Easy and Elegant Christmas Cards

1. Welcome!: Hey, guys, and welcome to my studio. Christmas is just around the corner, and I know that many of you love making your own holiday cards. So I have this quick and fun class for you today to make these simple yet elegant Christmas cards, featuring a traditional Christmas ornament decorated with floral elements. You can add some wish here. I am extremely bad at lettering, so I left this space blank. But you can certainly do so and maybe add some personal message to your loved ones. So let us see what are supplies we need for this class and let's start creating 2. Art Supplies: To make a card like this, first, you need a piece of watercolor paper. I use the pulp paper. It's a daily owning aquafin paper, and I cut it to smaller pieces. You can buy postcard size paper directly in the store, but it's usually cheaper to cut bigger sheets into whatever size you need. The body of the ornament is going to be painted with watercolor paint. I have Windsor Newton Cotman paints here. This is Azaren crimson hue and Viridian hue. But you can use any kind of watercolor in tubes, in pants or even gouache paint if you want to. Also, the color is completely up to you. You can decide for blue or pink or stick with the traditional red and green. For this small metal part that is used to hang the ornament, I use metallic watercolors by Kuretake. But, guys, no worries. If you don't have metallic paints, you can absolutely use regular yellow color. Now to decorate the ornaments, I have a white ink by Windsor Newton. I know that this isn't something everyone has at home, so if you don't, you can replace it with any other white opaque medium like white quash, even white acrylic paint, or white gel pen. Just keep in mind that obviously the lines will be thinner if you use the pen. I have three brushes here. The first one, this is the mop brush size two, or you can use regular round brush size eight or ten. It's for the big area for the base of the ornament. Then I have a round brush size 1.5 for the fine lines, the stems or branches. And one slightly bigger brush, this is size two for the leaves. And let's not forget a paper towel and a jar of water. The jar of water actually happens to be the perfect size for my ornaments, so it's going to help me to draw a perfect circle. I am sure you can find something similar in your house, too, a jar or a cup or a bowl. 3. Green Ornament: Very good. We have everything we need to create these lovely Christmas cards. So let's grab a piece of paper and something round that helps us with the round shape. Place the object in the middle of the paper, maybe a bit lower than the center of the paper, and with a pencil, draw a circle around the object. You can see these white irregular rectangles here. These are the reflections of the light on our ornament. You can see such on round glass objects. They are a simple yet effective way to make our ornament look realistic. If you want, you can predraw these reflections with a pencil. See that the reflections copy the shape of the ornament. And if you are happy with the sketch, we can jump right to the painting part. I'm using dN hue. It is a lovely rich green color, and I'm applying the color inside the round shape. Take your time, be careful. You want to stay inside the pencil sketch to make the ornament as round and smooth as possible. And of course, avoid the area of the reflections. You can add more color to the opposite side of the ornament, make it darker there, and that would improve the three D look of the sphere. Nice. We need to let this dry before we continue. Feel free to use your hair dryer to make it faster. And when you are ready to continue, then you can grab a pencil again and sketch this golden hanger of the ornament. I'm using the red gold from the KurtaKiset. Now, my favorite part decorating the ornaments. I already have some ideas here. You can see it's usually a line representing the stem or branch and simple leaves, maybe some dots. You can alter the direction and angle of the leading line, draw one long or several shorter lines, one simple line or one that is splitting into smaller lines. For this ornament, I'm going to draw several lines or stems from the top and another group of the lines or stems spreading from the bottom upwards, and they will meet in the middle of the ornament. Okay, so let's do it. I have the bottle of white ink. Let's shake it properly before opening, and a fine brush to draw precise lines. If you don't want to draw with the ink without any pre drawing, you can use white pencil to sketch the helping lines. Make sure the brush is not too loaded with the paint because you want the line to be thin. And you can see that I'm just randomly drawing some stems or branches. Again, keeping in mind the round shape of the ornament. I don't put the lines too close to each other because I want to have enough space left for the leaves. Now, the leaves are painted using this small flat brush. But honestly, this is not the best brush for florals. The absolute star for leaves and petals is the Filbert brush. It's flat too, but the corners rounded. But I don't have it in such a small size I need today, so a normal flat brush must suffice. Or even a regular round brush size two or four should be okay. Wow. I load the brush with ink. This time, you can use more ink than for the lines. I am painting simple leaves just with one stroke. Press the brush against the paper to create the wider part of the leaf and then lift the brush gradually to make the leaf go thinner towards the stem. It may take some practice, but you can certainly do it. It's easier for me to turn the paper upside down for the other part of the decoration. So what's do it? Well, I think it looks beautiful. Just some finishing touches. I had my fine brush again and a bit of brownish color, and I'm drawing some simple details here on the golden hanger and one simple line for the thread. Then I told you it's very quick and simple. Let's make one more together, and the rest is in your creative hands. O. 4. Blue Ornament: I decided to use blue color for this one. So this is ultramarine blue by Windsor Newton. It's a nice kind of lighter blue. I like it very much. The process is the same as last time, so we will start with drawing a circle using something like a jar or a cap. Okay, so this is my circle, and I'm also suggesting where I want my light reflections to be and the cap or hanger of the ornament. And with my pick brush, I'm carefully filling up the round shape with a blue color. Once the pluepaint is dry, I'm using blue gold this time for the hanger. You can see the difference between the red gold I used previously and the blue gold, which is lighter and cooler. And with the white ink, I'm going to decorate the ornament in a similar way as loft. So there will be some leaves coming from the top and from the bottom. But this time the stems will be longer. And now let's add some leaves. Again, just one br stroke for one leave. Because there are some spots that are maybe too empty, you can just add some simple random dots here and there. After we draw the thread with fines and brush, the card is done. Of course, there is still the space below the ornament for some Merry Christmas wish or whatever you want to write there, but I think it already looks very good. 5. 5 thank you: I must say that I very much enjoyed preparing this class. I hope you liked it too and that I managed to show you something new and interesting. I think these ornaments would also look marvelous in pink, purple, turquoise, or orange color. Maybe you decide to go for some of these less traditional colors. So let us see the results and upload the photos in the project section. Or even if you decide to go with the classic red and green, I'm always happy to see your artworks. In case you have any questions or comments, I'm here for you. Just share your thoughts in the discussion section or leave a review. I wish you the most beautiful creative holidays. Bye.