this nice golden shade. The brown and yellow would make a lighter brown, yellowish-brown shade. Adding orange to it will slightly turn it into golden. that's how you can mix Indian gold shade if you don't have it. Using this Indian gold, we will cover up the rest of the bokeh. Because our paper is wet, we have completely lost the white in the center. But don't worry, we can add it later on. Using the Indian gold or the Indian gold mix that you did with your brown, yellow, and orange, keep applying onto the sides of the yellow. Just make sure to leave that gap of white. Don't cover it up. Then let us take some permanent red and mix it with a bit of yellow so that we get a light reddish-orange color. This is what we will paint towards the outside of our painting. All around the bokeh and the outside areas of the lantern, so the other areas where the lantern is not there, so it needs to have some darker tones. That's what we're adding with this red. You can observe how my strokes are. I'm covering the whole of the bokeh as well with this red shade. Leaving that round yellowish color in the middle. Keep doing that, and the rest of the places, we will cover it up with this reddish-orange color. Remember my paper is still wet and we're working on the wet on wet technique. You can add more color to the top of our existing paint to get a darker shade. But remember to do this only if your paper is still wet. The key thing to get this wet on wet technique going on is to keep working on that paper. If there are some areas that are starting to dry, you can paint over it. But make sure that you're not adding any more water onto your paper. Here you can observe, I'm only picking up paint, I'm not mixing it with a lot of water. I have added a little bit of burnt umber onto the top area as well to get that darkness. The colors we have used for the background here are Indian yellow, Indian gold, permanent red, and burnt umber. The yellow colors towards the bottom, near the lantern and further away from the lantern, would be the darker shades, which are permanent red and burnt umber. The yellow part is because that's how the lantern is glowing. The yellow shows the glowing parts of the lantern, that is the light from the lantern. As you go further away from it, you have the darker tones. Then we have to wait for the whole background to dry. Once it has completely dried, we will paint the snow. We have to wait for it to dry because otherwise when you apply water onto the snow part, your yellow or red shade that you applied right next to that line would bleed into the water. In order to avoid that, we have to wait for the background to dry. Then we will take some Indian gold or the mix of Indian gold that you have made, and we will add it to the bottom. On the snow, it's the reflection of the light on the lantern. But remember to leave that gap of white to show the middle glow and the rest of the areas will cover up with cobalt blue first, and the darker tones on the shadow with Payne's gray. On the snow, first, blue, that is cobalt blue, or any other blue that you're using. Then Payne's gray for the darker shadows. Apply Payne's gray at the bottom areas. Now, once you have done that, we can paint the Christmas things. Starting with permanent red, you can also use transparent red, vermilion or scarlett. We will paint those little berries on the lantern. These are actually the berries on the holly plant, so we might have seen Christmas holly plant. Those berries just make them using a very small brush because they are very small. Using red, just cover it up. Next, we're going to mix a lighter brown shade. I'm going to use burnt umber and a little bit of Indian gold plus yellow to make this lighter brown shade. This will be the base layer for the pine cones. The simple shape that you made for the pine cones, add the whole of it with this lighter brown shade. If you already have a lighter brown shade, such as raw siena, then you can directly use that. I'm using these three colors to make this lighter shade, as you can see. Then next, we will use sap green. My dark green is very dark. I'm mixing a bit of Indian yellow to it to create sap green. Using the sap green, I'm going to make the leaves of the holly plant. If you've seen the Christmas leaves, that is these holly leaves, then you'll know the shape of it. Otherwise, you can follow exactly as I'm doing here. You can see closely in this angle. It's got this weird shape. It's like a thorn kind of shape. It's quite easy once you get it. Using a small brush, try to make these small holly leaves onto that area. Few of them, and cover the whole of it with the sap green. You can use any of the green that you have. You necessarily don't need to use sap green. You can also use hookers green or any other green. If it is too difficult, you can also add other leaves. Then any gap or space between those berries of the holly, you can cover it up with green as well. Remember to use the smallest size brush. Then we will also add some few small leaves of pine tree kind. If you've been following along in all the other exercises, then you will know how these are done. Just simple strokes towards the outside, similar to those leaves of the pine tree. We will add it all around this so that it resembles the Christmas pine cone bunch. Just using a very small brush, and then you can also add details onto your holly leaves if you want with that tiny brush and a darker shade of green, so I've just added a line in the center. All the other places in between those berries, you can fill it up with the green. Then next thing is using a darker shade of brown that is burnt umber [inaudible] brown or sepia or whatever darker brown. Use that to add few dots on to the pine cone. This is what will make the pine cone look real. Ideally, it should not be done like this pine cones. It's got a very nice shape. But to do it quickly, and also because this bunch is really small, this would be enough adding few dots randomly. Then we will take this burnt umber again, and we will paint the lantern itself. The whole of that outer covering of the lantern, we will paint with burnt umber. Use a small brush because this is again, we have to make sure that we follow along the lines. Using the smallest brush that you own, just along the lines of your pencil sketch inside the whole of that lantern. So no, actually not the whole of the lantern. Just follow me along the whole left side. Yes. But towards the center, we need to show the light. The light acting on that lantern would be having a glow on that lantern itself, and we will add that with a different color. For now follow me along in this. This is burnt umber. Use any darker brown that you have, it doesn't matter. You can see this process is very simple. It would be a straight line at the top, but the bottom side of it would not be a straight line. This is because it's lying there in the snow, so we need to have that surface of the snow , so little angled. This is what I was talking about, about the light of the lantern being reflected on the outside cage of it. The center diamond shape, we will add it with Indian gold. Remember, you just have to mix this Indian gold. You can use burnt umber, yellow, and red or any orange to mix this Indian gold shade. To the outside of it, we will add burnt umber. Once you have added this burnt umber, just blend it to the Indian gold sheet. For blending it, just use a damp brush and swipe it across, so the two colors will mix together. It will seem like the light is shining in the center and it's being reflected in that cage part of the lantern. You can see how I've blended it. Then let us add a candle shape inside the lantern. This is what is actually there glowing inside the lantern, a small candle. We add that with Indian yellow. We can also add some yellow to the outside of that white region, but then you need to blend it so that it doesn't form a dark edge. Once we have added that candle, you can see I'm adding a bit of yellow to the outside of that white. But just make sure that you retain that white. For now the lantern itself is ready, but we need to add some more darker tones to the inside of it to give contrast to that light and to give it a nice effect, apply some mortar to the yellow areas inside the lantern and then just apply Indian gold on top of it. You will just see what's happening when you do this. We will also do it to the right side. That is; in the four boxes. Not exactly a box, but in those four corners apply water. We're applying water so that it will blend evenly. Then to the corners of it, apply Indian gold. You can see what's happening. I'm only applying Indian gold to the corner and then blending it towards the middle. When we do this to all the four corners, you will see that the white of that light in the center will glow a bit more because of the contrasting darker tone on the outside of it. That's why we need to make it a bit more darker so that there's a large contrast between the center region and the outside region. This is how we can make light to show in a painting. That is by adding contrast between the light and its darkest part. I'm adding Indian gold here and blending it towards the inside, towards the center. So that diamond shape in the middle is actually helping us to blend that towards that area. There, now it looks good. Let us now paint the top part, the head of the lantern. We're going to paint it with burnt umber. We'll just cover up the whole area with burnt umber. But if you can leave some gap on the right side for the snow, it would be easy for us later on when we're adding the snow. Because we were working on the wet on wet technique, the permanent red that we applied in that area did flow on to that lantern head. But if you leave that and not paint burnt umber all over it, it would be easier later on when you add white because it's easier to add white on top of a lighter red than on dark burnt umber. The hook and the question mark kind of hook on the top all with burnt umber. You can see that gap that I've left on the right side of the head of the lantern. This is where we will add lantern later on. Now we will add the snow. We're going to add it with white gouache or white watercolors. As I always say, it doesn't matter which one you're using. You can use either white gouache, white watercolors. It doesn't really matter at all. Now on the right side, we will paint with white. This is what I said, that leaving it without bending is much more helpful for applying that paint because it's easier to apply the white onto a lighter red shade than onto a darker brown shade. It's a lighter red shade because we used wet on wet technique and it went lighter after it dried. But if we had applied a darker burnt umber, you would have to apply the white paint multiple times to get it to a darker white sheet, darker, as in when you apply on top of the burnt umber, it would just mix with the brown and create a lighter brown shade and it would fade. To get that white of the snow, you would have to apply multiple times. This way, we're just saving our time. We'll add the snow onto all the places where it can settle. That is the top part of the question mark, some on top of that hook, and then of course, on the edges of the lantern. Wherever places the snow can sit alone, that's where we will add. On all the horizontal surfaces of the lantern, we will add the snow. Use a very small size brush for this and it will be quite easy. Snow has a tendency to stick to whatever horizontal surface and if there's a vertical surface next to it, it forms a small triangle next to it. That is what we can see in both the sides, what I have done. Then let us make that light in the center more white so that it appears as if it is glowing. But if you applied white, we need to soften the edges. Use a damp brush and soften the edges that is blended into the background so that the white does not stick out, and the same we need to add to the bouquet. We add the white in the center. But if you remember the first bouquet we did, we need to soften the edges so that they blend into the yellow. When you soften the edges, it does not have a dark edge or a harsh edge and it looks as though it's been there all the time. There, now our bouquet effect looks real. You can add more bouquet effect if you want. Then we will also add some more snow to the top of the lantern and we also need to add it to the small holly plant and the pine cones. Just apply some dots here and there and also try to paint a half of the holly leaf with the white. This is just the snow that had settled on the holly leaf. On the top, just randomly at certain places, add those white. Then once you have done this, I will show you another technique where we can add some splatters. We're going to use this toothbrush. It's an old toothbrush. Don't throw away your old toothbrush. You can use them in paintings. Just dip your toothbrush in wet paint and then using your finger splatter onto the paper. This will also give some concentrated splatters and it really helps because it gives tiny splatters. That's what we will add to that Christmas part of the lantern. Then of course, the whole painting, we'll just add snow. Here I will use two brushes. First, I'm adding snow with a smaller brush and creating the splatters. This creates smaller splatters. Then, switching to a medium-size brush, I will add most splatters. My splatters now would be larger because I've switched to a larger size brush. These are little things that we can learn. That is, the size of the splatters vary with the size of the brush. Then once you have added the splatters, that is, oh, this was a very quick one and easy one. Let us remove the masking tape. I hope you all really enjoyed this one. You can see my hands, it's all covered in splatters. Thank you all for joining me. 12. Day 10 - 15 Days to Christmas: Welcome to day 10. It's just 15 days to Christmas and today we will be painting this Christmas cake. So what is Christmas without a cake. The colors we need are Indian yellow, burnt umber, transparent red, Payne's gray, green, and an orange. So let us start with the pencil sketch, so I'm going to make a circle first on my paper for the cake. Use whatever you have, so I just used my masking tape as you can see. Then along the edges of that circle, we need to make it curved because this is how the shape of the cake is going to be and we need to duplicate that in the inside as well. Just follow along, so this painting is going to be a bit longer than 30 minutes. As you can see, the speed of the video is 1.5, which is why it's a bit faster. But you can always slow it down and also pause and draw with me. The next thing is let us add some few biscuits or cookies on top of the cake. So for adding the cookies, I'm making these lines first because they will act as the reference lines for me to draw the cookie so you can see how I'm drawing the cookie. Shouldn't have any sharp lines, but rather curved and smooth edges. That is why we add the reference lines first so that you can draw the shapes without having any sharp edges or you can make it totally curved. So add a few star-shaped cookies in there. If the star shape is difficult for you, you can add any other shape. You know it's just a cookie and you can make the cookies in any shape. That's going to be really easy. Then remove the lines inside, of course. For a few of the cookies add a cream on top, so that means another layer of line inside following along the outer sketch so this will be for the cream on the top. Then we can add some few other things on top of the cake, such as maybe slice of orange, few berries, and maybe few Christmas leaves. Anything that is totally Christmassy, so that's what we'll add on top of our cake. You can see some few leaves, some berries. Once you have done that, we will add few other elements onto our paper. Because if you look right now, the paper looks blank in the other places. Add a few Christmas things in there, like a few berries, maybe few Christmas pine leaves, and another plate of cookies in the corner. Here are the cookies are just going to be simple round shape because I didn't want to add much of tough things into this painting anymore. Then maybe a few Christmas leaves here and there, that would be all for the pencil sketch. First we will start with painting the background. All the outer area of the cake, and also not the area of the biscuit so the whole background. For painting the background we will be working on wet technique. Apply water onto the whole area. Here, even though you have painted some berries or anything, that's fine because we can add that later on the top. Just apply water to the whole of the background. You don't need to skip on top of the berries or the leaves or whatever you have added, just the cake and the plate of cookies that's all you need to avoid. Whole of the paper. Then once you have applied the water, we will go with a yellowish brown shade. We need to create this yellowish brown shade. We're mixing burnt umber and Indian yellow together and also Indian gold. When you mix all these three colors, you'll get a nice yellowish brown shade. I know many of you may not have Indian gold color, but not to worry if you don't have Indian gold. For this mixture, you can also use just any orange and it will give you this Golden shade itself, nice shining orange-ish golden shade. You can either mix burnt umber Indian yellow and orange or Indian gold, Indian yellow, and burnt umber, so apply this to the whole of the background. You can see it's a nice yellowish brown shade. When you paint the other things on top of it, it's going to appear nicely because it's not a very nice dark color. That's why I said, it's alright to paint on the whole of the background. We just apply the paint onto the whole of the background. Just keeping the cake area and the cookies, the blade of cookies. Careful along the edge of the cake because we need to preserve the cake. But even if you slightly go on top of it, it's going to be fine because the outer color of that cake is going to be a darker tone. Next, we will mix another color, a reddish brown shade. For that mix a little bit of red, burnt umber and a little bit of Indian yellow and apply it on the top. Here what we're trying to achieve is to get a nice wooden touch to the background. It seems that the cake is sitting on a wooden surface so that is why we first made a yellowish brown and now we're just adding a few details on the top with other colors. The next thing, take burnt umber and using a very smaller size brush, draw a few lines on it. Your paper is still wet from the background wash and it's alright because we want these lines to spread. This is still the background that we're painting with wet on wet technique. Just make these lines but remember to use a smaller brush so that you get thinner lines. If you use a larger brush, the whole painting is just going to mess up because of the large lines and the spreading. That is all for the background. While the background dries, we can actually paint the other inner parts of the cake. Now we're going to paint the cookies in the cake because that's not touching any part of the background. I'm showing you the entire mixing process, I'm trying to create a nice burnt sienna kind of color. I'm trying to limit the number of shapes that I'm using. The mix I created is with burnt umber, a bit of red, a bit if Indian gold and a bit of yellow. Don't worry, you don't have to use all of these colors. You can use burnt sienna directly or you can mix these colors. The mix I have made is with a bit of red, burnt umber, Indian gold and yellow. If you don't have Indian gold, you can use a bit of orange, you will still somehow end up with the same shade or you can use burnt sienna directly as I said. This is what we're going to use to paint the cookies. I just wanted to create a different kind of brown. Either burnt sienna, or if you have a different brown, you can also use that. But we need it to be a lighter brown not a darker brown. On the cookies, the member, not the center part for those cookies in which you made the inner sketch. This will be the icing on the top and for the cookie without the icing, you can add a whole of that cookie with this color. Use a smaller brush to get inside the details correctly. Otherwise, you can also use the tip of a medium-sized brush. Then we will also paint the cookies in the plate of cookies as well so I'm just going to go with the same color so all the cookies with this color. I will say the mix again so it's burnt umber, Indian yellow, Indian gold, and a bit of red. That creates a very nice golden color kind of brown so that's what we used. Next, we will paint the berries on top of the cake. The berries is going to be with a nice red shade. You can use scarlet or permanent red or transparent red and paint the whole of the berries with this red shade. Little circles on top of the cake at random places. I've tried to center all of these cake decorations to one side because that looks attractive rather than scattered on top all over. But if you find that adding on top of the cake at all over random places is what you like, then you can go ahead and do it. Remember to use a smaller size brush because these are tiny little circles. You can see there's a lot of berries on top of this cake. Then once you have finished with the berries, we will paint the inside of the cake. For this, you have to wait for the berries to dry. I painted as soon as it finished because the berries had dried while I was painting it. But if it has not dried, what you can do is don't apply water right next to the berries so that the red paint won't flow into the water. Then the whole of the cake, we're going to paint with Indian yellow. It's going to be a nice yellow shade. When you apply the paint right next to the berries, just look at the paper to make sure that the red color that you applied for the various had dried. Because we don't want this red shade to be spreading on top of the yellow. Just make sure that it has dried. That's all. Then paint the whole area of the cake. But remember to leave that outer layer of icing, the curved layer that we added, because that's going to be with a different color. This is yellow because I think this is a lemon cake maybe. Or maybe it's just yellow icing corners. Add Indian yellow on the whole of the cake. Alternative colors for Indian yellow that you can use are transparent yellow, Aurelion yellow league, or in fact, any other yellow that you have. Any yellow you use is not going to affect this painting. On the whole of the cake surrounding the berries, the biscuits, and everywhere. You can see that I waited for a bit to paint that little bit of white space between those two berries because the batteries were still wet. I was painting the rest of the area while the battery is dried and then I moved on top of it. That looks better now. Now, we need to add a bit of shadows to the cake, the shadow from the icing outside. We're going to paint this using Indian gold. But don't worry if you don't have Indian gold. As I said, you can mix Indian gold by mixing a bit of burnt umber, orange, and yellow, you'll get a nice golden brown shade. That's what we want. Just along the top right corner around that cake, add a bit of this color onto the wet paper so that it flows down, that is spreads. We will also add the same to add the shadows on the other things on the cake. For all the berries, all the biscuits, the cookies, just add towards the bottom part. Here we're adding towards the bottom part because this means that the light is somewhere from the top, that's why all of that shadow is going to be towards the bottom. Once you have done that, let us add the berries in the background. Again, we're going to be adding with the transplant and read or the permanent red. Then next we're going to add some Christmas leaves on top of it. Again, going back to my favorite color, sap green, I'm mixing a bit of Indian yellow with my darker green to create that sap green. Using the same exact strokes that we have done until now for all the projects. If you've been following along in this class, you will know how it is. Just adding few Christmas spine leaves on the table so it looks like there's few decorative items right next to the cake. Whoever photographed this, tried to add few decorations on the table, so that's why. A bit of pine tree leaf on the table. Remember, add a lighter green first, so sap green, and then a darker green on the top of it for some shadows. That gives a mix of two greens, which will make the pine leaf more interesting. In order to get a darker green, you can mix a dark green or any green that you have with indigo, which will make the green more darker. To make a green lighter, you can mix it with yellow. That's how we can get different kinds of green. Towards the top, we'll just add few parts of a pine tree, not a whole, just a few lines and the same towards the left as well. Remember to use a smallest size brush Then, using the orange, we will add that slice of orange on the cake. I've just made it a shape of the orange around it, that's it, we'll add more details to it later on. Right now I'm taking sap green again and we're going to add that Christmas pine leaf on the cake. There's going to be that leaf on the cake as well. Use a very tiny small brush because this pine leaf is going to be very small, smaller than the one that we made on the outside of the cake on the table. So just quickly, very small strokes, and then the darker tone of green on the top. So always add darker shadows. It's just because any leaf or any plant, it's not going to be a single color. So that's why we keep adding shadow and a lighter tone to it so that it gives more real like look to that painting. So there you go. It looks better now. So now we're going to make some shadow for our berries. So I'm mixing a darker red shade. To mix that darker red shade, what we did is mixing a bit of brown and red together, which gives a darker red shade and this is what we will apply to certain sides of the berries. So just at some corners. So here as I said, the light is going to be at the bottom, so apply at the bottom part mostly, and then just blend it with a brush. So blend it with the damp brush. So we're just using water to blend it to the red on the top. So that gives a nice effect of shadow. Then next, we will need to add parts of the icing because we just can't leave it white. We need to add shadows to it. So I'm using a very lighter tone of Payne's gray. Lighter, as in literally lighter. That's 90% water and 10 percentage of the paints. That's all. So use that and apply it on top of the icing because we just can't leave it white. So apply more towards the bottom, that is bottom till the corner, but leave a white space towards the top because that's where the light is from. Next, we'll paint the outer part of the cake. So this seems like chocolate icing on it. So let us add some chocolate icing to our cake with burnt umber. So any darker brown that you have, like van **** brown, sepia, transparent brown, any darker brown, just add it. So remember, again, use a smaller size brush or the tip of a medium size brush. So this is why I said that, even if your Indian yellow or the background color, even if it had gone on top of this part of the cake, it's fine because you can correct it because when adding a darker tone. So that is quite simple, isn't it? So let's paint the chocolate part of our cake. We can already see the cake coming together. So very carefully along the edges. We need to get the shape right. Remember not to ruin the round shape of the cake. That's very important. That's icing added. Then the other plate of cookies, the plate itself. So it seems like a dark wooden plate, so we will add that with burnt umber. So again, a darker brown shade. Remember to apply a darker brown shade so that the cookies that we did with the lighter brown shows a contrast there. So using Indian yellow, again, we need to add some shadows to the bottom part as well. So apply to the corner of that burnt umber and then just blend it with water to the yellow. So apply Indian gold to the corners, that is along the edges of the chocolate icing, and then just blend it towards the inside. So that's what we're doing. Or you can do it the other way around, which is to apply water first on top of the Indian yellow, just right next to the chocolate icing and then apply Indian gold to that corner so that the water will blend it. So once we've done that, next thing is we will add the details on the wooden table that the cake is sitting on. So using burnt umber again, very randomly. So we don't want perfect lines because no wood has perfect shapes. Just few lines on the wooden background and try to make these spirals at certain places. So you can see here spirals and then some lines leading to it. So this will add the nice wooden shape to our background. It's not perfect, but this is something that we can just add for fun. So you can see how it has turned out, very nice. So next thing again, we need to add few shadows to our cookies. So apply a darker tone of brown to the bottom side. As I said, light is from the top and every shadow is at the bottom. Then, using white watercolors, we need to complete the orange. Because of the yellow background, the orange is now on a whole yellowish shade. So we're going to cover that up with white on the top. Don't worry. It's not going to be whole as white. Because of the yellow underneath, it will turn lighter, so just apply one shade. Then let us add some few dots on top of our other cookie so it seems like somebody has added dot icing on the top. That's a starfish. [LAUGHTER] Then for some of the berries, with dark brown, add few dots on the top. So this will seem as if the berry is cut into half and placed on the cake. So not the whole berry, a half a berry on the top. So here I'm adding the shadows I missed earlier for the icing on the cookies. Next is, let us add some icing sugar on our cake. So when I say icing sugar, you know those tiny splatters of icing on our cake? So we need that. So cover up the rest of the area with some paper, or tissue, or whatever you have, and then use an old toothbrush. Dip the toothbrush in the white paint, gouache, acrylic, or whatever, and add these splatters on top of these berries and the cookies. So this will give the nice, beautiful shade that is, the icing splatters that you must have seen on cakes. So that's what it'll add. Then let's add this to some parts of the wood as well because just to show that somebody has added some splatters here and there. So you can also add to other places. So it's not going to be snow, but it's just the icing splattered on the cake and the wooden table. You can also add splatters with a small brush. Remember, small brush and add it closer to the cake so that it doesn't spread to the table. So now you can see my orange slice, the color has turned lighter and now it looks better. Lastly, you can also add white dots onto your berries to make them have that light on it. So the next thing is we need to add a shadow for our cake. So I forgot to add this when I peeled off the masking tape, but then while editing, I moved this video to the front so that you can paint it before removing the tape itself. So it's just simply, apply some burnt umber to the edge of the bottom half of the cake and then just blend it to the wooden area with water. The same for the plate of cookies as well. So you can see here my tape has already been removed and I have to paint very carefully so that my lines don't go outside. That's why I moved this to this part so that you can paint before removing the masking tape. So it's just simple, applying the burnt umber and then spreading it. Once that is done, the painting is complete. So you can see here those shadows are missing because I didn't have it. Here's the final painting. Thank you for joining me today. 13. Day 11 - 14 Days to Christmas: Hello. Welcome to day 11. It's just 14 days to Christmas and today we will be painting this simple painting. It's going to be really simple because yesterday's was a quiet long. The colors we need are, cobalt blue, indigo, Payne's gray, red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, and Indian gold. First, we will start with the ornaments. It's going to have some ornaments lying in the snow and I'm going to use this small circle maker to make some few circles on the snow. You can use a compass or whatever you have at hand. Towards the bottom of those circles, we are going to make the line of the snow so it seems as if it's resting on the snow. Add another circle to the bottom as well and add a bit of extra snow at the bottom. Then we need to add the hooks on the top, so the hooks of these Christmas ornaments. If you've taken the other classes, you know already how it's done, it's quite easy. Just a few cylindrical shapes on the top and the hook and once you've done that, that would be all for the pencil sketch. That was very simple. Let us first start with our painting. This one, it is better to have your papers stuck onto a board because you really need the angle to work on this background. Apply water to the top region of those Christmas ornaments and make sure to go around the edges of the Christmas ornament so you can use a medium-size brush for that. Around the edges, very nicely, apply water evenly on the paper because we will be working with the wet on wet technique. Once you have applied water, we need something to keep under our board. But here we're going to keep it at the bottom because we need the angle towards the top. Gravity should be such that your paint is flowing to the top. That's why more angle at the bottom side lifted and all the water and paint will flow towards the top. We'll start with cobalt blue. You can also use any other blues such as ultramarine blue or a lighter blue that you have. Ultramarine blue will separate and form granulation on the paper, so if you don't want that, you can avoid ultramarine blue and use cobalt blue. But I think the granulation would just add a nice effect to this background so you can just go ahead and use ultramarine blue, it's going to be fine. On the whole of the background, skipping the regions of the ornaments very carefully. We didn't apply water, so it's not going to go there, but when we apply we just have to be careful. Apply the cobalt blue to the top. Here, our background is going to be from the bottom to the top, all our strokes from the bottom to the top. Apply the paint in larger consistency as well as in a lot of water. All your paint will just flow in the water that we applied. You can see because of the angle, it's all flowing towards the top and let it flow, that's the key thing. Then now towards the top, we will paint with a darker tone. The darker tone that we're going to apply is indigo. At the top part, apply indigo. Here, remember that my angle of the paper is such that all the paint and the water is going to flow towards the top. I've placed something under my board at the bottom so here, I'm letting gravity do the part of blending it with the blue and the indigo. At the top part, we need a darker shade and this darker shade is going to be with indigo. It's going to be like in around the edges of the paper, it would be the darker shade. Apply a darker consistency of indigo. Try to make it as dark as possible, but because there's water, it's just going to turn lighter eventually. We'll keep adding the Indigo and make sure to apply more darker tones towards the edges of the paper because that is the place that needs to be really dark. Then once you have applied the indigo, you can add a bit more of the cobalt blue to blend it so that they don't seem odd, split away, so we need to blend that, so add cobalt blue again. Now you can see that they have blend together very nicely. Just a mix of these two colors that is what we will use for the background. Very nicely mix evenly. There, now our background is mixed nicely. Now I'm going to add some blooms to give it a nice effect. It's just a medium-sized brush, dip it in water, and splatter it. Here is another thing we'll add to make it interesting. Take some white paint and splatter that as well. Our paper is wet and we added wet on wet splatters. That's all for the background. Then we will move on to the rest of the painting after the top background has dried, we have to make sure it's dry because otherwise it's going to spread onto the snow. We don't want that, so that's why. After it has dried, let us paint the snow. Here we only need to add the shadows on the snow. Because the snow is white, so only the shadows. The shadows we will paint with the wet on wet technique, so apply water to the whole area of the snow. Remember to not paint on that ornament. The snow we'll be adding with Payne's gray. Take a bit of Payne's gray and lighter tone, not a very darker tone, just a lighter tone of Payne's gray, and add it to certain places. Remember to add it towards the bottom of that ornament, which is at the bottom as well and to all the other areas as well, just randomly at certain places. I will also add darker tones towards the bottom. More darker towards the bottom because that's what we see clearly, because the bottom part is what is closest to the viewer. This was a very lighter tone of Payne's gray and just blend it with the background. But we need to take a bit of medium tone of Payne's gray and apply it right next to that ornament, but towards the top side. This is what will make the ornament look like as if it is resting on the snow. Then once it has dried, we will paint the ornament itself. Let us first paint the one on the left. We're going to paint that with transparent red. Apply the transparent red on the ornament. You can see that white gap that I've left. This is because I want that area to be lighter. Don't paint over that area, but just try to use water to blend paint onto that area, so this will make that area lighter. Then the rest of the areas of obviously just add the whole of the red paint. Remember to use a medium-sized brush to maintain the shape of the ornament, the round shape, we need to get that correctly. You can see on the left side there's that lighter area and the darker areas towards the right side. We need to add the shadows now. The shadow we will add it with the darker tone of red, which is made by mixing TranSpin and red and burnt umber together. This darker part applied with the darker tone of red towards the right side. Obviously, the lighter side was towards the left and the darker side towards the right. To make it even more darker, just apply burnt umber itself on top of the red. This gives a nice darker touch and darker shadow for our ornament. Then if it doesn't appear to be blended, just use red again and blend it. I have lost that light highlight so I'm adding that with a bit of white on the top and I'll just blend it to the red. Now you can see I have retained that white highlight. Now we'll paint the other red ornament as well. This one is to the right, only half of it is visible. Again, I apply the red tone and then I try to blend it with water. This one has got shiny lights on the right side. That is the shining part on the right side. Then add the shadows with the darker tone of red by mixing burnt umber and red together. Blend it with the red as well and water. Then we'll paint the next ornament with yellow. There's three more ornaments to paint. We'll start with the next one, and it's going to be using yellow. Here again, do the left side of it, we'll blend it with water and try to make it lighter. But don't worry if it doesn't turn lighter because we can add it with white later on. Here we will paint the shadows with a darker tone, which is made by mixing a bit of red, yellow, and Indian gold. Don't worry if you don't have Indian gold. To make this mix, what you can do is mix a bit of orange with yellow and use that on top of the yellow. This would give roughly the same shadows as I'm applying. Remember, just a mix of orange, yellow, and red would give that nice golden shade. The same we'll do for one of the other ornaments. This is still bigger than the one that's next to it. Applying yellow first and then the shadows using the mix of Indian gold and red. Then just blend the highlight with water. You can see I'm just blending and trying to use the lifting technique to remove that paint from the white area that I want to leave. But if you're not able to get it, don't worry, you can use white paint itself to get that white highlight. Now we'll paint that smaller ornament right next to the yellow. But remember when you're painting this, you have to make sure that the yellow one is dry. Otherwise, our whole thing would just blend together with the red so that's why. Here I'm applying a darker red. I mix a bit of burnt umber to my red to get that darker red and the shadow of this one is going to be even darker. That means I'm going to apply a bit of burnt umber. This one is a bit darker than the other two ornaments I just wanted to color to be a bit different. That's why and the shadow with burnt umber. You can add the white highlights with white paint towards the left. Now, we'll paint the hooks of our ornaments. This I'm painting with Indian gold. Remember, if you don't have Indian gold, you can mix it with a bit of orange, brown, and yellow, which will give you a nice golden brown shade. This is what I'm using to paint the hooks of my ornaments. If you are painting gold you can use that directly. Then add a few bits of shadow with burnt umber on top of this Indian gold. We will also add the hook on the top. It's not the hook, it's that loop on the top with burnt umber. Just add loop on all of them. There, that's it. That looks really interesting and beautiful. Now let us make this more interesting. We're going to add a few details onto our ornaments. Some snowflakes, some designed onto the ornaments. That's what makes this interesting. Because now the ornaments look planned and we want to make it interesting so that's why. Add these tiny shapes in the form of snowflakes on to these ornaments. The one on the right, only few parts of it is going to be visible. It is made by making this star shape. It's that X and then across. Then on top of each of those lines, add few smaller lines. That's how the snowflake is created. Let us add to the bigger one first. Here I'll add a different snowflake. First, add a hexagon. You know the shape of a hexagon. Add a hexagon, then few lines away from it. Here, you can see I made a mistake, but I just applied water and then lead a tissue absorb it and cleared the mistake. It is all right to make mistakes, everyone does it. But just knowing how to clear that is the most important part. If you have just applied the paint, apply some water on top of it, and quickly absorb it with the tissue. That's how you can correct it. Coming back to the design, the hexagon shape, and then lines from each of the corners, and then adding these tiny small lines on the top. That's how this shape is. We'll make another one as well. Remember to use a very smaller size brush because these lines need to be really thin and detailed. I'm using a Size 1 brush. After adding that ornament design on it, it looks more interesting and more beautiful now, rather than before. That is why we added these. You can also add just part of the design. Here at the top, I'm adding another one, but only few part of that snowflake is visible. Then let us add to the yellow as well. For the yellow, I'm just going to make it simple. I'm just adding few star shapes on top of it. Small star shapes because all of them are not going to be similar. You can also leave them without painting as well, so it's totally up to you. Now lastly, we just need to add the snow in this painting. Use a medium-size brush and dip it into white paint and pick a nice consistency of it and tap it with your hand. This would create larger as well smaller amounts of snow. You can see on my paper, I've got larger, smaller, and different sizes of those splatters, and that's what we want. Once you've done that, the painting is complete and you can take off your masking tape. This is really beautiful and quick, isn't it? Thank you guys for joining me. 14. Day 12 - 13 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 12. I can't believe we have reached day 12. It's just 13 days left to Christmas. So today we will paint this beautiful village Christmas tree. And the colors we need are indigo, Payne's gray, green, Indian yellow, burnt umber, transparent, and Indian gold. So starting with our pencil sketch, let us first make that pine tree. So it might look difficult, but not to worry, it's not that difficult. First, all you need to do is outline the shape of the pine tree. We know the shape of and pine tree, right? So all we're going to do is just to outline the left and the right side of the pine tree. Then this pine tree is going to be covered in snow. And snow usually forms like a bubble or a curved shape attached to the leaves of the pine tree. So this is what I'm adding. So I will add this reference picture into the resources section and you can download it by going to a mobile browser and logging into skillshare or by logging into Skillshare using a PC. So you will be able to see where these snow areas are on the pine tree. And you will be able to make them. It's just going to be very simple shapes, just curved lines here and there. And the rest of the areas are going to be the leaves of the pine tree. So just sketch them roughly with your pencil and the rest of the things we'll be doing with our paintbrush. So this is how we would always do pine trees for winter illustrations. So this is the best way to do it. If you have a pine tree. That is, we are viewing at a very close angle. Then towards the right of it lets have few branches of some kind of plant, or the leaves have died out because it's winter. And let's add two houses in the distance. So this is what the village is. At the distance we're seeing parts of some houses covered in snow. And we'll also add the horizon line here. And behind the horizon we will add another house. So just part of a house, and then we'll have some pine trees there as well. So this would be our main pencil sketch. Now, let us start painting. So we will first paint the sky region. So this is going to be the wet on wet technique. So this is the reason we will apply the water. So now the sky and the snow part of this painting are going to be almost similar. So if you've seen a winter sky, it's just like a gray tone. You're not going to see much of blue skies during the winter. So that is why. So we'll apply paint all over the paper except for the areas of the pine tree. So leaving the outline of the pine tree, the rest of the areas we will apply water. This is why a pointed brush would be really nice option to apply water in such cramped areas. Then once we have applied the water will use Payne's gray to paint the sky. So look at the tone that I'm using. It's a very lighter tone when we don't want a darker gray color for the sky. Just a lighter tone. So apply this lighter tone to the sky. And we will also be using this same tone to paint the shadows of our snow. So snow is white. But in order to depict that white snow there is going to be some shadow areas. And this is what we will use - Payne's grey. So right below the pine tree, we will have some shadows because of the tree itself. So that is why we apply Payne's gray there. And then let us also add some lighter tone of this Payne's grey, next to the houses near the horizon, so that we show the shadow on the snow at those places. So if you're sky has turned lighter, you can apply another coat of Payne's grey. But remember, I am applying the paint mainly because my sky is still wet. That is, my paper is still wet so I can continue working on the wet on wet technique. But if your paper has dried, don't apply more paint because otherwise you'll get dark edges. So apply some Payne's grey to some other ideas as well because we will add some small plants there in the distance. So that would be really helpful. Then, using a tissue dab off the water from the areas below the horizon. So below the horizon, you will see why in just a moment. Because we're going to paint the pine trees above that horizon line. So we don't want the paint to flow down in that water so that is why we dabbed off all those extra water right below the horizon line. So now you paint wouldn't flow down. So the sky region is still wet. So we will use indigo. And using indigo, we will make those smaller tiny pine trees. So remember, your paper is still wet and we are working on the wet on wet technique. These trees are kind of like far away behind the horizon. So we don't want it too much detailed. But just the outlines of the tree. So draw the pine tree in the usual shape that you do. And you can see that your paint is spreading. But here, one thing to remember is that make sure that your paper is not too wet. Otherwise it would just flow a lot and spread a lot. So it just needs to be damp. So damp paper means look at your paper and if you see water on top of it. So that means that is really wet. But we don't want that. So when you look at your paper, if you can not see water, but then it still kind of gold. That means that it is just damp. So this is the moment that we need to apply this paint. This means that it's still the wet on wet technique because it's still somewhat damp, but not a lot of wet, so it will not flow a lot. So you can see the consistency of my paint here. I'm using a medium to tone of indigo and applying. And it's not spreading a lot. This is because my paper is just damp and not wet. Then do the same damp paper where we applied the Indigo in the shape of the pine trees. We will add some white watercolors on the top for the snow. So again, this is going to spread, but that's fine. This is how we can depict pine trees that are very far away. So this is how professional artist and everyone would depict something that is far away using the blurriness in the picture. So that's what we need to achieve here. So you can see the tiny lines that I'm adding with white. After that, we can paint the houses. So to the bottom of that house, I'm going to be adding a bit of Indian Gold. And then to the top I will add burnt umber. So don't worry if you don't have Indian gold, you can make it yourself. All you need is an orange, a Brown and a bit of yellow. Mix these together and you'll get Indian gold color. Next towards the right of the house. We will add Burnt sienna So I'm making my Burnt Sienna kind of color and I'm mixing brown, red, and Indian gold together to make my Burnt Sienna. So I will apply my burnt sienna towards the right side of the house, The roof of the house. We will leave right for now because it's going to be covered in snow itself. Then we will do the same for the other house as well. But before that, let's add the shadows. So using burnt umber just outline along the bottom part of the roof of the house on both the sides. This is the shadow because of the roof of the house, on the walls of the house itself. So this is exactly what we'll do with the other house. So first we will apply burnt sienna. Or you can mix your burnt sienna like I said, using burnt umber red and yellow together and you'll get a nice beautiful burnt sienna. Or you can use burnt sienna directly. And once you have painted that, we'll add a little bit of burnt umber or any other dark brown to the top part. So this will be the shadow. Now our houses are complete and we will move on to the pine tree. So we will start with Sap Green First. I mixed a bit of Indian yellow to my dark green, to get Sap Green. If you have Sap Green or hookers green, you can use them directly. So what we will do here is that we will paint just the outer areas of the snow. So remember those areas that pencil sketched for the snow, those curved areas. So excluding that part the rest of the areas, we will add small pine tree leaves. So it's just going to be small lines. Use a very small brush, a pointed round brush. A typically a size 2, size 1 or a size 0 would be ideal. And using the tip of the brush triy to make these small lines. So all of these lines, if they are facing outward from the tree, that would be nice. And all the other areas that are in the center. You can fill them up with paint so you can observe those large blobs and parts of Green that I have applied. So this is going to be like the centre portion of the tree in which we don't have to make the shape of the pine tree itself. But towards the left side and the right side, where actually you can see the leaves there you'd have to make these small lines with your brush, which would form the outer leaves of the pine tree. If you find it too difficult to make the shape, tried to first make it on another paper. I don't mean the whole pine tree, but tried to make these small shapes on a piece of paper and see if you can get that correctly. And once you do, you can start applying on your pine tree. So we need to add different shapes to our tree to make it look more real. So first I am starting with Sap Green, and we will add a darker color later on. So just follow along with me and this will be quite simple. You can clearly see all the white spaces that I have left behind for this pine tree. So it's just really simple once you crack this part. And as you can see clearly, are we working on the wet on dry technique This is after the whole paper has tried when we painted the background. And also we did not apply water to this region here. So it's fine. So working on the wet on dry technique here, slowly, just try and make all those small leaves of the pine tree. Then once you're done with the first part of applying the Sap Green, we will add the darker green on top. So here I'm using a darker green from White nights. It's a really nice dark green. But don't worry if you don't have dark green, you can make such a nice dark green by mixing your Sap Green or any other green that you have with indigo or any other darker blue. So mixing with Prussian blue would also make it dark. Or another option is to mix it with Payne's grey, which will give a nice dark green. And if you're using a very basic palette and you don't have payne's grey either than you can mix it with black. So this dark green, as you can see, we will apply at certain places. And most importantly, where we apply is right next to the snow region. So right below all the curves of the snow, that's where we add those dark paint. So the main reason why I apply here is because this is the shadow on the tree. So the snow on that tree is going to cast the shadow itself on the leaves of that tree. So we need to depict that and also some other areas of the tree. So these are going to be like the leaves in the depth of the tree. Apply to random places, as well as the areas right below the snow region that we have left white. So that is all we have to take care about when we're doing these shadow regions on the pine tree. So you can clearly see that this painting is very simple. If you get those tiny leaves of the pine tree correct, there is nothing much to do with this painting. I actually wanted to give out that feeling of the Christmas vibes in a winter. So that is why I chose this painting. And once you have done with the pine tree, we can add that little branch on the right. So that is going to be with a dark brown. And to get a dark brown, You can mix burnt umber with gray, Payne's gray, or burnt umber with black or go with Sepia. So using a darker tone of the darkest brown that do have make these small branches. And remember to use the tip of a smallest brush. And using a darker green. And we will also add that small plant in the distance where we added the shadow with Payne's grey earlier. So just a few small lines, that's all. Now the next thing is we need to add shadow to all our other parts of the snow that we didn't do for the background. Like for example, the first part would be the roof of the house. And then we have the snow on the pine tree as well. So for the roof of the house, apply water first and then just apply a bit of payne's grey and let it spread. So this would add the nice shadow that we want for this snow. Let us add some more shadows to the ideas right below the bottom house. So apply water. Remember, when we are applying the shadow, it's best to use the wet on wet technique. So this is why I apply water first and then I just apply the paint, to blend it so the water will do its work and blend the paint. So we need to add the shadow to the snow on our pine tree. So again, we will be working with the wet on wet technique. Use a small brush and carefully apply water onto the snow regions. So remember when you're applying this water, your dark green paint and the sap green paint should not mix with the water. So very carefully we have to apply water onto those snow region. And then we will add payne's grey. So remember to add payne's grey, to the top part of the snow always. So this is what where the shadow will be formed. So all of the top regions of this blob of snow apply payne's grey. So again, this process is going to be fairly similar and very simple. Apply the water first and then apply payne's grey to the top region and then blended towards the bottom part. And we will be doing the same for all the snow region on this pine tree. I have a class on winter pines, in fact. And for that class, I actually used masking fluid to cover all the areas of the snow. And this is why for this class, I specifically wanted to avoid using masking fluid. Because masking fluid is something that many artists may not have. And so I wanted this to be something that everyone can follow. So that is why I thought of this method where you can paint around the areas of the snow and then adding the shadows to the snow later on. Remember, we just have to be careful when applying the water because we don't want our green paints to mix with the water and blend onto the snow region. So take your time in doing this. It's just really simple. All we have to do is pay a little attention to where our brush is going. And towards the top, the regions are really tiny, so it wouldn't even matter if you didn't add the shadow. Once we're done with the shadows our pine tree is complete. So if you feel that your background has too much of white space, then you can add a bit of water again, like I'm doing right now and add more shadows. Then next thing is we need to add some shadow to those branches as well. So if it's snow, it's bound to settle long those branches. So what we will do is apply a bit of Payne's gray or you can even apply water first and then apply payne's grey to it. Or the other way that you can do is apply Payne's gray, to the branches. That is right along the branch. And then right after you apply it, use water to blend it so that you soften the edges. So when you're softening the edges, the payne;s gray would just spread and form like a bubble of snow. Now, we need to make this tree look Christmassy, right? So it's a winter Christmas tree. So let us add few Christmas ornaments. So now we're going to add this on the top. So using a dark red or any red in fact, just add few small circular shapes. And this is what is going to be the Christmas ornament on that tree. So you can use different shades as well. It just doesn't have to be read. But since the tree is green, the colours that would be mostly visible on that tree would be red and yellow. So this is why I'm using these two colors. And I'm making tiny ornaments. But if you feel that you want to make bigger ornaments, you can do that as well. So make sure to add some ornament that are covered in snow. So what you would do is just paint like a small semicircle on top of the snow, which shows that the rest of it is covered in snow. So some circles here and there. And that would be the Christmas ornaments on the tree. Now, let us add a star on top of the tree. So we'll just make a tiny star on top of the tree. And lastly, let us add some snow to our painting. So you know how much I love adding snow. So all we're going to do is dip our brush in white paint and splatter this on to the paper. So it's not going to be much visible because we already have our whole painting which is almost white. But then it will be seen on top of the tree. And that's what we want, and also in the areas of the house. So just splatter these paints. And you can either use the two brush method or the single hand method to add these splatters, it doesn't really matter. But once you've added the splatters, that is all for this painting. So let us remove our tape to reveal our beautiful painting. So today's was quite simple, right? I love this pine tree. So here it is. and Thank you for joining me. 15. Day 13 - 12 Days to Christmas: Welcome to day 13. It's just 12 days to Christmas. Today we will be sending out our Christmas letters with this painting and the colors we need are cobalt blue, green, Payne's gray, red, Indian yellow, burnt umber, and indigo. Starting with our pencil sketch, we are going to do some basic pencil sketching here. We don't need to do entirely all the background images. Just the post box and the wooden log that it is attached to. They wouldn't post that this post box is attached to. You can see the shape of the post box. It's going to be somewhat slanted towards the right side. Then it will have these extra lines inside. Don't worry, take the reference image from the resources and you can easily make the pencil sketch by refereeing to that image. I hope it is not really too late for us to send out our Christmas letters to family and friends. Let us make these today. You can see I've added the post box and the wooden post that it is attached to. We need to add the attachment that is the curved line on that wooden post. It's attached using two metal parts. That is what it is. For the background, we will be having a pine tree. But we don't need to add the whole details like we did yesterday. It's just going to be very basic, just the outline of the pine tree. Then let's at the top part of the post box. You can see now it's empty. We need to add the head portion of it. This head portion will be covered in snow. We will add that later. Towards the bottom, we will have some shrubs and a few branches. Let us add that as well because we will have some different fruit towards the bottom today. It's not going to be the holly that we added until now. These circles are going to be different. Just add few of them. I just wanted to make it different and diverse in a way because we've been doing so many similar things for all these days. That is why just simple circles and their branches. That's all. Once you've done that, your pencil sketch is complete. We will again start with the background. Here the background is going to be using the wet-on-wet technique. We will apply water. When we're applying water, obviously, we have to avoid the areas of the post box and the wooden part that it is attached to, and the rest of the areas we will apply water. Carefully apply water to all the other areas except this wooden part and the post box. Both on the left side and the right side, as well as the top and that little portion below the post box. Then we will start with the sky region. We will apply cobalt blue. You can also use any other blues, such as ultimately in blue, or bright blue. But cobalt blue is a very nice blue for showing the winter sky. Apply this evenly. Using a larger size brush would be really helpful for applying this. Then next thing is we will switch to a smaller size brush. Here, I'm using a synthetic brush. By synthetic, I mean, the hairs are synthetic. Most brushes that you buy from local stores are in fact synthetic. It wouldn't be a matter. What we need is we're going to mix a darker shade of green. I have mixed my green with a bit of indigo. We're going to make the shape of a pine tree onto the wet paper. This is the background and we want the paint to spread, but not a lot. That is why we are using a synthetic brush. Here I want to show you the importance of using a synthetic brush when applying the wet paint onto the wet paper because if you're using a synthetic brush, it holds very less water as compared to a natural hair brush. You are not introducing a lot of water back onto the paper, which will not allow the paint to flow out a lot. That is one use of synthetic brushes when painting with wet on wet technique. Here on the wet paper, you can clearly see, I'm taking this darker version of green, that is the green mixed with indigo, and applying it just in the shape of a pine tree. It's not spreading a lot onto my paper. This is because I'm not adding any more water into the paper. If I had used a natural hair brush, those brushes hold a lot of water as well as paint. Your paint is likely to be a bit more diluted. This might introduce a lot of water onto the existing water that's already there on the paper. We don't want that, which is why we used a synthetic brush. Towards the bottom of that tree, we will add sap green. The pine tree is there, but then we just want to show some of the other plants, shrubs, and bushes that are in front of that pine tree at the bottom part of the post box. Then again towards the background, we will add some more pine trees. Here, these pine trees and I'm adding with indigo. Remember again, my paper is wet and onto my wet paper, I'm adding these shapes. It's still the wet-on-wet technique. Don't worry if your paper has started to dry, that's fine. We just need to make this shape of the pine trees very nicely and it will act as the background. One important tip that I want to tell you is that if you're not using 100% cotton paper, your paper is likely to get dry by the time you reach this step. It's fine. It's okay if it dries, we just have to draw the shape of the normal pine tree as we would do it. If your paper has dried, try to apply this indigo in a lighter tone. These are different ways that we can show the background. Either we can have a blurred background like the one I'm working on, or you can have a lighter background. These are two options that you can do for getting a nice background. If your paper is dry, go for the lighter background. That means you would apply a lighter tone of indigo. If your paper is still wet, then go for the blurred background. It's just using indigo making the shape of a pine tree. You can see how I've got that blurred version on my background. Then next, we're going to paint the snow area at the bottom. This one, we're going to be painting the snow itself. Remember, it's going to have the shadows. That would be with cobalt blue or Payne's gray. Add a bit of both of these colors at random places to depict the snow on that area. That's it. Certain darker tones here and there onto the wet paper itself. Then, now you can see my whole background has dried. This is when we will paint the post box itself. We have to wait for the background to dry. Otherwise, when we apply the red tone, it's going to spread over into the wet area. This is after the holding is dried, take red. You can either use Scarlett transparent red or permanent red. First, we will apply this to the whole area of the post box. But observe here on the left side, right next to that, wooden post. I have left few spaces right next to where that bar of the boost box is, which is holding onto the wooden block. This is where the snow is going to be. We can obviously add the snow later on with the white paint but I'm just trying to leave some space so that it's easier for me to add the white paint later on. Because if we add white paint onto a red shade, it would need at least two or three times of applying the same paint over and again to get a nice white don't. That is why I left that white space. You can either not leave that white space and add the snow later on, or you can leave that white space and it would be easier for us to add the snow. Also observe in the center, that small square part where I have lifted white. This one we will add it with a different tone later on. Also, there's going to be that another rectangle at the bottom part of the post box. This would be where the information on that post box is written. If you've seen post boxes like these they usually has something written on them. It's about the timings that the post is usually taken by the postman. It's a paper that's inside a glass. That's why that needs to be white. Now we have applied our red all over the postbox. Then switch to a medium-sized or a smaller size brush, and we will add the shadows now. For the shadows, you already know what the shadows of the target tone of red is going to be we're going to mix a bit of red with burnt umber. A darker tone of red, with a bit of burnt umber, and we will add this for the shadows. It's going to be right where this postbox is attached to the wooden part. It would have some shadow because that area is having the shadow from the wooden part and also towards the top. This is the shadow from the snow on the top and then other lines of this postbox, we will add it with this darker tone as well. Make this darker tone of red nicely by mixing it with burnt umber and add the shadows next to the wooden post, as I said, and try to blend it with red again because we don't want to form any harsh edge there for the shadow. Once we apply the shadow, and if your paper has dried and you're seeing a harsh edge or a dark edge, then take some more red and just blend it onto the background. Then we'll paint that middle bar that is attaching it to the woods. Remember to use a smaller size brush because this line is very small and smaller size brush would be really useful. Next, we will take some more of this darker version of red and we will be in the other areas of the postbox. All of those lines on the postbox, we will be adding it with this darker tone. Just few lines in the center then there is another shape, somewhat like rectangular and a curve in the left side. Then there's the area where you add the post itself. That box is going to be with this darker tone again. Here, my paper is still wet. You can see that the darker tone that I applied is spreading. You can stop the spreading by using your brush and sweeping over it, then switching to a medium-size brush. Now we will paint the wooden part itself. This is the wooden log that this is attached to. This we're going to be painting with burnt umber. Use a nice dark brown that you have for painting this darker tone. Towards the bottom remember that we need to add some plants, so we're not going to paint the whole up to the bottom, but once you apply the burnt umber, then take a bit of sap green and just blend it along with the brown and add those shapes towards the bottom. This forms the shrubs or the bushes that's there at the bottom part of this painting. The area that's below the postbox, we might have some plants. That's what we're adding. Since we already started adding those plants at the bottom, let's just finish the rest of it. Just add some few smaller random shapes with your brush in the shape of small plants. It's just going to be totally random. No specifics. Just paint some small, tiny plants any way that you want. You can see my brush movement. It's quite clear. It's not anything specific, it's just random. I'm making simple strokes and making them as plants in front of it. Once you have done that, we can get back to painting the rest of the wooden part. Again, with burnt umber. Burnt umber is a really nice brown that is used in many paintings. You might have seen if you've followed until today, we have used it a lot in our paintings. But don't worry, you can use other brands as well. Here, while applying the burnt umber, just note I have left that gap for the snow. I'm just leaving those gaps because I don't want to paint later on by adding white on top of it. It's better to leave it white. But if you would rather add white later on, and for now, you just want to paint the whole thing, you can do that as well. It's totally up to you. You can see how I'm applying it. Using a medium-size brush, just apply the whole part of the wooden log and you can see that when I'm applying, I'm making sure that the strokes that I'm applying is like continuous and onto the previous stroke. That doesn't give me any hard edge in-between those strokes. There now we have added that very nicely. Now we'll paint those fruits that I was talking about. It's some winter berry that's there and this one is going to be in a mix of yellow and red. First we will apply some yellow. This is Indian yellow that I'm using here and we'll paint all of those with Indian yellow first and then take some red and apply it to certain corners. Not to the whole of it, but just certain corners and try to blend it. This forms like a red shade on one side, then a little orange to where it has blended with the yellow, and then a bit of yellow. That looks like