Fun With Watercolor: Winter Wreath | Kolbie Blume | Skillshare
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Fun With Watercolor: Winter Wreath

teacher avatar Kolbie Blume, Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      0:51

    • 2.

      Warm Up

      8:22

    • 3.

      Practice: Pine Needles

      7:18

    • 4.

      Practice: Branches

      5:50

    • 5.

      Practice: Mistletoe Leaves

      8:17

    • 6.

      Practice: Holly

      18:04

    • 7.

      Final Project, Part 1

      15:43

    • 8.

      Final Project, Part 2

      6:42

    • 9.

      Final Project, Part 3

      8:32

    • 10.

      Final Project, Part 4

      13:33

    • 11.

      Final Project, Part 5

      5:25

    • 12.

      Recap

      2:08

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About This Class

Looking to add the perfect handmade touch to your holiday greetings this year? Paint with me in this holiday-inspired watercolor course to create a perfectly woodsy winter wreath! 

This class is great for painters of all levels! 

Meet Your Teacher

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Kolbie Blume

Artist

Top Teacher

 

 

If you're pretty sure you're terrible at art...

...you're in the right place, my friend. 

 

 

Hi there! My name is Kolbie, and I'm a full-time artist, writer, and online educator -- but up until a few years ago, I was working a 9-5 desk job and thought my artistic ability maxed out at poorly-drawn stick figures. 

In my early 20s, I stumbled on mesmerizing Instagram videos with luminous watercolor paintings and flourishing calligraphy pieces, and ... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Kolbie and I love watercolor. I especially love to watercolor around the holidays because it just brings so much joy and it's a great way to de-stress and relax when things can get a little bit busy and stressful. Today we're going to learn how to paint this winter themed watercolor wreath, complete with pine needles and holly berries and mistletoe and it would be the perfect addition to any painting session, any holiday decoration, collection, or even for you to make some fun handmade cards for friends and families. If you want to learn how to paint a holiday wreath, then keep watching and I can't wait to see what you come up with. 2. Warm Up: Welcome to the warm-up video for my watercolor holiday wreath class. Before we get started on learning to paint all of the different elements in this wreath, I thought we'd just do some very quick warm-ups. The sun just started shining into my window, so if you saw a change of light there, that's what's happening. Here comes the sun. That was silly. For this class, we are mostly going to be focusing on the wet-on-dry technique. The wet-on-dry technique is when you use watercolor to paint on a dry surface. Because we're mostly using the wet-on-dry technique and not so much the wet-on-wet, which I frequently feature the wet-on-wet technique in my other classes, as you might imagine, this class is mostly focused on the specific details that's going to go into the different parts of the wreath we're going to paint. So here's an example of that wreath again. As you can see, we have a few different foliage elements and we have some berries and some branches in here. I think the cool part about all of these elements coming together is getting some of the details right so that they all look bright and festive when they're put together. That's not to say you have to get them exactly right every time. I am a big fan of considering watercolor a forgiving medium because you need to really lean into the chaos and the creativity if you want to get the most out of watercolor and that's tangent for a different day. But there are some tips and tricks that you can use to help you get the details exactly right. First of all, is you're warming up. I always think it's a good idea to practice pressure on the brushes that you're using. This is my size number one brush that I'm going to be using for a lot of the small details, particularly for painting the pine needles when we get to those. If you don't have this size, that's okay, but get whatever smallest paintbrush that you have, and just practice going really thin, painting really thin lines, and then going really thick also. This actually is a brush-stroking calligraphy. I think it's called the compound stroke. I like to practice this squiggle line when I'm practicing pressure for brushstrokes because it's an easy pattern and it encourages me to go as thin as I can on the upstroke and then as thick as I can on the downstroke. [NOISE] The trick here and why I like to practice between thin and thick is because I think that it's easy to paint lines that are medium thickness. It's harder to paint lines that are really thin. You have to use barely any pressure at all. In order to get our pine needles just right, we want our lines to be very thin when we paint them. So I would practice different thicknesses and then figuring out exactly how much pressure you need to get these really thin lines. Note that you can, we'll talk about this when we do our practice pine needle class, but you can paint them slowly like this to get them as soon as you want. Or you can even practice painting them really quick like this just so you can paint the pine needles a little faster. I'll talk more about that in that specific class. But that is one of the warm-ups that I would do. I would do some of these squiggly lines to practice thin and thick, to see how much pressure you need. I would practice painting thin lines slowly and practice painting them quickly to see how much pressure you need there also. [NOISE] For a lot of the elements in the wreath, there's one particular brushstroke that I think will be helpful to practice. Brushstroke meaning movement of your brush, and that is turning your brush around like this. Before we end this class, I'm going to give you a different angle of that brushstroke so that you're not just seeing the top of my paintbrush. But basically, to paint berries and also to paint the mistletoe leaves, we want a rounded leaf or a rounded shape, and one of the best ways to paint rounded things, obviously, you can still paint it this way, but instead of trying to move your bristles in a hard direction, sometimes they don't want to move that way and they jump back and forth and whatever. It's easier to bring your paintbrush around like this and make a circle by moving your paintbrush in an actual circle instead of drawing one if that makes sense. To practice this brushstroke, you start at the bottom with your handle, your paintbrush handle pointing towards the bottom. Then you move your hand in a circle so that you move the bristles around in a circle like that. That's one brushstroke that's really helpful to use to practice as we are going to learn to paint these leaves. Before we move on, stay tuned for a quick demonstration of that brushstroke from an angle so you can see it a little bit better. Thanks for hanging in there. Now here is that rounded brushstroke at an angle. I'm starting with my brush down and then moving the bristles around like that. I do that by keeping the bristles down on the paper and moving my hand so that they never leave the paper. Then if I'm trying to make a circle, then I will just fill it in like this. I've done this stroke a few different times in some of my other Skillshare classes, so if you've taken my bouquet leaves Skillshare class, or if you've taken my loose florals Skillshare class, we've talked about the stroke before, but just in case you haven't, I'll demonstrate it one more time. The trick is to keep the bristles on the paper and move them around in a circle so that they don't want to jump away from the circle and ruin the shape that you're trying to make. That's why this can be helpful. This stroke can be helpful, but if it's just as helpful for you to paint it normally, to paint a circle like this, then you can go ahead and do that. My recommendation, if you're going to draw the circle like you would with a pencil, is to use a lot of water when you are trying to make rounded edges. That's my recommendation, and this wraps up our warm-up class. Before any painting, I usually like to warm up for 10 maybe minutes. If you think that's enough to get you loose, then I would recommend doing that and I will see you in the next video as we begin our practice sessions. 3. Practice: Pine Needles: Okay, so you've had a chance to warm up a little bit, and now we're going to start practicing all of the elements that we are putting together to form this holiday wreath. You can see there's a lot going on here. The first thing we're going to practice is painting these pine needles, like these branches or sprigs if you will, of needles off of a pine tree or any kind of fur tree that has needles instead of leaves. I've done a lot of classes on painting pine trees as a whole. I have a Loose Pines class where I go over eight different ways to paint loose watercolor forms of pine trees. I have a Misty Forest class and Monochrome Forest class and in all of those, we learned how to paint trees that look like this, that are like the actual pine trees. This is the blobby technique if you've taken any of my classes. More of a loose form of pine tree, but for this wreath, we're zooming in on the needles and painting it slightly more realistic, so it's still loose style. We're still not putting tons of emphasis on the very specific details, but we are focusing on a little bit of detail and that is to emphasize the needle. Like I talked about in the warm-up class when I told you to practice thin and thick lines, specifically learning the difference between and getting a handle on how much pressure you need to get really thin lines, we're going to use that practice to paint pine needles. Here's the basic gist of painting a pine needle or a sprig of pine needles. We're going to paint the stem or the branch or whatever is holding the pine needle together, and then basically on either side of the stem, we're just going to paint a bunch of these very thin, light pine needles all the way down like that. There are two tricks to this. First, keep them very thin, and second, make sure they're not all parallel. Also so that they're not all completely straight. I think that pine needles look more realistic when they're wacky and crazy and all on top of each other and that's really the effect that we're going for here. I'll probably do another side angle of this just so you can see if my hand is covering the pine needle right here. I'll do this one side like this and then all. If you stay for a second, I will change the angle so that you can see the needles from a different angle. We painted one side with that bird's eye view that I like to do, and now, I just want to show you the other side so that you can maybe see the brush a little bit better. Again, I'm just painting very thin lines. I'm using a number one brush, but you could even go as small as zero or smaller than that. From the other side, I started from the stem going outward, but you can also start from the outside and go towards the stem. I like to go fast, partly because I think that when I go slow, like what I was doing up here, when I go slow, I tend to make thicker lines accidentally. When I go fast, knowing that I need to go quick, I barely put any pressure on it. As you can tell by the fact that I miss the paper sometimes because I'm barely putting any pressure on this to put on the paper. But when I do that, it also creates the effect that the needles are going a little bit more crazy and on top of each other. In order to emphasize the fact that these are needles and not leaves, it's important to have space in between them. That's why the thin lines are pretty crucial to make these sprigs look like actual sprigs of pine needles, as opposed to just like very small leaves. You need the space in between the lines so that people can tell their needles. That is one side from that angle and that pretty much sums up this Pine Needles lesson. Once you have mastered the very thin lines and you've mastered, you can do them slowly or quickly, however you want, it's just easier for me when I do them quickly to make them look crazy and there's a lot of them also and they're actually in nature and have that chaotic look. Once you've decided what your preferred method is, when we do our actual wreath, we're going to do sprigs of just one long one like this. Or you can even add a second branch or two on those longer sprigs, just to add a little bit of diversity and extra composition to these pine needles. The one thing that you want to keep in mind is that generally, there's a point at the end of each branch. Very similar to when we paint pine trees, I always say to keep this point at the top, I would recommend doing that, and if you don't keep it, like if you accidentally put your pine needles at the top when you're doing your pine needles, that's okay. I would just recommend bringing it up a little, filling it out a bit more so that you still have that point at the top. Your sprigs of pine needles have all different kinds of shapes to them, but generally, this straight stem style with the pine needles pointing in this direction. Just to recap, you can paint your needles from the stem outward or from outward toward the stem, whichever way is the most helpful for you to get very thin lines. I would practice and figure out what your best method is, and then, we will move on to branches. 4. Practice: Branches: We practiced our pine needles and now we're going to practice painting just plain branches. This is probably going to be more of a quick video because branches are honestly just as easy, in my opinion as they sound. You really just need to pick up your brown paint and paint a line. The trick with making them look like branches and not just brown lines is to first of all, make sure the line you paint isn't even. You don't want a line that looks like this and that has a little bump in there, but you don't want a line that's particularly even you want it to be a little wonky. Not like squiggly because that doesn't really look like a branch. Branches have bumps. It's not like you pick up a branch and your stick is perfectly straight. It has a little bit of shape and curvature to it in some places. It's not always the same thickness throughout. You want to keep that in mind when you're painting your branches. We're going to talk more about that when we actually paint the wreath but your branches can be straight or they can be a little curved because sometimes with wreathes branches, we do curve the branches a little bit. But you just want to make sure either way you're not making it look very squiggly because they're flexible to an extent but they still pretty much hold their shape so you want to try to mimic that when you're making the branches. That even if it's curved, it's only curved a little bit and you can almost see the tension in them if that makes sense. One tip to making branches look a little bit more branch-like or to give them a little bit of texture is to paint them in two strokes. I like to do that with this wreath especially. If you're painting a branch, you can do one stroke that has a little bit of a wobble to it and then finish off the branch by leaving a little bit of white space throughout the stroke like that. This is a thicker branch, but by leaving some white space so like when you're doing the second stroke by sometimes touching it to the branch and sometimes moving away from the first one you did and just intentionally leaving some of this white space, it creates the illusion that there's more colors going on, that the bark is doing something interesting. This is a very loose watercolor style where if you've taken my loose florals class, I talk about this a lot where we use white space intentionally to create diversity with what you're painting to create depth or detailing in whatever subject you're painting without actually having to paint the specific details. That's one thing that you can do with branches that I have really enjoyed experimenting with by using multiple strokes to create this white space. One thing I want you to pay attention to is to make sure that in conjunction with what else is on the wreath, you're not painting a log basically you want to paint a pretty thin branch. This is probably too thick, at least in my opinion, and we'll talk more about that more when we do the actual wreath. But this guy right here is about as thick as I like to go. Before we move on, when I put my branches on the wreath, sometimes I like to paint multiple that are on top of each other like this especially if I want them to stay mostly straight, to change the direction of the wreath. Instead of making them very curved in a circle, you could try painting some straighter branches but on top of each other like this that form the basic shape of a circle and use that to help shape your wreath. I keep saying we'll talk more about that when we paint the wreath and we will. [LAUGHTER] That's pretty much my tutorial on branches. You could similar to pine needles, not just paint one stick but paint little offshoots or whatever those are called from the stick because not all branches are just one straight stick, they often have little sprigs or tendrils coming off of them. You can keep that in mind and that can be other fun little details to add. But branches are pretty simple but when it comes to a winter wreath, adding that brown in there and adding those bare branches, I think is a really nice addition to signal the fact that we're trying to paint winter, we're trying to capture winter in this wreath. That is the branches tutorial. Now let's move on to mistletoe leaves. 5. Practice: Mistletoe Leaves: Welcome back. We practiced painting the pine needles for our wreath, and we practiced painting the branches for our wreath. Now we're going to move on to the mistletoe leaves, which if you look at this wreath here, are the leaves that are a little bit rounded at the end. I had to look this up the difference between holly leaves and mistletoe leaves. I'm pretty sure that holly leaves based on my intense Google searching, holly leaves are the ones that are more pointed, which we will practice in the next video. The mistletoe leaves are the ones that curve a little bit. You can find mistletoe in sprigs like this, where there are a bunch of leaves on a stem. I'm just going to quickly paint some of these. I'm trying to use that stroke that we talked about where are you could do a rounded edge of the leaf like that in one stroke as opposed to what I did for this one where I had to paint it into, but you can do both styles if you want. Maybe I'll demonstrate both of those in just a second. But either way, a mistletoe leaf, the sprig can look like this, where there's a bunch of them altogether on one stem, or you can paint them separately more like this. I like to do a combination of both having a sprig of leaves and just individually fill in on my wreath. We will go over that more closely in the wreath section. But for now, let's look more closely at how to actually paint these mistletoe leaves. I think it's a lot easier to start with a bigger version of this single leaf. First, I'm going to paint the stem of this leaf. Then I'm going to start with using not a lot of pressure. See how the leaf is thinner right here and then it gets wider at the top? Using not a lot of pressure, I'm going to start my leaf and then put more pressure. Then at the top, I'm just going to round my paintbrush like we practiced with that stroke and then come back to where we started so it's still a little bit thinner. If your shape isn't quite what you want, then you can always go back and fill it in after. I'm going to do the same with this as I have done with the other ones, where I'll do it at an angle to show you a little bit better. But first, I'm going to show that to you one more time, and then we'll practice forming the shape of the leaf in two strokes if that's a little easier, and then we'll do the other angle. One more time, here's the stem, and then starting thin and going thicker. That one got away from me. [LAUGHTER] Always be careful to control your paintbrush. Starting thin and going thicker towards the top, and then just rounding out my paintbrush and moving it back toward where I started so that I have this rounded leaf at the top. Then it still tapers down when you go to the stem. One thing also to note with these mistletoe leaves is that they can be a little bit straight like that, or they can be floppy like that. Those leaves can be fun to paint like that as well. I'll do another one of those at the angle in case the paintbrush made it so you couldn't see. That's using that curved stroke that we practiced. But you can also, if it's easier for you, practice painting these mistletoe leaves using two strokes. You can stop at the top. The trick is to start at the bottom both times. I'm fumbling over my words, so hopefully, you saw what I did, but I'll do it again. You start taper at the bottom and then go thick towards the top, and then just stop in the middle of the curve so that you can do the exact same thing on the other side. The most important thing is to maintain the shape so that it's tapered at the bottom and thicker and rounded at the top. So tapered at the bottom, thicker and rounded at the top. Again, when we do our wreaths, you can do single leaves like this, like the ones we did up here or you can do more sprigs of leaves, whichever is better for your wreath. You can even do a combination of both, which is similar to what I'm doing. Before we move on, let's look at these leaves from a different angle because I think that will be helpful for you. Here are these two methods for painting these mistletoe leaves at a different angle. Also, I didn't note this specifically in the first video, but I'm using this round Number 6 paintbrush. This is my Wonderful Forest paint brush, but you can use whatever one you want, but I like to use when painting leaves. I think round Number 6 is probably one of my favorite brush sizes to use. This is round Number 6. Now I will paint this mistletoe leaf using that rounded brush stroke that we practiced. Here's at an angle, so you can see it a little better. Thin at the bottom and then rounded at the top, and then I went back to meet the mistletoe where I started, and then I'm just filling in the spaces that I wasn't able to get right up front. Let's do that one again, but a little more floppy maybe, so a little more folded over. It's tapered at the bottom and then more pressure. Then I'm making that leaf a little more floppy so it's bent, but I did that rounded stroke so that I can do all this mostly in one stroke. But as we practiced before, you can also do it in two strokes. If you were to start at the bottom, tapered again and stop in the middle where it's going to be rounded at the top. Then do the exact same thing, just opposite, so that it's thin at the bottom and rounded at the top, and just meet where you left off that stroke before. That will work too. Both of those methods for painting a mistletoe leaf will work wonderfully. Let's practice our mistletoe leaves. Then last for the elements portion of this class, we are going to learn how to paint holly. That includes holly leaves and holly berries and how to put them together. I will see you in that lesson coming up next. 6. Practice: Holly: We've gone through pine needles and branches and mistletoe leaves, and now it is time to practice the final elements to our holiday wreath, and that will be the holly leaves and berries. Let's gets started. Berries are pretty easy. They're just circles. There's one specific trick that I use for my berries to give them just a little bit of depth. First of all, we use the circle stroke that we used before to form the general shape of the berries, but then when filling them in, I like to leave just a little bit of whitespace to mimic the shine that is reflected off of berry sometimes. Once more, if you're not doing that stroke, then I would do it in two strokes like that if you're drawing it and then just drawing in a little bit of shine on the Berry. Holly berries are pretty easy. Just draw them like that. They don't have to be perfect circles, like that one's pretty good, but they can be misshapen or whatever you think. Not whatever you think really, just I wouldn't spend too much time trying to make your berries look perfectly circular or perfect because the more imperfect that they are, the more they look like they're in nature. That is really all there is to the berries. You can use red or this dark pink color that I used right here for holly berries. I think I have occasionally seen some holly berries that are also more like red orange outside my house, I think. But typically, red is the color that holly berries are. Now for the holly leaves, which are a little bit trickier. Here's the general shape of a holly leaf. This is how I paint them sometimes too. Well, first, I'm just going to paint it and then I'm going to break it down. This is wonky, but holly leaves are pointy. The edges are a little bit pointy like this. Traditionally, when creating illustrations of holly leaves, they look like this, almost like you're putting two stars together at once. That's the crude, very simple way to form them. I'm just going to quickly break down what I did. You're going to use this stroke a lot, starting at the top and then moving in a swoop to the side like that. Almost like a C, but not quite. Like half of a C. Like the bottom half of a C. Then you're going to use that one twice. I'm trying to figure out how to say this in the right way. This swoopy gesture, when you're at the top, it's like you're going in a straight line and then curving slightly toward the middle for the top portion of the leaf, for this portion. Then when you're doing the middle portion of the leaf, you're doing the same gesture where it's a little bit more curved uniformly. You're doing more of a classic, I think, swoop, like U-shape, for the middle part. Then for the bottom part, it's similar to the top but just reversed. It's more swoopy when you start and then more straight when you get to the bottom, to where you're going to have the stem. Then you would just do that on the other side as well. So straight, and then a little swoopy, and then a lot swoopy uniformly on all sides, and then swoopy until it's straight and we get to the stem. One way to paint in these leaves is to just paint them in like this. So using your brush to outline the leaf and then just coloring it in basically with the pain. That's one way to paint these holly leaves. Another way that I really like to, just in general with most of my leaves anyway, with all the other leaves that I do, is to utilize whitespace like we talked about before in a smart way to mimic the vein of the leaf. Normally, if you just paint it in like this, you could then paint in the veins of the leaf in a darker green on top of that. You could do it that way. I think that that would look really cute and nice, but you could also try to leave in some whitespace down the center to make it look like the whitespace is the vein of the leaf. Let me show you what I mean. I'm using a lot of pressure this time instead of just using a point to outline it. I'm using a little bit of pressure to save me some filling in later. If we're doing this basic shape of a holly leaf that we practiced before, I'm going to do one side, and once I use my broad end of my brush to paint the one side, I'll fill it in all the way like that. But then on the other side, I'll do the same thing on the other side for the outline, but then instead of bringing it all the way to this line, I'm going to draw in a little bit of whitespace right there. Then once I've drawn in that line leaving in the whitespace, then I'm going to paint in the rest of the leaf with my paint making sure to leave just that little bit of whitespace, almost like a triangle of whitespace where it's wider at the bottom and then goes very thin inward. That is another way to embrace the loose watercolor style to paint these holly leaves. I'm going to do that one more time just to show you again. I'm doing my swoops to paint the leaves, to paint the 1/2, and then I'm coloring in this 1/2 of the holly leaf. Then doing my swoops again, but this time I'm leaving the whitespace there so that when I color in the rest of the leaf, I leave just a little sliver of that whitespace to mimic the vein of the leaf. No matter which one you choose, which method, meaning if you choose to draw in the veins after or not at all, or choose to use this whitespace method, I think that holly leaves are a really fun addition to the holiday doodling repertoire. Really quick, I'm going to show you these leaves at a side angle, and then we're going to look at how to put together holly leaves and berries so you get that traditional bundle of holly. Hold on just a second. Here's another look at holly leaves. I'm specifically painting the holly leaves with this little sliver of white to mimic the vein at a side angle, if that is a little bit more helpful for you to see how I move my brush. I'm starting at the top, and I'm doing my swoops straight and then curved, and then curved pretty equally on both sides, and then curved, and then straight down at the bottom. Remember the way that I add in the white space is, when I do this first half of the holly leaf, I just fill it all the way in. It's a lot easier to do this outline and paint and then fill it in later if you're using very wet paint for the record. When I did a bunch of these other leaves, my paint wasn't quite as wet as I normally would have liked it and that's why it dried before I had a chance to fill it in, so I had to almost repaint the whole thing or else I would have dried paint lines in there and that's not that's not my favorite look. Using very wet paint is my recommendation if you are planning to outline something you're painting and then fill it in later. We did that one side and next, let's do the other side. Swoop, swoop and down at the bottom. Then using this bottom as a guide, when I put it down at the bottom, I didn't meet it with this other side, I left a little bit of space open. I'm going to use this as a guide to start my white space vein and then meet the watercolor in the middle. See, I made it a little bit more wet this time, so it's easier to fill it in. Then if you want to put it on like a stem, just draw the stem in the middle and have the leaf meet the stem like that. There you go. If you want to have more than one holly leaf, like if this stem is actually protruding to have another holly leaf next to it, then here's how I would do that. This holly leaf exercise can be a good way to practice your sketching skills. You can also do it this way like I just did, where you sketch out both sides of the holly leaf at once and leave the middle open to mimic the vein. That might be a little faster, but I definitely had to practice that method multiple times before I could do it that quickly. Just to show it to you one more time, and then we will move on to putting all of these together. Swoop, swoop, down, swoop, swoop, down. That one's a little wonky. Then I'm just drawing in like a triangle shape to mimic the vein and then painting all of that in. If you're using a size 6, which I'm using right now, it's a lot easier. You definitely want to test to make sure that your paintbrush can retain a point. I think that is one of the most important characteristics of a round paintbrush that I look for. But if you don't have a bigger size paintbrush that does that, then that's okay. You can totally use a smaller size, and I'll show you what that looks like. If I'm using my size 1, it's a little bit easier to control than the size 6, especially if you're not doing a particularly big wreath or if your holly leaves aren't going to be that big, then a smaller paintbrush might be easier for you to use, but it's totally up to your preference. The good thing about professional paint brushes if you invest in them, is that they should retain their shape well enough that you should be able to get details like this even if you're using a bigger size. Just for reference. That about sums up the loose quick holly leaf tutorial. Before we end this lesson though, I'm going to show you what it looks like when you put the holly leaves and the berries together. I was going to do this bird's eye view, but now I think I'm just going to do it at this side angle again. Basically, the way that I've always seen bunches of holly together is with two leaves and three berries. You probably know this composition, but I'm just going to paint it for you anyway. When we do our wreath, I'm going to talk a little bit about how you don't necessarily have to do this composition. But while we're just practicing, I think the traditional way is a good way to practice. I am forming my holly leaf 1. You don't have to go as fast as me, again. If I went slower, it probably look a little bit better. See, I forgot to leave a little bit of space open right there, but that's okay. Then we're going to make it basically a V with our holly leaves. That's one side of the V, and then I'm going to make the other side; 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Those didn't come together quite like I hope they're supposed to be closer together. But that's okay. I'm just painting in these holly leaves. These are messy, quick doodles, which is honestly okay because when you put them all together in a wreath, most of the time, at least in my experience, the elements come together to make them look not quite so messy, or if they do, it looks like you did it on purpose, and it just looks really fun and doodle. Don't take the way that your artwork comes out too seriously because sometimes messy is exactly what people want, sometimes it's not. Just need to experiment with it. Now we have these holly leaves. It's okay that they're a little separate. I would've preferred them to be almost touching, I think, but we can work with this. Now we're going to basically form a triangle with these holly berries. There's one berry, there's two berries, and remember to leave just a little bit of white pace for a shine. There's three berries. That is the traditional composition for holly. You can add more leaves or more berries and when we go to paint our wreath, I'm definitely going to be switching it up and using a lot of different styles and compositions. Don't feel the need to stick with this composition always, but I do like to stick at least one of these classic ones in there when I'm painting these wreaths. With that, let us practice this to your heart's content. Figure out what styles you like the best and finish practicing up all of the other elements as you want. Now let's move on to our final project. 7. Final Project, Part 1: Okay, practice time is over. Now we are going to put all of the elements together to re-create wreath that looks like that. If you've taken any of my, if you've taken either my summer doodles class or my loose florals class. You know that I have a specific method for wreaths and how to put all of the elements down in order. Basically, I like to go from biggest to smallest. You put down the elements that have to take up the most space first. Then you use the smaller elements to fill in the gaps after the bigger elements are down. For us, that means the order that I'm going to do things is first, I'm going to put pine needles. Next, I'm going to put branches. Then I'm going to do the mistletoe leaves, then the holly leaves and then the berries. That's pretty much the order of things. To get started, you might not be able to see it very well, but I drew using a bowl that I have on hand. I lightly sketched a circle outline so that I can loosely follow that structure for the wreath. But also note that just because I have a circle outline doesn't necessarily mean that my wreath has to be exactly circular. Because wreaths are made up of natural things and often have some irregularity to them and that's partly what makes them beautiful. Now that we have that down, let's start this, our wreath by painting in some pine needles I'm going to take my round number one brush. For pine needles I'm going to use that grainy sap green for the pine needles that I showed you in the first video, I'm using two different greens for the different leaves. I'm using one green for the pine needles and a different green for the other leaves because I like to mix it up that way. First, I'm going to I don't know why for whatever reason, I always like to start on this side of the circle, maybe because I'm right-handed. But I'm taking my round number one brush and I'm just going to paint not exactly around the circle, but a little bit along the curve. I'm going to paint a stem for my first pine needle branch. I think this one, I'm going to have its branch off like that. There's the stem for the sprig of pine needles that I'm going to paint. Then like we practiced, I'm going to very quickly and using very little pressure just to paint these needles going all the way down, making sure that they're thin. Because we need the needles to be thin. They look like needles and not leaves. We also need the needles to have some space in-between each one so that they continue to look like needles and again, not just leaves. That's one of the reasons why I like to practice this as a warm-up. In the warm-up video, we went over this in a warm video and also in the pine needle lesson. How I like to, my preferred method for painting these needles is to go pretty quickly using very little pressure. It's almost like I'm barely even touching my paintbrush to the paper. Because these are loose. This is a loose watercolor wreath, not necessarily super realistic. It's okay if some of your pine needles don't even make it to the stem. I it's also okay if they accidentally cross over into the other side of the stem. Because when we paint the other side of the pine needles, what another calling card of nature, is that it's wild and crazy. If some of your pine needles are crossing over each other, that's okay too. We don't need them to be perfectly parallel or perfectly symmetrical or perfect anything really. The most important thing we need is for them to be thin enough so that they look like needles instead of leaves. To have enough whitespace in-between some of the needles or on top or on bottom or wherever so that they look like needles and not leaves. Those are really the only two. Really important things as we're painting these loose pine sprigs here. Another note too, you don't have to paint the stem in green. You could paint it like it's a branch in brown if that's what you want. But I'm just going for this monotone green thing. Notice too, just because the way my hand is positioned, because I'm right-handed when I paint the left side, it's easier for me to start out from the stem and go in. Then when I'm painting the right side, it's easier for me to start from the stem and go out. I'm sure there's lots of science and psychology about that that could explain why that is. But I don't know why precisely. But I thought I'd pointed out as a way to once again mentioned that there is no real right or wrong way to paint these elements on here. Once you figure out the way that works best for you, then you should do that. That's why experimenting is also really important. If you're watching this video and you haven't experimented or practiced yet. I would definitely recommend practicing before you start painting. If you practice all the elements before you start your final project, you are almost definitely going to come up with a final result that you like a whole lot more because practicing is where you discover what your preferences are and where you can really figure out your style specifically. I am sure there are many different ways to paint loose pine sprigs like this and I'm sure there are teachers who have very similar styles for me. But my favorite way to come up with my own style is to see something that I like or I think is cool and then just mess around. Instead of trying to copy exactly what somebody else is doing, I like to look at what they do and analyze what I like or dislike about it. Then I like to experiment and just figure out the best ways for me. Now that I've painted all of this down, I'm doing one more step that I'm not sure if I quite covered in the specific pine needle lesson plan, but often, I like to go back over a second time for my pine needles, especially if my initial needles were really light. I like to go back over and just paint a second layer, not quite as full necessarily or not quite the same amount, but I like to paint a second layer with a deeper green just to add a little bit of depth and texture to these leaves. That also can help to make it seem like the pine needles are going all the way around like they do in real life because life isn't in 2D, like we're painting. But just in general, providing multiple layers with different color values. A color value is the lightness or darkness of a specific color and it's without changing its hue. Me getting a darker green because I'm using a more potent pigment, so I didn't add as much water to the paint basically and so that made it darker, that is me changing its color value slightly. Just adding a little bit of these darker needles on top of the lighter ones. One trick too to make it look a little bit more natural is to even take the second layer of needles at a different angle so that they crisscross the needles up there that you're layering them on top of so that it creates just a little bit more shape and movement in the sprig of pine. Those are some pretty fun easy tricks to make this loose style of pine needles fun and easy, but still look really cool. Now I'm doing the other side. Remember how I talked about in the lesson for pine needles, that you can have your sprigs of pine be just like have one little branch full of needles or you can have some of them jetting out like this as they often do on pine trees. I could even do another branch right here. It depends on what tickles your fancy. You'll also see me moving my watercolor block around in a circle quite a bit. My favorite way to paint wreaths is with these watercolor blocks as opposed to taping down your paper to the desk. Specifically because when I'm painting wreaths, it's so much easier for me to just move the paper instead of trying to move my hand or my body to get the right angle to paint whatever it is I'm painting or to paint things upside down or whatever. Those are some tricks for me. As far as this wreath goes, I think I'm going to paint three or four sprigs of these pine needles around the wreath. If you stick around for the next 30 seconds, you can see a little time-lapse of myself doing that. I don't have anything else to teach you. That's why I'm doing it as a time-lapse instead of super long so you don't have to just watch me paint the same thing over and over again. But if you do enjoy watching me paint this over and over again in real-time, that's how I've done most of my other classes as for the final projects, I just have several 15 or 20-minute long videos of me painting all of this stuff in real-time. For this, because the elements take a little bit more time, I thought that I'd do this time-lapse combo thing. If you like this, please let me know at the end of class in a review or in the discussion board. If you don't like this method, the same. I would love to know if this way to do a final project that makes these videos a little shorter is preferable for you or not. Either way, stay tuned for the next 30 seconds to watch this time-lapse. I finished painting most of the sprigs of pine, at least the initial sprigs of pine that I have on this wreath and I hope you enjoyed that little hyper lapse. As you can see, I did a combination. I didn't really mean to do this, but it's how it turned out this time. On these two sides, I did some single sprigs overlapping each other. Then on these two sides, I did a single sprig that had shoots sticking out of it. One thing I was noticing as I was doing the close-ups of the painting is that when I start painting the needles from the stem outward, it's a lot easier to get a point on the outside as opposed to when I start on the outside and go toward the stem, I tend to get more rounded points, which is not a big deal. Pine needles don't necessarily have to be super sharp, but that is one difference that I noted. Do with that what you will and decide what is your preference. But as I was painting these, I mostly did in the same way that I did this sprig, which is I painted the first layer first and then I added a few darker needles on top of there just to add some depth. Also note that when I did the two single sprigs on top of each other, I didn't stop painting the needles. I just went ahead and painted the needles right on top of each other. I think it looks messy and delightful and very much like a holiday wreath. That concludes the first part, the first layer of our holiday wreath with the sprigs of pine. Next we are going to add in some branches. Stay tuned. 8. Final Project, Part 2: Round 2 of our final project. We've added the sprigs of pine and now we're going to add in a few branches. The pine and the branches are both in this wreath. They're both working together to form the basic foundation of the wreath. Knowing that, it's definitely okay to have some branches overlap on the sprigs of pine, but I also mostly want to use the branches to fill in the gaps in-between the sprigs of pine. Now I want to say one thing. Normally my wreaths aren't quite so symmetrical. This wreath is starting to feel a little bit symmetrical to me and normally mine aren't that way, so I might do some. This is a good habit for you to get into if you're a painter or a creator of any kind as to when you start creating something to notice what you like or don't like about it, or notice how maybe you've deviated from patterns in the past, and if that's a good deviation or if you prefer the way you did it before. For me, I really prefer to have an odd number of things to have the off-balance. Not off-balance so much, but just like not so symmetrical subjects in my paintings. I'm not sure why that is, but that's what I prefer. I'm going to try as I'm painting these branches to make it a little bit more off-kilter. [LAUGHTER] The thing with the branches remember is that they're very simple, but mostly we don't want them to be super flexible and bendy, but they can be curved a little bit, and if you do them in steps like this to add in some white space, then it can add some nice character. That's what I'm doing here with this branch. Then I'm going to extend it and have this branch have a smaller shoot going off this way. Often if I'm going to paint pine trees, trunks on pine trees that aren't just lines, this is a way that I like to do it as well to paint one line of the tree or of the branch, and then use a second line to add in some texture, just make it look not like a solid brown line pretty much. To make it look a little bit more roughed up, make it look a little bit more like it's in nature. That's what I like to do with these branches and with trunks of pine trees, and so we're going to continue doing that. Like I mentioned before, your elements should touch. The thing about a wreath is it looks way better when it's full. So you definitely should have your elements, the overlapping in some places. For here, I think I'm going to put a branch right here, but I'm going to pretend that it's underneath these pine needles, but that it's overlapping this branch. I'm just going to skip painting it right there and just pick it up again right here, and have it be on top of this branch like that and then just maybe have a little offshoot there. That looks pretty cool. I like my branches to look like craggy is the wrong word because mountains are supposed to look craggy, but I like them to have character and look a little rough around the edges if you will. Now that's pretty much how I paint my branches. Now I'm just going to go around and put a few more branches in the in-between spaces here. Let's stay tuned for another quick hyper-lapse while I do that. Before I do that, I want to say I have no plan [LAUGHTER] for when I put these branches down and that's how I roll. If you've taken any of my classes before, you know that I don't really have a solid composition plan for how my wreaths especially are going to go down. Mostly it's just like I'm going start with this element and then move on to this element and so on and so forth, but in terms of where the branches are going to go, I'm just winging it as I go along. After the hyper-lapse, if there's explanation that's needed, I will do a quick recap like I did in the first layer, but just know that if your question is how do I decide where to put something? It's pretty much if there's a white space, then I'll put a branch there and see if it works, and then we'll talk about after. [MUSIC] Keep watching for delightful time-laps of more branches. [NOISE] I finished painting all of the branches. As you can see, I did some overlap. If you hear my son in the background, I apologize. He is almost ready for nap time. I'm just trying to finish this video before the light goes for my house. Done daylight savings. I had some of the branches overlap. Some of them overlap the sprigs of pines, some of them went underneath these logs of pine. [NOISE] There wasn't really any explanation. A lot of them are very craggy, but I think they've worked together with the pine to just give a really rustic feel. With that, let's move on to our mistletoe leaves. 9. Final Project, Part 3: Welcome back. [NOISE] We've painted the pine needles we've painted the branches. As you can see, we've basically formed the outline of our wreath. Now we just need to paint in the leaves and the berries. First I'm going to paint in some mistletoe and some mistletoe leaves and I'm going to do that if you don't remember, those are the rounded shaped ones. I'm going to do a few sprigs and then some smaller ones also. I'm going to put my first sprig. [NOISE] Like I said, I [APPLAUSE] never have a plan. [LAUGHTER] Generally, I want my leaves to be going this way. I'm going to paint my first sprig right here and I'm going to move through, you can see a little bit better. I'm going to paint it over the top of this branch right here. I'm saying sprig, meaning I'm going to do multiple leaves on one stem. This is where we get to practice that rounded brushstroke so I can paint most of the leaf in one go. I'm using my number six, but you can also paint brush, I mean, but you can also use a smaller one if it's easier. I'm on a smaller wreath size. It might be easier to use a smaller paintbrush. I might even pop out my just rounded number one paint brush that I was using before and use it to paint the rest of these. I'm just painting these rounded leaves using the two methods that we talked about. One, the first method is where we try to do it all in one stroke. Like I put my paintbrush around and then bring it back to my small stem here. I want a rounded top leaf like that. Then the other one and see some of them I have going straight out and some of them are a little bit more bendy. [NOISE] The other method for painting these leaves is to do it in two strokes. If it's really skinny at the bottom and then they grow on top. Skinny on the bottom, thicker on top, like that. But without a point at the top, like we would normally leaves. Or just simple. I guess normal works. [LAUGHTER] The key for these mistletoe sprigs is that we want the leaves to stay rounded at the top. I'm going to have this sprig just stay on top of this branch here. If you are having trouble, one tip I gave you was to mistletoe leaves but also for holly leaves, but also for these mistletoe leaves. If you're having trouble getting really wet paint or your pigment, you're green pigment is so dark that it's almost coming out black. [NOISE] One thing I like to do is put my pigment onto a palette like this, and then add water to it on the palette just so it can be a lighter value and you can add more fluid to it that it's a little bit more watery and easier to stay wet and easier to see that it's green. [NOISE] One thing that I love about deep green is it has that really big range of colors so that you can have color values so that you can make it look really dark, or you can make it look really light. I love that, but it can be tricky if you're not sure how to do that. If you don't want it really dark, then you just have to add more water. One of the best ways to do that is on a palette instead of like if your paint is in these half pans, like minor for these Blue Pine Arts paints. Then putting it onto a palette, it's definitely the way to go, or like butchers plates or just anything you can transfer the color to add more water will work. There's one sprig of mistletoe. [NOISE] It looks pretty cool. I like for these reasons, especially I like my foliage to be sticking out of the wreath as you can see, I think some people prefer them to be more cohesive like braided together, but I think they look really cool when they're just sticking out like this. Then we're going to add more elements on top of it. It's not quite so stark, but just in general, I really like this poking out in every general direction, messy style for my wreath. [NOISE] That's what it looks like when you paint a sprig on this wreath. Now I talked about how we can paint individual ones too. Just going to go around and paint a few individual mistletoe leaves throughout the wreath. I'm going to go ahead and do that for you in a fun hyper laps. [MUSIC] I have finished painting some of my mistletoe leaves around and I love how all of this has turned out. I think that honestly with wreaths some more elements you add, I guess at some point too much is too much. But the more elements, you add, [NOISE] the more it just comes together at such a really such a satisfying thing. If you watch the hyper laps I painted after this sprig, I painted a bunch of mini sprigs where I did like, if they were connected on the same stem with just two leaves or three leaves like this. Or if they were two leaves that were not quite connected but close to each other or even just single leaves. But one important thing was that I had the leaves basically going in the same general direction. That's one thing with circle wreaths especially I think that it depends. Sometimes you can have them going different directions and it can look okay, but especially for beginners, circle wreaths, I think that the leaves look really cool if they all are basically going in the same direction. That is pretty much it with the mistletoe leaves. If you watch the hyper laps, a little montage of how I painted these, you'll notice that sometimes I did the method of where I twisted my paintbrush around and sometimes [NOISE] I did the method where I did two strokes at once. I mean two strokes to form the leaf. But either way, I just filled in some of the gaps, filled in some space between the branches and the pine sprigs. I think that even this alone would look like a bear, but also really fun holiday wreath. [NOISE] Now we're going to add in the Holly. That is going to be super fun. Stay tuned. 10. Final Project, Part 4: We've added almost everything to our wreath, and now it's just time to add the holly, so that includes the holly leaves and the holly berries. Since the berries are the smallest element on here, they're going last, and since holly leaves are pretty unique, I'm not going to paint too many of them because I want them to be more like an accent and not necessarily like this is a holly wreath, if that makes sense. I'm going to look for some spaces. First of all, as we near the end of this wreath, it's important to look for the available spaces. I see some space up here. That's probably one of the most glaring spaces. I see, there could be some space over here. In general, if it doesn't look like immediately there's a space that needs to be filled in, then you can pretty much fill in anywhere as long as you pay attention to composition and try to balance out the wreath as you go along. Like if I were to put in a holly leaf right here, then I would also want to put one in right here. I know I said that I don't like it to be exactly symmetrical and I don't, but I also don't like things to look really, I'm from Utah, we say things like skiwampus, [LAUGHTER] which is a term that nobody else has heard as I move to the East Coast. But I don't like things to look like they're tilted or uneven in any way. I don't like things to look perfect pretty much. Anyway, that's around for a different day. But for right now, I think that this space is the first immediately that looks like I could put some holly leaves here and how it look really cool. I'm going to use this stems as the general outline for where my holly leaves you're going to go, and then I'm going to just paint them in. Remember to leave some whitespace. This is small, it might be hard to see. I accidentally painted in the whitespace on this side, so I'm going to try to leave it on this side. I'm leaving in some whitespace right there for that holly leaf, [BACKGROUND] and then to paint this one, doing my swoops on one side, and then my swoops on the other side. This one is a little wonky, but that's okay. This one, I'm just going to go ahead and paint it all in since I'm trying to paint it on top of some elements, I'm just going to call it good like that. Those are some holly leaves, and then right there is where I can put those three berries. Remember that triangle composition, that is the "Normal way" to include holly leaves and berries. I said I'd include at least one of those and so I probably will right there. But then throughout the rest of the wreath, I'm just going to add a few little holly leaves on top of some of these elements. Just to add a little pizzazz, and I'm just going to go ahead and fill them all the way in, I think. Then as an extra surprise, I'll show you in the last layer with my gold paint how I'm going to add some detail in there. I'm going to do another holly leaf flag right here. I didn't really like how I went over on top of my mistletoe leaf right there for this holly leaf, so for my next ones, I'm going to try not to do that as much. That is one downside of not planning or composing your wreath ahead of time. You might accidentally paint over something that you really liked, but that's okay. I know what not to do in the future then. Remember how I said I don't like things always to be symmetrical. I don't like doing the same pattern every time. Since I put two down like that, I'm just going to put a smaller third one right here. These are more rudimentary holly leaves but they look okay. [MUSIC] I'm just going to go around and put in the rest of these holly leaves, and after a quick time lapse, then we will put in the berries. I added just a few leaves of holly all the way around. Sometimes I added two in one place, sometimes I just did one, mostly I just did one in random places, and now let's add the berries. I'm going to do Holly in red and in dark pink. I'm going to do a few berries. The trick with berries is because they're the smallest is to basically just have them fill up some spaces, so the berries don't have to always only go with the holly, they can also go with the mistletoe. They look right at home there as well. I'm just putting in random circles sometimes two at once, like right there, but I'm going to try to keep them nestled in-between somewhere. It doesn't matter if it's by the holly, right right here, or if it's by the mistletoe or the pine. Berries are a great filler element for basically any wreath. To just fill up some space, add a little bit of diversity and dimension to the piece. Because they're so small, it's so easy to put them basically anywhere. You'll notice that for some of my berries, I filled them in all the way, and some of them, I'm leaving just that little bit of whitespace to show that some light is reflecting off of them like I did before in the berry tutorial video if you watched that. Now, I do want to make sure to put some varies by the holly, so I'm going to put one here in-between these two, and I'll get to the other one when I get there. I like going in order in my wreaths, going around because then if I feel like any pieces are missing, then I can just go around a second time and continue adding as I see fit. I'm just going to add another berry here, maybe one here on the other side of this mistletoe sprig. When you see mistletoe like in the movies or wherever it's generally represented, I think most often holly berries are accompanying, or maybe I'm wrong, and mistletoe does have berries too, but that's one thing to know. Maybe I just didn't do enough research and mistletoe actually does have those pointy leaves or berries or whatever, but I looked it up and it seemed like this was right. [LAUGHTER] I'm not sure if I'm supposed to tell you and if I'm supposed to acknowledge my failings to you as your instructor, but I'm pretty sure that what I know is right. If I'm wrong, please let me know in the comments, but I hope you enjoy painting this wreath anyway, even if I get the terminology not exactly right. [LAUGHTER] I painted three right there next to this kilter pair of leaves, and I'm just going to keep going along. I'm not going to do a hyper elapse this time because we are almost done and it's not going to take that long to finish these berries. Sometimes I'm doing one, sometimes I'm doing three, sometimes like, I'm just going to do a tiny one right here. Maybe two tiny ones. They don't always have to be that same general berry size. They can be whatever size you think is best, and actually it is good to mix up the sizes to once again, add just a little bit of diversity and fun to your piece. Human eyes generally like to look at different things. Contrasting sizes, contrasting colors can be really fun to look at. I have noticed that and read up on it a little bit since I gave birth to my son. [LAUGHTER] When we bought some contrast books and he is just, one time he always wearing a striped white and black shirt and his eyes just went so wide looking at it, he was so fascinated, anyway. These are the leaves that I first mentioned when we painted the holly leaves, where I'm going to do that traditional trio of two holly leaves and the berries right there. Then I'm almost to where I started with the berries. Almost there, just painting in a couple more and random spots. One thing with loose watercolor is, some of you might be thinking, it doesn't really make sense for things that just be floating around. This is watercolor and the cool thing about art is it doesn't always have to make sense. It can be nice to follow some of the rules like I said the general, keep the leaves going in the same direction rule, but other times, you can just paint things together and they look cool. That's the rule that I like to live by, generally. I have painted all the way around, now is where I take stock and see if there's a different amount of weight on a different place of the paper. I can see, I think I have a little bit more berries and leaves over here, so I'm just going to add a couple more berries on this side just to even it out a little bit, and not an exactly the same spot. This is where it's like it needs to be somewhat even, but not so symmetrical that you're painting the exact same thing on each side. I'm just putting in different elements to even out the weight a little bit, and also I painted a few of these tiny berries on one side and not really anywhere else. Now I'm going through and just adding a few of these tiny berries throughout the painting because I think they look cute and cool. Maybe just two more, three more right there. Perfect. That is our holly portion of the final project, and now let's move on to the final layer which is where we're going to add in some fun gold detailing. Can't wait. 11. Final Project, Part 5: Last but certainly not least, I'm taking some of my green leaf and blueberry gold paint and I'm just going to add in a few more holly berries that are this gold color, and then I'm going to paint in the veins of some of the mistletoe leaves, this gold color also. It's pretty easy, pretty much you just take the gold, and paint, holly berries wherever you feel so inclined. I like adding gold as accents to holiday rids, especially because I think it can be fun to add just a little bit of sparkle to this time of year and it generally goes in. The gold goes pretty well with the pallets we're working with and the subject matter. I'm just not adding too much gold, just in a few spots. Then we're almost done, I think just one more right there. Now I'm going to take my smaller brush and on top of my holly leaves, I think not on all of them, but on some of them. I'm going to paint in the detailing that we would normally add with whitespace or with a different color. Just right on top of this green, very lightly. I'm going to paint in this vein, this is a little thick for my taste. That line is a little thick for my taste, but that's okay, it still looks pretty cool and we are where we are so with this failed whitespace vein, I'm going to just layer on top of it. You, if you did not fail with your whitespaces, you do not have to do this, but I think it can add a fun flare, so I'm not doing it to all of the holly leaves like I mentioned, just a few, so maybe just this one, and it's just a leaf down the middle and then some veins on either side going into the leaf. Just that one and I think honestly just one more. I think I'm just going to do this one right here and the other ones, I'm just going to leave. My darkest holly leaves played a lot into my decision on which leaf it was going to be, that one was pretty dark, it looked almost black. Then after I've painted in those gold accents, I'm done. That's it for my holiday-themed wreath and honestly, this one looks even cooler from the sample ones that I showed you. It can be this really simple. It doesn't look simple, but all of the elements by themselves are pretty simple to learn how to paint and then just layering them on top of each other. It can be a really fun way to make a decoration or make cards, or just celebrate the holidays however you see fit. Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I had a lot of fun putting together these different elements into this fun holiday-inspired wreath and I hope that you did too. If you join me in the recap video coming up next, I will talk about some ways that you can help support me as a teacher and a small business owner. If you loved this class, one of them is leaving a review. Again, I'm going to talk about it more, but leaving a review on Skillshare is one of the best ways to help your favorite teachers. If you have any questions on how to leave a review, I am going to be in the next video answering some frequently asked questions I get about reviews. Head onto that video to hear my explanation of that but just in general, thank you once again for joining me. I have a lot of fun doing stuff like this with you and if you have any suggestions for future classes, please feel free to drop me a line in the discussion forum in the class, and I will take them into consideration but until next time. Head to the recap video and I will see you again soon. 12. Recap: Thank you so much for watching this class. If you made it all the way through, then you will have painted an array wreath that looks just like this one. I'm so proud of you for learning all those techniques and sticking with me through this class. I think that wreaths are some of my favorite things to paint because you can really just slap together a whole bunch of elements into a circle and it looks awesome. On that note, I would love to see any of your final projects or any of your progress shots along the way. Make sure to post those to the project gallery so that I can give you some feedback if you're looking for it and leave you some encouragement for sure. Also, if you're on Instagram, if you want to post your stuff to Instagram, make sure to tag me. My handle is "thiswritingdesk". I try to do weekly features of my Skillshare classes. Sometimes I go back and forth, but typically on Wednesdays, I try to do features of all my Skillshare classes and so if you tag me, I just may feature yours. Finally, if you really loved this class, I would love it if you left me a review. One thing to note, you can't leave reviews on the phone app. I'm fairly positive. I think you have to go on the desktop version. If you want to leave a review, make sure to go to your desktop computer and leave one there. I would love to hear any of your honest feedback. But leaving lots of reviews tells the Skillshare algorithm that people liked this class. It's one of the best ways to make it. Other people will find it as well. If you liked this class and want to learn more from me, I have several other classes on lots of different topics on Skillshare. Make sure you check those out. Just once again, thank you for joining me and I hope to see you next time.