Transcripts
1. Hand-Painted Ornaments Introduction: My name's Dylan Mierzwinski, I'm an Illustrator living in Phoenix, Arizona. I love making handmade gifts for my favorite people, that they actually want to hold onto. In this class, I'm going to show you the materials and process I use to make hand-painted ornaments. Together we'll get inspired, plan our designs and get painting. The end of the year is a great time to slow down, get cozy, and work on a fun craft. Whether you keep it for yourself or gift it to someone you love, you'll leave this class with a one heirloom made by your hands. Let's get to it.
2. Class Project and Materials: In this lesson, we're going to cover the class project, required and optional materials, what's included and how to access class resources, and how to share your project when you're done. For your class project, as you may have guessed, you'll be painting your very own ornament. If you like the design I'm painting and want to follow along exactly, I've supplied the design template with three color palettes for you to use. Please don't use my design if you plan on selling your ornaments. If you want your own custom design, we'll be walking through the steps in considerations for planning your own. The materials you'll need for this course are as follows. The star of the show is of course, our bisqueware ornaments. Bisqueware are ceramics that are unfinished and haven't been glazed or fired. They have a smooth matte surface that's delicious to paint on. I'll be using a three-inch round globe ornament, but the sources I share in the class resources, which we'll get to in a minute, have a ton of shapes. So if you're not even in the Christmas theme, you could get an ornament shaped like the Star of David, or ornaments shaped like various states in the United States, or a pickles, skulls, paw prints. There's a lot out there, so don't feel like you have to stick with the traditional globe shape, although they look so good. Next up is paint. I'll be using Holbein acrylic wash, which is plasticky and dries all the way like acrylic paint, but flat matte, opaque and vibrant like wash. The materials list and design templates in the class resources lists the exact colors you'll need to recreate any of my three color palettes. But if you'll be making your own design or recoloring my design, I recommend finding and picking out some paint colors that you love right from the tube to keep things easy and to give yourself options. You may even want to watch through and plan your design before picking out your paint colors to make sure that they work with the design that you end up with. I'll be using to paint brushes, a pigeon letters size six round, Princeton heritage size 2 round. Your brushes may vary based on your design, but this is a solid range that will cover a lot of ground. We'll need some clean water to rinse our brushes, and paper towel for controlling the water on our brushes. You'll want something to mix the paint on, I'll be using this reusable plastic palette with wells. We'll need the provided class resources printed out or just some scrap paper, as well as a pencil and whatever coloring tools you have to help plan your designs. You can also use paint for this part or even just stick with your plain pencil. I don't want you to overthink it here, I just want you to use any tools that will help you get your thoughts from your head onto the paper before painting our ornaments. You're going to want to drying stand of some kind. For globe ornaments like I'll be using, I recommend taking an empty box, filling it with crumpled up papers or junk mail and poking two pencils through. If you're extra, and I am, you can wrap the box in festive paper. Finally, you want some ribbon or twine to use as a hanger. If you're going to gift your ornament, a small gift box and tissue paper or bubble wrap will help you out. Some optional materials you can use if you want are, small lidded paint canisters that keep paint from drying out. These are helpful if you mix a lot of a specific color, and plan on painting beyond one session or ornament. If you don't like the matte look like I do, you can purchase clear spray paint that acts as a sealer, and can also give your ornament a glossy finish. If you want to seal your ornament, but like the matte look, you can definitely buy sprays that have a matte finish. I prefer to leave my ornaments completely unfinished. You can also experiment with things like gold leaf and glitter, or other paints that you have on hand that you're familiar with. My friend who lives here in Phoenix, Jen Duran, she sold ornaments at a craft fair last year, and I just had to get some of them. She gave me permission to show off what she made, and you can see that she finished her ornaments so they have a glossy finish, and added gold leaf for a unique and luxurious touch. I love her use of cacti motifs and creative and charming design approach. I've included her sources for the gold leaf, gold leaf adhesive, and finishing spray in the class resources. So let's finally chat about these provided resources which you can access from the projects and resources tab. This works best from a computer, but sculpture has finally, and I'm so grateful, started rolling out access to class resources from the mobile app and mobile website. The class resources include a full materials lists, and just real quick, it's hard to find a single reliable bisqueware square source. Especially considering that people are watching from all over, some people have the ability to set up a wholesale account, others don't. And so you may need to do some searching on your own to find bisqueware near you, but I have listed a few resources to get you started. Additionally, it may help you to Google bisqueware near me, or bisq ornaments on sale. I've also provided a design guide for the design I'll be demonstrating, along with three optional color pallets with paint colors and mixing recipes, if you want to follow along with what I'm doing. There's also a blank copy of my design if you want to recolor it. I've also provided a blank template, and inspiration worksheet if you're making your own ornament design. Complete with areas to write in some of the specific design decisions we'll be going over later. When you finish your project, it's time to upload a photo. This works best from a computer, and you'll head back to the project and resources tab, and click the big green create project button, above where the class resources live. There are two main parts to the project editor. The cover photo uploader, where you upload a landscape orientation project cover, almost like a book cover and the project body, where you can upload multiple photos of various sizes and ad texts, like the pages of a book. When you're all done, you can hit publish. If you need to add more or change your project in the future, you can click "Edit Project" make your changes, and save it. Don't forget to scroll through the project gallery to see what other students are making. Now that you're familiar with the class project, project materials, class resources, and publishing your project, let's talk about getting inspired for your ornament design.
3. Getting Inspired: In this lesson, we're going to cover finding inspiration, picking out motifs, choosing a design style, and considering color. To start finding and utilizing inspiration, print out the Finding Inspiration worksheet from the class resources as covered in the last lesson, or grab scrap paper to jot down notes. Then I want you to take to Google, Pinterest, your decoration bins and ugly sweaters to be on the hunt for things that stand out to you and make you happy. When you find something you like, I want you to ask yourself three things. What motifs are present? What design style is it or could it be? What colors are present? Motifs can be things like deer, candles, bells, holly, berries, plaid, Santa, cabins, etc, you'd be surprised at how jotting a few things down can really focus your sights. When I'm talking about design style, I mean, in terms of working on an ornament. Three main ones stick out to me, the first being a front placement design, which is an ornament with a clear front and back or a clear single focal point. The second is an all over pattern, it could be decorative with line work or marks, or intricate with sprigs of holly and other winter greenery. It could be geometric, it could be simple like a stripe. The third is a repeated interval motif, so where the allover pattern takes up most of the available negative space and maybe multi-directional, a sectioned or interval design might have the same nutcracker painted four times around the circumference or a Christmas tree or something like that. You can either write down the design style as you found it, or you can come up with one as you imagine it. Maybe you'll come across a gingerbread placement, but get a fun idea for tiny gingerbread men and an all over design. Make a note of that. For colors you can write down or swatch single colors that stand out or combinations that you love. If you take the time to write a few of these things down, you'll have a pretty solid roadmap when getting to the next lesson, drawing the design. Some things I wrote down are front-facing decorative flourishes in silver and red, front-facing dear head and a wreath or with surrounding laurels and a blue, green, red, and ivory palate. All over winter scene like a horizon line wrapping around the ball in green, gold, and ivory. An interval style of snowmen in red and white and floral elements like poinsettia flowers and holly leaves in a front-facing or all over design in a fun retro palette with pink. Spend some time getting inspired by what's out there and take some notes. If you're going to be keeping or gifting your ornaments, then the inspiration world is your oyster. If you plan on selling your ornaments, refrain from taking any single existing ornament design and copying it. That's not cool. This design guide worksheet is a nice way to utilize your inspiration while staying one step removed from it. Next, we'll work on drawing out a design.
4. Drawing the Design: In this lesson we're going to cover some tips for drawing out a custom design as well as choosing final colors. If you're using a globe ornament like me, you can use the blank provided template to start sketching your design, as well as to notate the motifs, design style, and colors you've chosen to use. You can also easily use scrap paper for this. This template isn't perfect. Of course, if we flattened our globe shape out, it wouldn't make this perfect oval. But it gets us moving in the right direction for thinking about a design that's going to wrap around. The main thing to remember is, because our globe is one continuous canvas, anything that gets close to the edge is going to show up on the other side. Grab your filled worksheet or scrap notes from the inspiration lesson, and start picking a motif or a few motifs, design style, and a few colors to start with. You don't have to pick things in rows as you wrote them, you can make new combinations from what you wrote down. I'm drawn to floral and holly motifs in a bold front-facing design that wraps around the back. Even though it's a front-facing design, the way that it is big and bold and wraps around the back, will make it feel like an all over design but I don't have to worry about the back of the ornament. It's kind of a lazy all over design. I'm also leaning towards a retro color palette. I'll fill those details in on my design template. When we get to sketching, depending on your experience, you may need to spend time practicing sketching your motifs before you start working them into a design. For me, I spend some time sketching out simple flower shapes that felt festive but easy to paint. I drew out some holly leaves and berries and felt ready to work it in to a design. The type of design you're doing may guide the way you sketch. For instance, mine is front-facing and therefore has one main focal area. I'm going to start with my biggest flowers and fill in the other elements around them. I want it to feel wild and varied, but need it to be easy to paint. I'm going to play with imperfect symmetry. Each flower will have some buds and holly leaf shooting off the open side for movement and energy as well as smaller flowers framing the bottom. Round berries will fill in weird spaces. What I love about this design, is it looks intricate and wild, but it's actually a bit deceptive. The shapes are easy to paint and the layout is easy for me to visualize and execute on the ornament. Yet it's wild enough that if I don't paint something in the exact place I sketched it out, I can improvise as needed and paint without disrupting the design. If I were doing an all over design, more of a repeat, maybe I'd shrink my motifs down, simplify their details and focus more on how the motifs need to flow together to work. If I were doing a segmented design, I'd divide my globe into the ideal amount of sections, let's say four, and work on a bouquet that fits nicely in that section and can be easily repeated around the sides. Like I said, this template isn't perfect so make sure while you're sketching, you're actually referencing your ornaments so that the size of motifs are appropriate. Spend some time sketching as much as you need considering how to simplify shapes so that they're easy to paint. When you've got something you like, clean it up with an eraser or redraw, a clean version so we can really nail down color. You should already have some color ideas thanks to your inspiration phase. Now that you've got a design to go off it should be easier to assign colors to various motifs. Count how many motifs or groups of motifs you have and decide how to divvy up color among them. In my example, I'm painting all the main flower color as one color. All the accent berries another color, the holly leaves a third color, the background color of fourth, and then a dark neutral as a fifth for details. The goal here is to not overthink it. Start with a color you know you want to use, say blue, and maybe pick two types of that color that you can use together. A bolder blue and a lighter gray blue. Then add in a neutral too, like an ivory brown or a shade of gray. Now add in a pop of color that works with the main color. I think a gold or ocher color would be beautiful with this palette, or even a shot of red. This alone is a fabulous palette that could go a long way and it'd be easy to keep adding to it if you needed more colors. You also may have found a palette in its entirety that you want to recreate, and that's excellent too. In my example, I knew I wanted to use pink, so I chose a peachy pink I liked. To bring it back to holiday, I wanted to add in red and green, but a hotter orange red like I had seen in my inspiration, and a sea foamy candy green that feels retro. To tone it down, I'm adding in an ivory neutral and I'm also using full black to really have my details pop. To pick my actual paint mixes, I referenced a color chart I made for my acrylic wash paints. Is a bit like shopping for a color mix and picking out what I liked. I shared the process for making one of these in my Skillshare class, getting to know your paint, if you want to know more. But as I recommended in the class project and materials lesson, you may find it easier to draw your design, then buy colors you like right from the tube to refrain from mixing colors and to make sure you like the colors for your design. Now listen, I know this part really freaks people out. They don't trust their decision-making skills, they think that there's some right way to do it. There's not. Take a deep breath. Ask yourself questions like, what colors that I like most from my inspiration? Or what motifs do I feel comfortable using? Trust the answers you find there. The great news is this, acrylic wash layer is like a dream. If you painted the actual ugliest ornament of all time in the worst colors, could probably just paint over it. Most of these ornaments come in sets. If you really ruin one, you can start a new one and just give the other to your least favorite family member. This is just a fun winner craft to work on. No reason to get all perfectionistic about it. Spend some time reviewing your inspiration and making some design decisions as you sketch through your ideas. In the next lesson we'll talk about how to approach painting your design onto your ornament.
5. Making a Painting Plan: In this lesson, we're going to make a plan for the best order to paint our ornaments. The first thing to consider is when to paint the background. If you paint the background first, you've got a fully colored canvas ready to paint on and don't have to worry about painting around intricate motifs later on. The layer of paint can add texture to the finished piece as the paint builds on itself, and can also add a painterly look if it peeks through the layered motifs. This approach is quicker, though it does use more paint, can add an unwanted or unintentional layers of texture. If you're using a dark background color and light motifs, you may need to use additional coats of paint to adequately cover the dark ground. If you start painting your motifs first, it takes longer later to move carefully around the motifs when painting in the background, but you use less paint. The colors are all their truest, brightest hue because they were all painted on white. You can cut down on texture and keep all the painted shapes flat. The other consideration is to develop the design one motif at a time or one color at a time. If you choose to paint the design one color at a time, you're able to streamline the process and develop the overall design in stages. You use less paint because you're only mixing one color at a time and the overall process feel systematic. The downside is the placement of each element can be a little tricky to gauge at first without the context of the other elements. If you choose to paint the design one motif at a time, you're able to be more expressive in your painting decisions because you have all your colors at your disposal and can make choices about value in detail as you go. The design ends up being developed more organically, growing and filling out as needed. But you may end up using more paint as you'll have to have all colors mixed and ready to go. Once they're dry, they're done so, which means you may also need to work more quickly. Additionally, it'll be harder to recreate multiple similar designs in this way, as many decisions are made in the context of each painting, and it can be hard to remember the order in which you painted the previous ornament. If your design is very intricate or you're worried about painting without guides, you can use a pencil to lightly mark on the ornament. The opaqueness of the paint should cover any pencil lines you may draw. Just be careful with lighter values as the paint can pick up the graphite dust and mix it in with what you're painting. None of these routes are right or wrong, but some may appeal to you more than others. If you aren't comfortable or that familiar painting, if you are a beginner in general or just looking for a light craft to work on, I recommend painting the background first and developing the design one color at a time, which is how I'll be demonstrating my design. If you want to really sink into this and find some peace then painting the background around the motifs can be really therapeutic. If your motifs are really intricate and/or small, painting the background first is a must. If you love letting your creative brain take-over, then developing the design one motif at a time may feel less stifling than taking it one color at a time. So reflect on what you're trying to get out of this time and pick a route that you think's going to work best for you. If you paint something you don't like, which is highly unlikely, but if you make something you don't like, you can paint it again or grab a fresh one and try a brand new design approach. The main point is you're going to have a custom painted design and that's the gold. The plan for my design is this. I'm going to paint the background first because it's quicker, and because I tried test painting ivory flowers on the white ball on camera. Though I could easily see it with my eyes on camera, it looked like I was just joking and not painting anything at all. For filming practicality, I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. After the background is painted, I'm going to develop my design one color at a time, starting with the main ivory flowers, then adding in the pops of red berries. Then painting in the big green holly leaves behind the flowers and berries. I could paint the holly leaves before the pops of red as the paint layers nicely. But it's easier for me personally to place the red dots in the composition and fill in the leaves where needed. So that's what I'm doing. I'll top it off with the final painted details and call it done. Spend a few minutes making a plan for how to paint your design so that it's the most enjoyable process and best result for you. In the next lesson we'll do a brief demo of how to mix up your acrylic wash for the best results and how to mix colors.
6. Mixing Paint & Colors: In this lesson, we're going to cover preparing the paint with water and mixing colors. To mix up your paint, squeeze some onto your palette, wet your brush, and without tapping it on the side of your water glass, start mixing that water into the paint. For maximum smoothness and opaqueness, you want a consistency of heavy whipping cream or even a bit thicker. When I'm first mixing the paint, I tend to leave it a bit thicker than heavy whipping cream, as it will continue to loosen up as I paint and introduce more water from my brush. You can use less water if you need a thick, extra opaque application, but be warned this can produce a dry brush look if there isn't enough water for the brush to glide, or you can add more water if you want more translucent washy layers. When it comes to color mixing, I prefer to mix the hue before adding too much water. I'll mix up some of my background color to show as an example. Per the recipe, I'll squeeze out a good amount of shell pink and a dab of raw sienna. I'll keep the ivory on standby in case I want to lighten the color. Since I've mixed this color before, I feel comfortable squeezing the colors right next to each other. But if you're less familiar with this, keeping the paint further away from each other will allow you to introduce the colors in intervals as needed. I'll wet my brush, but this time I'll swipe it on the side of the glass to remove the excess water and we'll start mixing my hues together and correcting as necessary. Since this is the background color, I'm going to mix a good amount. If you're going to be preserving the paint past one session and using a lidded canister, this is when I would scoop the paint from my palate into the canister and then I would add water to the mix as needed while painting to get the best consistency. This doesn't need to be a perfect science. If it's your first time using acrylic wash, you're probably going to need to be patient with yourself. But, I'm confident that you'll be mixing up paint like a master in no time. In the next lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the background.
7. Color 1: Painting the Background: In this lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the background. I have my paint mixed up, my color mixed up from the last lesson. It's my background, peachy pink color, and I'm ready to just paint the entire ornament this color. Since we're going to be covering the entire ornament, the first trick I want to show you is to use a pencil from your drawing stand. Just insert that in there, and that's going to help us as an aid as we paint around it without having to hold and touch the whole ornament. I'm just going to get some water and my paint. I'm just going to start applying it. You'll be able to tell right away if you need more water or less lot water. These bisque ornaments are really thirsty, and so if your paint's too dry, you're going to see it's not going to go very far. If your paint's too watery, you'll easily be able to tell that it's washed out and not a solid color. Since it dries so matt and pretty, a lot of these streaks aren't going to be noticeable, but some of them will be. You might want to smooth out if you want a smoother finish, make sure you're spending time adding more water and going over it. I'm just rotating. I'm using my thumbs around the top here to just twirl it around and hold it still. I'm just going to do one nice coat around the outside. The gouache is going to be glossy when I put it on when it's wet, and then as it dries, it's going to become more matt. Unless you're using a very dark or a particularly streaky color, one coat should be all it takes. Now I'm just going to go ahead and set this back on the drying stand and let it dry all the way. In the next lesson, I'll paint the main ivory flower shapes.
8. Color 2: Painting the Main Flowers: In this lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the main flower shapes. A quick disclaimer, when I'm painting these non on-camera, I tend to hold them pretty close to my body and crouch into it, and rotate the ornament as needed while I'm painting. But when I'm filming, I have to hold it out unnaturally in front of me and always try to keep it faced up towards the camera. I'm happy to do it, but I just wanted to say sorry in advance for the times when my hand is unintentionally blocking what I'm doing. It's only temporary, you'll be able to see once my hand moves. Luckily, the shapes I'm painting are really simple and you have the design guide to know exactly what I'm painting from. I know you'll understand. Thank you for understanding. To work on my main flower shapes, I've got my dry ornament with the background that we just painted. I've got some ivory paint ready to go per my design guide, which you can print this out if you're following along with me. If you are doing your own design, then yours probably won't be colored like this, it'll look more something like this. Maybe you'll color in with your coloring tools. But basically, I'm just going to use my guide to place my ivory white flowers, mix up some of this paint. For these flowers, I really just wanted to be able to use the shape of the brush. I don't really have to draw so much. I'm just going to press down and let my brush create that petal shape. I think I went too low on that, so I want to go a little bit higher. My paint is a little bit thicker because I'm painting a very white light color on top of a darker color. I know that background is going to poke through more strongly. By using a thicker paint, I'm able to counterbalance that. I could also do another coat after it dries, if it's not solid enough for me, but I think this thicker paint will be enough. You can see already the shape is a little wonky here than I had intended. But that's okay, we're not machines, we are making ornaments with our hands, and so don't let that discourage you, just keep going. Now, for my second flower, I don't have to worry about placing everything perfectly. Remember this is just a general guide, but what I do know is that this flower I'm about to paint is up and to the left of the other one. I need a little bit of space in between for a holly leaf. Rotate my bulb and be careful to not put my fingers in that. I'm just putting my finger on a dry part and rotating. I'm going to start my other flower closer up here. For this one, I just wanted it to look a little bit different than the first flower. So I'm going to round the edge of the petals a little bit. I may have gone too close, so they're going to overlap a little bit, but I'm okay with all of these things. When I had originally drawn this, I wanted this one to have eight petals and this one to have six, but they both have six. But that's okay because the whole point of that was I wanted variation, and I have variation between these flowers just from their placement and their size. I'm just smoothing out some of these thicker paint streaks because they'll dry and add texture. Even though I'm okay with the paint not being totally opaque, I do want to smooth out some of the texture so that the line work on top really pops. I have my two main flowers. Now, when I was planning my design, I did full symmetry, both flowers have a tiny flower off to the side on the bottom, and then both have a set of buds shooting off on either side. I'm going to go ahead and go to the right of my first flower and just do some dabs like that. Go to the left of my second flower. You can see my first ones are over there, and I'll do some on this side. Then down here for these flowers, I'll go ahead and turn this upside down and just generally want one over here. Again, I'm just using the shape of my brush to create those flower petals. I'm not drawing it all. I'm just laying the brush down. There's that one below there, and then there's one to the bottom right of this flower, that's this flower. Bottom right is about there. I feel pretty good about that. We have one big flower, and off to the right, we have two buds and a smaller flower. Then we have our smaller flower, but still main one right here, and then we have his tiny flower and his two buds over here. Since I still have some paint on my palette, I'm going to go over some of the dry areas to make the color more opaque and smooth out the texture as I go. There I have it, I've got my main flowers. I'm going to put those on my stand to dry. In the next lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the accent berries.
9. Color 3: Painting the Accent Berries: In this lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the accent berries. I'm ready to paint my berries. These are essentially just dots or circles that are going to fill in some space, so you don't need too much paint. Squeeze out a little bit of orange. It's probably even much more than I need. A tiny bit of shell pink to lighten and add just that tiny bit more of red back in. I have my ornament with the dry flowers. Now I'm just going to look at the design in relation of all the elements and just add these dots where they fit. The first one I can see is I have two that go in this cradle at the top of this flower. So I could either put those right here or maybe over here. I think I'm going to put them over here. Again, I'm just going to use the shape of the brush and how it fans out when I push down to make those shapes. So you have those two here, I'm going to do two on the other side. Pretty thick paint on my brush. I just going to thin that out with some water. Now the next spot are these three down here. That's towards the bottom. See how this little flower and these two big flowers create a triangle. You can see that happening right here. So I'll just go ahead and add in my three berries where they fit in that spot. I've got my three, my two and my two, and now I just have one that floats over here. It goes to the left of this flower and it's higher than it and it's about lined up with these buds. Before this flower, so it's going to be about right here. Go ahead and add that little dot in. You can see it really doesn't take much paint at all to draw those dots, so you don't need to squeeze out as much as I did. That's it for the berries. Put it back on my drying stand. In the next lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the holly leaves.
10. Color 4: Painting the Holly Leaves: In this lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the holly leaves. I have my green color mixed up per my design guides, so I've got my green and Naples yellow mixed together here. Now, I'm going to use my smaller brush in order to draw on my holly leaves. As with the flowers, I was using my larger size six brush, and pushing down and letting the shape of the brush determine flower shapes and these little berries. Even these tiny flowers down here, I just let the brush stamp out its shape. But with the holly leaves, I'm actually going to use my smaller brush to draw the outline of the leaves first, and then color them in. That's because these holly leaves have a more complex shape than what we've been working with. I'm going to go ahead and get in with my smaller brush. The first one I see is easy, it's this little holly leaf that goes in between the two flowers. That one is going to be a bit easier because the shape, just needs to look like there is a holly leaf back there. But I'm basically just going to use my brush, and carefully paint out what that shape's going to look like before I fill it in. This is when you're going to see how this is really just a guide, and I'll have to improvise as I go. My original plan was to have a third holly leaf coming off of this flower, and going into fill this area, but in reality, I actually don't have as big of a space there as I thought I would. Just try to remember if you don't get frustrated, if things aren't lining up exactly as your guide, the guide just helped us figure out the flow of it, that it looks wild, and so now I'm going to use my creativity to figure out where I need that wildness to be. I've got my red berry here, my red berry here, and I know I want a holly leaf curving near that. I'm going to draw the center of the leaf first to get the angle of it. Then I'll go ahead and use my brush to really carefully draw out those points. You may find that the other brush method of letting the brush create the shape is better for you, and you can totally do whatever works best for you. For me with these more complex shapes, I just need a little bit more help. There's one holly leaf, suppose to have another one down here. It's not exactly as my guide is, but that's okay. As I go around I'm just trying to be very mindful of not putting my fingers on any of the green paint. Now we're on the back side of the ball, we're right here. I can see I can just do one long holly leaf to fill that space. I ended up painting less holly leaves that I had done on my guide, and I'm still capturing the same spirit. There we go, I got the outlines of all the holly leaves. Now that we've been able to draw those, where they're going to be, I can grab my pencil again. Now, we can just paint and color them in upside down because we don't have to worry about placement. You're welcome to use your larger brush to fill this in. It takes less time, or you can use your smaller one. I'm going to use my smaller one because when I am impatient and use my larger one, I tend to ruin the nice points that I create and everything gets rounded out. Since the holly leaves, they add that wildness with that shape in there, I really don't want to disrupt that too much, so I'll use my smaller brush, and just work my way around, filling in my holly leaves. Or I make my way around shapes like this. I'm going to use more of the point of my brush, so that I can really make sure I've got control over the shape. I'm going to rest my palm on a dry part of the ornament. Just drag around like that. If you're unsuccessful and you accidentally cut too far into that berry, you can layer the paint, you can mix up more of that, light red, orange color, and paint on top of this one, this is dry. No worries if you don't get it right the first time. It's excellently just put my palm down there, rest it. That's okay. This is where improvising comes in and why we're using very layerable paint. I'll be able to go over that with some ivory later. The main thing is I want to make sure I now dry my palm off, so I don't stamp that all over the design. It'll be a good reminder for me to be more careful as I go around. I think this is the last leaf that we're going to do, and then that one that's in between them, so almost done. With that, I'm going to put my ornament back on the drying stand and let the holly leaves dry. In the next lesson, we'll add in the final details to make the design pop.
11. Color 5: Painting the Final Details: In this lesson, I'll demonstrate painting the final details. I've got all of the shapes and colors on my ornament. Right now it just looks like random shapes on an ornament, and that's why this is my favorite part of the process because these lines and accent details we're about to add are really going to make everything pop and really finish it off. Since I last saw you, I did repaint. Remember how my hand stamped through some of the green and took off some of these flowers. I went back over and painted over it with some ivory. You can see here how some of that green is showing through because I had a more watery mix, and I'm okay with that. If I wanted it to be solid and less painterly, now that it's dry, I could go over with another code of ivory and it would be solid ivory. I have my black paint, and I have my smallest brush. There are just a few tips that I want to talk about before we get on here. The first is that even though this is a very small brush, it still has a variation in the lines that it can produce. If I just get some of my paint on my brush here and even use this paper as an example, you can see if I really have a light hand when I lay this brush down. You can see I can get a very fine and thin line. But if I accidentally push too hard, I get a much thicker line. When I'm laying down my accent lines, I want them to be thinner. In order to do that, I need to be able to move quickly and be really light with my brush. All of that is to say, when you're going to lay down a mark while the actual gesture of painting it may be quick or gestural, you want to be thoughtful. You don't just want to fall into a rush of painting all these lines, and then before you know it, it's overdone. While the stroke is going to be quick, we may be thoughtful in-between the strokes to figure out where we want them to be laid down. The other thing is, if you lay down a stroke you don't like, when I'm making these holly leaves, I know I'm bound to make one that's thicker than I want it, or maybe not in the perfect direction that I want it. My tip to you is to not paint over it. Don't try to go in there with more black and add more lines. You're just going to add more emphasis to that spot. If you paint something you don't like, leave it and let it dry. Then look at it at the end to see if it's still stands out to you. If it does, you can paint over it with the green and then take another shot. But if you just keep going in there with the black, you're just going to make a mess and it's going to very much be a focal point. When you're done, I want to say it now just in case I don't remember, don't forget to add your initials or maybe the year that you made the ornament at the bottom so that that lives on. I'm just going to go ahead and get into my black paint here. If I wanted to, I could put the pencil in here and do my drawing upside down because I already know all the lines and everything. But in this case, I'm just going to hold on to my ornament and rotate it for as long as possible. That way I can set it down on the desk and have it be sturdy and then hopefully my lines will work out better for that. I'm just going to get in. Per my a design guide I've got these little circles in the middle. You can already see what I mean that some of the strokes are thicker than others and that's okay, I'm not going to fight it too much. I've added all the details to my white flowers so they're all ready to go. Now I'll go ahead and add the berries. It's looking so good. I just love this design. I love these colors. Now the only thing I have left to do are the holly leaves. I've got a lot of black paint. It's mostly dry in most areas, but I really don't at this point want to accidentally smudge anything. I'm going to grab my pencil and use it as an aid again. Even though now the design is upside down, at least the holly leaves are easy enough. Basically there's one main stroke that goes down the center and then tiny lines that come out as little expression lines. It's okay that it's upside down. The ease of being able to rotate and know that I'm not touching wet paint is going to be more comfortable for me. Now I'm going to do this longer line and I know that it's probably going to be wider than the other ones just because I'm going around the ball and trying to make it smooth. I'm not going to stress about it too much. You can see it's a little wobbly, little wiggly and that's okay. Those lines just really add movement. You can see that even though they're not all uniform, it doesn't really matter. It just still adds to the feel. Looks like that's it. Looks like we've got all the lines in there that we wanted. You can decide if you want to add your initials, you could also do this with a pen you don't have to try and brush it. You just do a DM dash and a 20. Now when we look at it, we'll remember the year I made it and that I made it myself. Go ahead and put it on the drying rack. At this point, since we've added all of the paint to our design, now would be a great time to wash brushes and wash any excess paint off. Also you can store some of this in those wedged containers if you don't want to waste it. Just like that, our beautiful painted ornament design is complete. In the next lesson, we'll cover finishing the ornament and cover ideas for gifting.
12. Finishing & Gifting Ideas: In this lesson, we'll cover adding a glossy finish, adding the ornament cap, tying a ribbon bow hanger, and a few ideas for gifting and storage. After you finish painting your design, it's time to add a spray coat should you want to. I prefer to leave mine unfinished because not only is the paint high-quality enough to stand up to it, I just love the mat flat texture of it. If you are going to be covering yours in addition to following the manufacturer's instructions on the spray code that you buy, I recommend wearing a glove and using the pencil method to aid in getting an even coating of the finish all over the ornament. Now it's time to pop the metal loop in the cap and into the top of the ornament. Finishing these ornaments off with a ribbon or twine bow as a hanger adds just the right touch. Silk ribbon adds an elegant touch, while twine has a vintage and organic feel. If you're keeping your ornament for yourself, simply wrap it in some crumpled tissue paper or craft paper to create a little protective halo and store it with the rest of your ornaments. If you're going to be gifting them, I recommend using a piece of recycled bubble wrap around the ornament and placing the bubble wrapped ornament inside a snugly fit but not too small gift box. If you're going to be shipping your ornament, I would recommend adding additional protective packaging on the outside of the gift box. Just like that, you've got a hand painted heirloom ornament and the process to do it over and over again.
13. Thank You!: Thank you so much for spending time painting ornaments with me. I hope you felt cozy and mindful while working on yours. I know I did while working on mine. Don't forget to post your project here on Skillshare so that we can all see the beauty you've created. If you'd like to be the first to know of new classes, give me a follow here on skill share, if you'd like more regular and casual encouragement, you can give me a follow on Instagram @bydylanm, and if you want to know all the important bits, I send out a quarterly newsletter that you can sign up for at bydylanm.com. Happy holidays. Until next time.
