Festive Card Ideas - Watercolour

1. Festive Card Painting Intro: Hello, welcome to artists and my name is China and I'm going to be your tutor throughout this workshop. Now, it is a festive time of year and that means that we want to get creative. We want to be sending the people, we love some homemade gifts. Now, in this workshop, we're actually going to be painting our own cards. If you like watercolor and you like gift and something to your family, this is the perfect cause for you. You're going to need a few different things in this class. And I would recommend that you do have them all. If you don't, then you're just going to be painting something slightly different, but that's okay too. Feel free to pause the videos at anytime. If you want to slow it down. If you want to spend some more time on the drawing, is completely up to you. How much time you spend on them. Some of the drawings might be sped up just because there's a little bit boring listening to me talk all the time. But feel free to pause it while you get yourself to the right stage and then continue the workshop. In this workshop, you have four different cards to make. You've got that Robin, the Christmas tree, you've got the snowflake and you've also got the reef. The reef will take much longer than the rest of them. So make sure you're sat down with a really nice cup of tea or mulled wine, I give yourself a chance to really get into it. If you are a beginner, I would recommend just having a scrap piece of paper on the side, just so you can practice some little bits before you apply them to your cards. Now, you can get blank cards from many different shops, minds from hobby craft, and they seem pretty good. You might also notice that I'm actually painting on scrap pieces of card as well. And they're fine to stick on your gifted cards if you want it to. So without further adieu, good luck for the workshop. I hope your cards come out beautifully and do make sure you show us at the end. I really can't wait to see what you make. Good luck and Merry Christmas. 2. Snow Flake Demo: Hello everyone. In today's class, we are going to be looking at how to make a snowflake using masking fluid, watercolors. This is great if you want to gift people anything for the festive season, but you can also use it for anytime of year. Now, feel free to do something other than a snowflake. You can do a penguin, you could do literally anything you want. But I'm going to do a snowflakes if feel free to do it along with me. You can use a pencil to draw it beforehand and a ruler, or you can go free hand like myself, completely up to you. So grab your equipment, you'll need your masking fluid at your watercolors and was there and a paintbrush. Let's get started. Okay, so to make this card, you're gonna get your masking fluid. Now, I like to separate it from the big jar and just put it in something small just so it's easier to reach. Then what we're gonna do is we're going to apply this to our card. You can use any brush you want. I'm using the little plastic watercolor brush that came with my palette just because it's nice and strong. It has really strong bristles and it's nice and small and pointers, which just means I can get different variants in thickness in the line. So to start our snowflake, we're going to just start with a cross. And you want this to be equal in length and height, ideally straight, but mine is a little bit wonky. Snowflakes, perfectly symmetrical and balanced. So aim to do that throughout your drawing. Now you can add anything you want. You can add lines, you can add little circles. You can look online and find your own design, or you can copy mine. So I'm just going down each of these strands with alternating legs. I've got a short one along one of short one along one is short one. This is basically going to mirror on either side and the left and the right side of that vertical line. I want to try and get this pattern on both edges. So that means that it's going to have 12345 dashes. If you want, you can start in the middle. There's no real reason why I started on the outside, in hindsight is probably a bad idea. So start in the middle and work your way outwards. That might just help with the symmetry and getting the right amount of lines. I'm not sure what you call them. Arms, legs, like bits. Either way. Hopefully you get the gist. We're looking for symmetrical areas and symmetrical lines. Just keep doing this with the masking fluid. If you really wanted to, you can, you can draw with a pencil underneath. That's absolutely fine. Now, once you've done that, it shows you how much space you have in those quarters. So I've decided to pop another line. So it's as if that cross is tilted in the middle and it's gonna go slap bang in the middle of each quarter. So four lines, again trying to keep that symmetry within those shapes. Pop those on, and then we can add a bit more detail. We can mix up a little bit. Now, we can connect some of those shorter lines that we originally had. And you see I'm skipping the first dash from the center. So I'm leaving those small v shapes in the center. Then all I'm doing is extending those branches so that they stand in the next level up so that they touch that new, new crosses tilted. So this creates a really cute little star. As I move up, I'm just going to alternate some more little dashes. So again, making it interesting thinking, what can I do? To make it fun? You might want to add diamonds, you might want to add thicker Vi's. It's completely up to you. But I really liked this simplistic look with a bit of a star in the middle because I think that is quite classic of a snowflake. Just remember whatever you do. Keep doing it around the same pattern. So you're following a rule is a little bit like him and dollar, which we also have a video off in our mindful drawing class if you did it, right. So going back into that store, I'm now just adding some dots in those points. Just to add a bit of variation because there's a lot of the same dashes. So circles are really, really nice once they've done those in the store. And then just adding some randomly, so some of the dots aren't actually touching the lines at all. It's just a little bit more decoration. I think dots work really well with this kind of card. So you can pop those on there if you want. Then after that. Well, I decided to make these, they're not quite dive is not quite dry. But if you imagine there's an upside-down V-shape just closing off the top of that snowflake. It is quite difficult to get them the same. And you can see that I'm not, not so great at it. But actually I think it looks, it looks fine so you can take the pressure off and think, okay, it's not perfect. Oh, well, it's fine. It's a handmade card. Actually looks quite good. And if you really wanted to, early stages, if you wanted to draw out with pencil, you can use a ruler to really get that super, super crisp and clean. I'm following up on those shapes with some more dots. These dots, I'm actually varying in size. I'm going for a fat dot near the tip and medium-sized dots and then a very small dot. So again, it just makes it a little bit more dynamic. Then I think the final bit is just to make some of those initial lines a little bit more interesting. So adding some circles just on the tips of those. Now, you could go all the way down your strands, your legs, arms, or you can just do one of the rows. Just make sure it is following that same rule. So you could alternate one. You could alternate up and down, whatever you fancy. So in mind, I'm just doing the ones that are underneath those triangle diamond once. Then I'm getting carried away. I'm actually adding some perpendicular lines just underneath as well. I don't think it adds much to it, but it also doesn't take anything away. So I think I just really liked the, the masking fluid. It's so fun and right at the end is gonna be even better. So, yeah, this is really fun. I think that's, that's it now for this drawing. So you want to wait for this to dry. And it does dry really quickly, which is great. Once it's dry and it doesn't come off on your fingers, I want you to get clean water and just rub that on top. You don't need to push hard. You're literally just pushing water on it. You don't need to be perfect. I think actually the looser the better. But you need to think about where's my paint I'm going to go to. So you definitely want to make sure it covers all of the masking fluid. A second, we're going to add color. You want to start applying really, really wet watercolor paint. You can do this either by mixing a little bit of pigment into your palette and adding water. Or you can add the water straight to your pigment, but make sure it's really wet. And I've got a couple of variations of blue here. I've got a very vibrant blue, very cool one, and a very warm blue. And all I'm doing is picking up that color and then just dribbling it into that wet liquid and you can see how it disperses, how it mixes into the other areas. And I'm just trying to put the warm in one place, the cooling one place. So think about what colors you want and just tap your brush a couple of times. I try not to push your brush around as if you were painting it. You just want to dribble it on, tap it on because that's what's going to give you these dynamic dynamic puddles. Some of it is going to be darker, some of it is going to be lighter. And that's what we want. We want it to be super, super dynamic. Make sure that you're getting it around all of the masking fluid. Because we're going to rub the masking fluid off and it's going to leave a great contrast from the white of the paper to the color around it. So think about, think about getting it everywhere. Now the next little bit of blue I'm putting is a blue with a tiny bit of black. So it's just making it again a little bit more dynamic, loads more color, and keeping it interesting. It's looking pretty good. I'm really liking that is moving around in that water that we left. Some of it, you can see nice swirl, not top-left is not quite going to the edge of the water, but it still looks really nice if that dries out that that will look sick. So when we're nearing the end of it, you basically want to let that dry. So this needs to be completely dry before you do anything else. So make sure it's dry to the touch because when we rub off the masking fluid, we don't want we don't want the paint coming off. Once it's dry, you'll see it looks quite different. The paint has settled. You can see all the different colors. And what you wanna do is just gently rub with the side of your finger all along the masking fluid. And you'll see it start to peel off. You'll see the white starting to come through. And it's so satisfying. Oh my goodness, this is the most amazing part. You just gently rubbing through and you can see why if your paper is wet at all underneath. You can see why that could be a little bit dangerous for the artwork. So just gently rub along to get all that masking fluid off. And it looks really nice. It's such a simple and effective technique. So it's something you can easily do at home, something that you can make for somebody else and absolutely love. I really hope you enjoyed that. I hope you found that really therapeutic. And look at that. Look how cool that is. Amazing. Well, thank you very much, everybody. Thanks for joining me. And yeah, if you want to share your work, I'd love to see what other variations you make. 3. Robin: Hello and welcome to the robin painting class. We're going to use warm colors in this one. We don't need anything else, just your watercolors and your brush and a pencil. We're going to start off with a bit of an outline and then we're gonna be working wet on wet. So that means lots of clean water in your sections. And we're hoping for those edges to blend naturally without having to do any work to itself. So just watch out for your colors and makes sure that bright, makes sure they're super, super wet. And makes sure you're leaving different areas of light and dark. Feel free to pause the video anytime. Hopefully, that will help you just to make the rubbing your own. And I really can't wait to see what you make at the end of it. So in this class, you are going to start off with an outline. So grab your pencil. I would recommend a to B, HB, just a box ended pencil so that it doesn't blend too much with the artwork. We're going to start off with the shape of it. So you'll see that the spine is fairly straight because that's where the back of the bird is. We want to emphasize the curvature of the bird on the front. So really try and round off the head and make sure that belly is much bigger than the head. Once you've done that, just add a little bit of a tail and you want to have a bit of a beak. So making sure that it comes into the feathers itself on the head. This just shows that the mouth is on the bird. Next you want to add the feet. So you've got two little lines that are pointing towards the bottom right. And then the feet are a little bit tricky. So take your time with them. They look a bit scary to be honest, and a little bit like tree branches. But what I'll do is I'll post this video just for a few seconds when the outline is done and definitely download the attachment as well just so you can spend a bit of time. I'm getting the outline ready because that's the most important. Now once you done the outside of the bird, you want to work in the middle. So we just want to get a very faint outline going across the back that this shapes around the head and shapes around the back. This just shows a bit of separation from the dark feathers on the back and the light area in the middle. So just add some lines there. And then of course we go to add an eyes. So just draw yourself a little circle in that gap on the head. See that there's a space that fits it perfectly. Now, don't draw it too low like I just did. Which is fine. I've just put mine a little bit more to the right and then I'll just rub it out very shortly so that I can have a nice-looking bird rather than one that's had a really tough winter. The phone of it is just to get a little bit of outline there on the belly to separate the feathers on the head to that lovely belly underneath. So pop that in. I'll pause the video for a second. You can pause it as well if you need a bit longer. Okay? So once you're happy with your outline, you can stop painting. So all I'm gonna do is wet my bed. And I'm just wetting that light areas so the bit where the eye is and you'll notice that I actually haven't rubbed out any of the mistakes because the paint should cover it. So if you've done the same, then it's probably better idea to rub out to be honest, but you'll see that it can blend it once your your area is wet or you're going to do is pick up a very loose yellow and just dab it on. I'm not spreading my brush. Just dab, dab, dab dabbing in a very, very wet surface. You'll also notice that I've just picked up a slightly darker yellow, so it's more golden yellow. And that's just going in there as well to create a bit of texture and a bit of dynamic illness within the area. We're looking for. Very textured. And it just making sure that you'll paint when you're adding it in is nice and wet because this is going to give the illusion of feathers. And when it dries, it's going to, well, it's going to actually help to blend in a little bit better with its neighbors. So I'm just adding a slightly dark yellow now, more of a yellow ocher with a tiny bit of dark red, so not brown because Brown can really kill the colors. Again, just dabbing that around, trying to make that a little bit more interesting. And then finally, just going around the edge with a nice red so you'll see what you can see quite easily, how red and how wet the paint is. I've just gone over the eye but I can still see it. But you might notice that we can't really see the mistake. Well, the pencil mistake that's underneath. So it's really, really nice and we've got the lightest bit right in the middle. So when it comes to the red and the dark areas, just do that on the line that meets the inside. Edges of the other sections of the bird. So not on the right hand side but just the inside edges. Next we want to do is wet the back of the bird. And I'm only just gently knocking into the area that we've just done that pose, some of that paint that we've just applied pulls it into that section so it makes a nice blend, but you'll see that I'm not overworking it. I'm doing a couple of strokes. And then I'm putting my paintbrush back to get some more paint. The color I've mixed here is a bit of purple, a bit of dark blue, a tiny bit of yellow ocher. So it makes this nice. Purply brown rather than just straight brown, is nice and dark on the tail. And then it's a little bit lighter near the top. So that's mixed in really nicely with the edge. Once you've done that, you want to move into that button belly of the bird. Again, we make it nice and wet and I've not quite touch the orange that we first did, but that will come in a second. So this bit because it's white, I don't want to leave it just white because that's boring. It doesn't really do much. So instead of just adding a very, very light, light relu, purple. And again, you'll see that I'm just touching the edges of that orange that we did. It just blends ever so nicely and I don't want to overwork this again. I want to let the water do its thing because that's naturally going to try and mix itself. It's going to pull from the pressure of the orange and then pull it down into the blue. So try not to go too dark with a blue here and try not to touch too much along the border there with the yellow. You just want to gently, gently encourage it to do its thing. And then it will naturally create a really nice area. Now you don't have to do this in one go. You could do it in a couple of different stages. You can let it dry and then you can repeat it again if you find that your colors aren't vibrant enough. So it depends how you've done it. When you're happy with the belly, you'll see that there's a lovely light area right in the middle. You can go into your feet. So with this one, I don't actually want that to blend too much, so I'm being a bit more careful with the edge. Make sure it doesn't go into the bird itself. But this gives you a nice thick dark color. It could literally be any dark, so long as it is way darker than the rest of your bird. So once you've done your feet and you're happy with the little close. Remember the quite skinny at the end, much thicker towards the middle of the foot. We want to just finish up the detail now, the beak and the eye. Now I just touched it to check that it was dry because I actually, again, do not want this to blend in. So do make sure your yellow is completely bone dry. Before you do this. Then you're just going to paint really dark underneath the mouse. So I experimented with a dark blue, not the one, but a dark purple. Maybe a little bit of black would be good into there. That's going to help with with your beak. And then just a tiny little bit of a nostril there. Then moving on to the eye, you just wanna get a nice dark black for this and you can fill it in, but you could also leave a little glint, so a tiny little space just to show that it is a shiny surface. Then that my friends is the end of the robin video. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you're gonna make lots of festive cards with the people you love. And I hope you really had fun with it too. So don't forget to show your picture to the class. I'd love to see what you've done and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much. 4. Christmas Tree Watercolour: Hello, Welcome to this festive tree painting watercolor class. In today's session, we're gonna be using masking fluid. So if you've not used this before, you're in for a real treat. If you don't have masking fluid, you can just do it free hand, but you have to be very, very careful. But I would advise you get some masking fluid because it's super cheap. It's like two or three pound for a bottle and it will last you such a long time. So grab your paints, grab your wards colors, tape your paper down, and let's get started. Okay, so let's start. Make sure first of all that your paper is taped down. Grab your water colors. And your kit might come with one of these brushes where it holds the water in the bass. Now you can use this. There's nothing wrong with using this *******, but I'm going to have that on standby and I'm just going to use a normal brush as I usually would. I have my dry rag and my water set ready. So make sure you have a pencil and let's start with that. So make sure you've got all your materials ready. And then we can begin with the outline. Now. For the Christmas tree, we don't want it to look perfect. So just pay attention to the direction that the branches are going in. And you'll see that I'm almost curving upwards and there's a slight bend in some of the branches. Now I'm going to do two trees. So I want them to be different levels and I'm just starting at the top. Just to get that nice point. Remember, a characteristic of trees is that they are nice and skinny on the top and they are quite wide and fat on the bottom. So we want to make sure that as we're traveling down without branches, that the base of both of the trees is getting nice and chunky at the bottom. Now, I like to work with both my edges at the same time because it just helps me to make sure I'm getting that thickness that I'm after. If I do one at a time, sometimes my brain can't quite work with that. But you might be different. You might prefer to do one tree fully and then you might prefer to draw the other tree behind that in its own right. So do it whatever feels most comfortable to you. You'll notice that mine is just slightly to the left. It's not ideal to be fair. But I'm actually going to pop something on the right-hand side later on. So I'm not too worried about this. So if you'll just slightly to the left like mine, don't worry, because we're going to add a little bit of decoration in the right-hand side on the gap. Now, I just wanted to make sure that both of my trees are different levels because we do have one in the foreground. I'm actually, there's three trees, but you won't be able to tell. So I just wanted to add a little bit of leveling and I've been a bit lazy. I didn't know about my messy law. So apologies for that one that cuts through the middle and the right hand side. Then finally, we have a star, so just drawn a nice star on the right hand side. And this is going to look a bloody lovely. So you're just looking for that to be quite symmetrical, if you can. Now, once you're happy with the outline, feel free to rub out any lines that are messy. But with mine, you won't be able to see it. So I'm not too worried about that. You want to grab your masking fluid. Now, if you haven't worked with this before, the trick with this is to work fairly quickly because it does draw incredibly quick. Because it's blue. It means that we can see it nice and easily on our drawing. So I'm just using my brush here to go around the edges. And I want to make it fairly thick so that if my brush, when I add color later goes over it, it gives me a bit more of a buffer. Apply this around the outside of your tree, not the inside, so that we can put loads of paint in the middle. The thing with masking fluid, it does like to stick to your bristles. So that's the main reason why I want to work quick. If my brush is constantly wet with the fluid, then it's not going to just draw and keep this, I guess is a plastic base liquids. But when it dries in your brushes, a real nightmare to get out. So if I just keep dipping it in the fluid, then it's just going to make sure it's still active. And as soon as I'm done with the outside, I can then give it a quickly and that means the brush is saved and won't be damaged. I really hate it when I damage a brush, so do be careful. But oh my goodness, this is such a satisfying technique. So you can get masking fluid from anywhere -0 Mojave craft. It was quite cheap. It might have been three pounds for a very decent portion. I like to just decant into smaller jars and use it from the lid because it's just much easier to get to. Having to dip your brush in anything big is dangerous. First of all, you don't know how much you're going to put on the brush. It could be way too much. But second of all, it means you can easily knock it over and cleaning this would be a nightmare, so try to avoid it if you can. Now we're getting narrower at the end of the tree, which is great. After this, which is going to pop some around that star. Half of it is for fun just to add a little bit extra of masking fluid. But the other half is because it's quite a skinny star. So I wanted to just create some barriers for myself. But you could also draw this star with a marker if you wanted to. But I wanted to just keep using the fun stuff. So I went around the store that now I did notice that my brush has stolons get a little bit congealed. So all I'm doing is giving it a good clean, taking away that water so that it's not gonna go into my masking fluid and then my legs a little bit dry. So just pouring the excess back in because the final bit that we need to do with the masking fluid, it's just a couple of little snowflakes, but all I'm doing is getting a bit of masking fluid and dotting it around my tree. I'm trying to get different textures. So a thick size and thin size, slightly different shapes so that it looks really snowy and really unique. So I'm trying not to get things too symmetrical. So just some little snowflakes around. Don't think about them in terms of like perfect snowflakes. Just try and get some different textures and then wash your brush. As I said, it's super quick to dry. So I bet that literally have to do in your brush, pop your finger on the masking fluid and see if it comes off on your finger. It shouldn't do, but if it does, just give it a few more seconds. Now, once we've done that, we want to add a layer of clear water to our tree. So you can see on the camera at how much water I'm putting you on, you can see that there's a solid shine in that area. I am being careful in my branches to try not to go outside of the masking fluid. Even though it is creating a barrier, I still want to be a little bit careful not to get it on the outside. So work your way around the tree just adding some clear water. This means we're working wet on wet. What I wanna do on the side is just get some colors. So I've just selected a few colors that I'm going to keep to make sure my tree is consistent. The first one is a nice blues, so it's an ultramarine blue with a tiny bit of dark green just to soften that color a little bit because obviously a tree isn't blue. But I just wanted to throw a bunch of different colors in there that are dynamic but not too crazy. So starting off with a blue patch up at the top, and then I'm just going to start to add some green so you can see how the color changes. But because I've mixed it in with a little bit of the blue, it still works because it's basically saying that we're in the same family, but we've just had another child. I didn't know if that makes sense, but if you keep the same colors, but you add more blue, we add more green, then it just keeps a consistency that you don't have any crazy colors that are just not quite working and keeps him keeps it quite nice. I keep working your way around the tree and the water underneath that just basically gives us festival a bit more time. If we have a wet base and that means we can keep those soft edges. If I'll paint dries, we end up with these really strong, hard edges. So that's not what we want. Really soft blending between the colors. We want to go right up into the branches. So try and make sure that you do have enough liquid on your page and it's never too late at a little bit more water. So keep working around this and just play with the colors, play with the balances. Do you want more green? Do you want more blue? Do you want it to be darker? Because remember, when this dries, it's going to be quite a bit lighter, significantly lighter. So we want to make sure that at this stage we're adding enough color and we're adding enough texture. So I'm really pleased with it at the minute actually because you can start to see the paint is blending in with each other. Sometimes you do want to just clean your brush to get a fresh fresh coat of color depending on what you're after. Or maybe you just want to have a bit of a, a bit of an empty brush as well. So that's looking really nice and just adding a few more flex because you can start to see where the color is becoming a bit dull. So make sure you're not afraid to make things darker or mixing those colors a bit more. I think that's gonna be a really nice touch. When it all dries. That's gonna be the fun stuff. So definitely make sure you make the most of your time now. I'm really happy with that green at the end. Oh, is it blue? So I could talk? Aqua. Bloody lovely. Okay. Once that's done, clean your brush, you can let that dry. We can just start. On the star, so we want a nice dark color here. I've mixed a dark version of that blue that we will use in. Again, it keeps it consistent. But actually I'm going to add a little bit of black as well, just so that it does stand out a bit more from the actual tree itself. So I'm just going to pop that in. And luckily, I've got those edges in the masking fluid because that really helps, especially in a very small area. So let that dry and you can see the difference. When I switched to the dry version, you can see it just takes away a little bit of that color. So this is why it's really important to get that from the get-go. So once it's dry and it has to be bone dry, you will start to rub your masking fluid off so you don't need to rub too hard just in case your paint is a little bit damp. And so sad, my style is actually a little bit rubbish. But I'm going to use my other brush lay around. So I'm not too worried. Just enjoy rubbing the masking fluid off because it is so satisfying. I cannot tell you how satisfying is. No need to get your nails involved. No need to do any weird peeling. Just gently rub it as if you've just got a little bit of tomato sauce on your leg and you're just trying to wrap that up. That's the consistency we're looking for. Nothing too aggressive. You can see some really, really nice edges going on. And when we start to rub in the middle, that's when these little flecks of white come through from the paper. So really, really good effect. It's like Christmas has arrived. So I'm just going back to that brush that we had at the start and you notice I didn't have to dip it. I'm just gently squeezing the top of the brush and that's releasing a little bit of water for me to mix into my colors. I'm just using this brush because it's quite a sharp point. And because it's not soft, it doesn't really ruin the bristles. So I'm just going to use that to go over the star itself. This is a much nicer effect. So just pumping that on and just adding loss and that a couple of extra little lines. There we go. That's quite nice, isn't it? I didn't know is that there was a few little snowflakes in the middle that I actually couldn't see. So it's best just to rub your finger over probably the whole thing if you can't see them, just to get those little white splotches coming through. Now, you can leave the painting at this stage if you want, um, or you can get a hero or felt tip or something dark. And you could just write a little message underneath. I think with mine I wrote nowhere else. So I'm just going to pop that final picture at the end just so you can see an option. You could write somebody's name whatever you want. But this is a really, really fun technique and I do hope you enjoyed that because I bloody loved it. Has a nice BIG shot of Noel at the end. So hopefully there's a bit of inspiration. Feel free to check out the other types of festive cards that we've done for this year. And if I don't hear from you, I'll see you next year. Happy Christmas. 5. Wreath Painting Vide: Hello, my name is China and welcome to Authors. And in this session I'm going to show you how to paint a wreath using watercolor. This is great if you want to gift it to someone as a present or as a card, or if you just wanna do it for yourself, you're going to learn lots of techniques and how to actually paint leaves. So I'd recommend that you have a piece of paper on the side to practice your leaves before you commit to your artwork. The last thing you wanna do is practice your leaves on the artwork and actually I'm not too happy with them. So give them a go on a separate piece of paper and then you can apply it to your painting. So make sure you've got your equipment and make sure your water is clean. You've got your dry rag, you've got your brush, your paper is taped down. Finally, have fun with this. And I do hope that at the end, you're going to show us exactly what you've done. I always say to my students, things look better the next day. So let it dry, walk away from it, grab a cup of tea, come back and you're going to be super, super proud of yourself. Good luck everybody. And I can't wait to see what you've made at the end. Once you're all set up, grab your pencil and we're just going to draw a circle on a page. This is just a reference point for us to paint a circle, so it doesn't have to be perfect. You can do it free hand or you can grab a plate and you can draw around that. But I'm going to leave a little open-end in the top-right corner just to make it a little bit more dynamic, you can obviously closures, but I think this looks really nice. Once you've done that, you are going to grab your paints. Now for our first layer, I want you to make your colors really, really watery. So I'm applying lots of water. And then I'm just making a mix of colors from the range of my greens and blues. Nothing too bright, but nothing to Dell. So think of a medium-sized of green. Now, when you're ready, you want to add these leaves that are just using one brush stroke. The tip is placed down on the brush, is then pushed further into the paper to create these round ends and pointy beginnings. Feel free to practice that on a side piece of paper. Before. If you're ready, we're going to make the next bit of our painting. So I'm making this a tiny bit darker, but it's still nice and wet. So just watch as I apply the brush so I get the tip on the end. Then I push the brush further down and give it a little bit of a wiggle. So this creates a thinner and both the top and the bottom and the middle is nice and fat. So I would definitely recommend practicing this one on a side piece of paper is really nice, really, really nice leaf to do. I'm just moving up on the right-hand side after that and adding little bit of blue. These are just gonna be normal shaped leaves that you might see or you might paint naturally. So we want it to be nice and chunky in the middle and pinched at either end. So you can literally just draw this with a brush and some leaves. You can leave a little line in the middle because that just looks like there's a highlight which I think is really nice. It doesn't matter if you have paint that's a little bit thicker at the top or the bottom. I think it adds a bit more of a dynamic element to it. So feel free to make either end a little bit more denser. Now we've got three different layers. So whilst the first two are drying, I'm just going to start with this technique on the left. So first, I want to get a really rough circle with paint. And immediately I want to fill that with clean water so you can see that I'm just picking that up and I'm just dabbing it in there. That's basically pushing the paint to the sides. So once I'm happy with how much water is on there, I will draw my brush and then just place the brush in the middle to soak up that paint. We're going to do a few of these so they're not gonna be the same shape. We're imagining that leaves are on this side, that they're facing different ways. But it's that same technique. So apply the color with the watercolor, dip in some clean water to make a really, really heavy water bubble, and then soak it up with that dry brush. Then if you want to add a little bit more of a dynamic touch, you can pick up a bit of color that's darker and less water and just dot that right on the bottom of the leaf. So this is going to blend into your lovely watery leaf there. We're going to do a few of these, which is great practice. Hopefully you've tried this on the side piece of paper first. And we're just changing the shape of these leaves. Then not the typical leaf shape that we just did there a little bit round. They're a little bit unsymmetrical. They're not perfect. And I think that's really nice about this leaf and also this technique. So we're starting to also overlayer on the previous layer that we have. Now to make sure that you can do that, do make sure that your wards color underneath is dry. And you can tell it's dry it by touching it with your hand. If it comes off, that means it's still wet. And if it feels damp, that means it's still wet too. So do make sure that it's room temperature and is not coming off on your hands. Okay, so let's jump to the right-hand side. Again. We're layering just like before. And it was starting off with a bit of a central branch. All I'm doing for this is getting the tip of my brush on the stem and then pulling back ever so slightly on the other side. I'm just going to match that so that it's almost creating like a V-shape, pulling back from where it connects at the stem and then the ends are tiny bit fatter than the center. And this is gonna be quite natural with your brush. Again, you can add a tiny bit of darker paint just in the leaves to make it a bit more dynamic. Or you can leave it and let the natural paint do what it wants. Now the next part, you will notice the color is starting to get a little bit thicker and a little bit more bright. So the saturation has increased a little bit. All I want to do is basically fill in this gap. I'm just taking away some of the paint in some of the color at the base is just to try and make it a little bit more dynamic. So let's add something that comes off the reef. So this is just a branch that is slightly bent and it's coming downwards. You'll notice that I'm staggering my mini branches so they're not touching it together at the stem. They're actually alternating. After that, I'm just adding some tiny little dots just to make it different to any leaf that we've done before. And I think that's quite a nice touch to once we've done that, we can just start to fill in some of the areas now, I don't really know what this is, but it was a really nice technique that I saw. It's almost like little bundles of hay and they've just been dusted around going in slightly different directions facing the way that the reef is going and it's a little bit lighter. So I quite like that because later I'm just going to make that darker on top. It's going to get a little bit more interesting. So we're going to add some berries. I've gone for a bright orangey yellow. And I'm just drawing these three little circles that actually have a tiny bit of white of the paper showing through. Just to show that this is reflective. Once I have that, then I'm just adding a few little branches that don't quite touch the berries because they didn't want the green to blend in. We will do some more later, but for now, we're actually going to add another layer of this watery technique that we had just in the bottom left there. So add a few more leaves, spice up your color a little bit, make them slightly different. The layering, and this is going to look stunning, but just remember, you do have to make sure it's dry. And to be fair, it probably will be by the time you've got round to it. So just make sure that your leaves aren't looking perfect, but they are nice and round and chunky and staying With the technique that we have underneath it. Once you've done that, we're going to mix a darker color. So we're going to add some holly. This is going to go right in the bottom of our painting. Now I remember painting Holly at school or at least drawing it. And it's this weird six curve edges that kind of fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. But just find a holly leaf on line, maybe give that a little practice, but they're super nice and easy to paint. And then you just want to fill them in with a nice dark green. Obviously, Holly has berries, so I'm just using the same technique as the yellow barriers, but with a bright red That's going to drive. But you see how nice that kind of fits in at the bottom of the paper. Once I've done that, I just want to actually close up the top of the reef a little bit more, so not fully, but just a little bit more. I'm going for some organics of waves. His, I'm just using the tip of the brush to make the drawing. So I'll let that dry. Now let's move to the right and I'm actually going to add some more of those yellow Berries Just to pick up the color a little bit and keep it quite interesting. So I'm just going to do full berries in the top right. And then I'm going to add some of those little stems as well. So they're not touching the barriers and keeping a little bit of a gap and they all coming out of the reef. Once I've done that, I'm just adding a very faint line in the middle of my holly that just makes it a little bit more dynamic. And once I've done that, I'm actually going for a purple. So this berry section on the bottom left is slightly more obscure so you can put them anywhere. Then you can make your stems fit around it so nature is unpredictable and so are all stems and our berries. So just a little bundle there on the bottom left. Moving on from that, making sure that my layer is dry, I'm just going to do another branch that's reaching out. This one, I'm doing the tip of the brush on the left and the outside of the stem and then pulling that towards the center with a little bend halfway through. So just missing the angle of the camera head. But do look at the reference pictures that are attached to the video. And hopefully you can see that style and technique. Once we've done this, we'll move back over to the right-hand side. You'll notice that I'm actually just jumping from left to right, top to bottom to try and get a nice balance. These leaves are really cute. They remind me of Mendelian leaves, so it's a nice fat base and then it's a very curved and pointed top. So I just want to take away a bit of color from that to make it fit in. You'll find that there are a couple of gaps like mine. What I want you to do is just fill in these gaps with random leaves. You can look online or you can just make them up. And you can also go darker on these little bundles within your painting. So nice and dark to get a bit of contrast, you can add a couple more to fill in the gaps. But you can see it looks really nice and really, really colorful. You can also think about adding different types of berries. So I'm gonna go for one of those long droopy barriers which I think are red and I have no idea what they're called. But just adding to these really gives it a little bit more color and a little bit more structure. Then even going to add more Holly. So a tiny, wholly different color in a different place. I think Holly really is a Christmas Eve touched. So you can add more of these if you want, or you can add lesser than you could take it away completely. That's up to you. Work around your painting now thinking, okay, what can I add in? Do I want to add some more stems? Do I want to alternate my leaves? Do I want to get some more layers? Is there any colors that I can increase? It's completely up to you, how you work it. This is your reef. This is just a guide, but I really do hope that this guide was helpful for you. If you paint these for your loved ones, I promise they will absolutely love them. And just remember to let it dry because things always look better the next day. So happy Christmas everybody. And I do hope you have a very wonderful festive time however you celebrate. I hope you enjoyed this repainting class or do share what you make because I cannot wait to see them. Have a good one folks.