Holiday Greeting Cards in Watercolors: Paint your own Christmas Cards

1. Intro: Holiday Greeting Cards with Watercolors: Hello, and welcome to my home studio. I'm Emily, and in today's Skillshare class. Our goal is to relax and have fun while painting with watercolors. This Skillshare tutorial is designed for beginners and comes with three different holiday greeting projects, a botanical wreath with berries, a wreath with a large bow, and a wreath made out of ornaments. These three designs are all easy and quick projects for those of you who are looking to add a handmade touch to your Christmas cards this year. Class includes printable templates for printing the outlines directly onto your watercolor cards, using your home printer, and traceable templates, if you'd rather trace the outline onto your paper. I've also included a video tutorial to teach you how to print onto your watercolor paper using your home printer. In the step by step tutorials, you'll learn how to create these paintings using basic watercolor techniques like wet on wet and wet on dry. You'll practice your fine brush control, and you even get access to a bonus card design so you can test out what you learned on a whole new design. So get your paints, paper, and brushes ready, and let's get started painting some holiday greeting cards. 2. Supplies Needed: Alright, so let's talk quickly about the supplies that you'll need for the Skillshare tutorial. First off, you'll notice that in all of my tutorials. I will be painting using these color dots from a practice sheet. That's because the original videos for this tutorial were originally recorded for these watercolor kits that I sell. And you can find these on my website if you're interested in having the printed cards already ready to go. Okay, now talking about the colors that you'll need for this tutorial. The first two colors are Daniel Smith. I have undersea green and deep sap green. Undersea green is a mix of French ultramarine and quinacridone gold. And so if you don't have undersea green at home, you can try with a mix of those two colors, or you can use a sap green mixed with a little bit more brown to make it a little bit more earthy. Deep Sap green is just a darker colored green. And then we move into some student grade water colors. So Windsor and Newton, their cotton collection is student grade. I'm using alizarin crimson and Palo blue, along with Gamboge, Gamboge, this yellow hue I don't use in the tutorials. I just include it in case you wanted to mix your own colors for the ornament wreath if you wanted to do a multi colored ornament wreath. And then a deep gold. This is a metallic color by Vang. It's a darker deeper metallic gold. It's really nice to add some metallic highlights. You'll also need some water. So I use only one glass of water in the tutorials. You can paint with two, if you'd like to. You will need a paper towel or a cloth. And then your brush. Any type of round size brush will work for this tutorial. I'm using a round size two. This is a fairly inexpensive student grade brush from Jerry's Artama. It's creative inspirations. Otherwise, at home in my home studio, I use black velvet, silver Limited brushes. Size four is kind of my go to brush for projects of this size. For your paper choice for your watercolor cards. You'll notice that there are a few different options online if you want to buy watercolor cards. I personally have been enjoying Strathmore watercolor cards. I feel like they have a good quality. It's 140 pound paper. They do come creased so that you can fold them when you're done painting. Make sure to not fold them until you're done. These are pressed. So you'll want to be printing on the bumpy side of the paper, not on the smooth side of the paper. This set of Strathmore watercolor cards comes with water with envelopes as well. This is a set of 100. But for your value of money, I do think the larger sets work really well. You get 100 cards, and it's just over $0.50 per card. So you can kind of play around with your watercolor cards without ruining without breaking the bank. Another brand of watercolor cards that I've used before are Cansen watercolor cards. However, I do like the texture, and how the pigment soaks into the paper a little bit better on the Strathmore in my opinion. Now, you could just use a five by seven inch of cut watercolor paper and then tape them or glue them onto a normal greeting card. That is always an option as well. But I do highly recommend that you do not paint directly on card stock greeting cards because your paint will not lay the same way. It won't soak into the paper the same way, and you might become really frustrated. 3. How to Print the Templates: In this video, we'll look at how to print templates, Trace using those templates and Trace using your phone. I'm going to talk quickly about printers. Not all printers are designed equally when it comes to printing on your watercolor paper. The first printer I want to talk about is the Epson workforce W F 78 40. I just purchased this printer, and I am in love with it. It's an ink jet printer. It uses pigment ink, which is known to be waterproof. So when you're looking at your printer, pigment ink is better than die ink. The ink that this printer uses is called Durabrt ultra Ink. That means that when it's printed and you use your watercolors on top of it, those that ink will not bleed. It does have a rear feed, which is definitely useful. You will need to use rear feed when you are printing on watercolor paper. However, you do need to load it one by one, which can be tedious, and it is a very large machine. Next, we're going to compare that with a brother laser printer. With laser printers, a lot of people will tend to use a laser printer instead of an ink jet for printing templates on watercolor paper because the ink used is a toner. Toner is waterproof, whereas pigment and dyes can be not so waterproof. You do have a rear feed option, which you will need for cardstock watercolor paper. However, some laser printers don't print color very well, so you have to be careful when choosing your laser printer. There's also some concern that the heat used to print using lasers will ruin the sizing of your watercolor paper. Others have used them and think that they're wonderful. I personally don't have any experience with laser printers, but this is just what I've been reading as I've done research. Lastly, we'll talk about the Con TS 95 21 C. This is the printer that I'm using in this video tutorial. It's the first printer that I started printing on. I have been printing both prints, cards, merchandise, as well as some templates. This is also an ink jet printer, which can cause some concern because the die used in this printer is a die ink. Dye inks tend to be not waterproof and will bleed slightly versus the pigment ink used in my Epsin printer. After I noticed how much bleeding of ink, this was causing on my watercolor paper, that's when I decided to purchase the Epsin workforce. The cannon printer does have a rear feet option, which is necessary when printing on cardstock or watercolor paper. However, you do still need to load it one by one, or otherwise, it will jam and cause a complete mess. As you get ready to print on your watercolor paper, using your home printer. Just be aware of these differences knowing that the template that you print might be waterproof, or it might not be waterproof. It might bleed slightly. If this is a concern for you and it ends up being troublesome, remember that there are templates for tracing in this tutorial as well, and it might benefit you to trace the template instead of print it directly on your watercolor paper. Let's take a look at how to print using my canon TS 95 21 C. So when it comes to watercolor card paper for printing your templates. There are a few options available to you at art stores and on Amazon. One of them is sin. I used to use Canson for all my watercolor kits. I've sensed switched to Strathmore watercolor cards. These can be purchased on Amazon in packs of 100, or I believe in packs of 30 as well. It is 140 pound watercolor paper. It is cold pressed. So one of these sides is going to have a little bit more grain to it than the other side. So you'll want to make sure to print on the side that has more grain. At least for now, it's where the fold of the card is ridged up. So it's a con x instead of a concave on the other side. So you'll just want to keep that in mind as you print on your Strathmore cards. They also come with envelopes as well. So next, you want to open up the digital download on your computer. I'm using a free version of adobe Acropad, and I did send a link on the page to get your own free version below you can find where the YouTube tutorial is that you're watching right now. So these are the printable templates. You can use the following templates to print each design directly onto your watercolor paper using a home printer. However, not all home printers are able to print on thick watercolor paper. You'll have to use the rear feed, and I recommend using an Epsin printer with durabrt ink. That's waterproof. You'll scroll down to the template you want to print, and then you'll go up and select file print. Now, here this might look slightly different, but you'll want to choose your printer, mine is the Epsin. And then we can print in gray scale since we're printing a template. Instead of printing all the pages, I'm going to select the current page. And now we'll want to look at the paper sizing. So I'm going to need to go down and set up my page, click on page setup. And now I want to change the size of the paper. It's currently on a regular letter size paper. I need to find a seven by 10 ". Since I don't have one on the list, I'm going to have to manage custom sizes. Here I can choose the width to be 7 ". And then the height to be 10 ". I do want my margins to say 0 " on each side. I don't want to margin. Click Okay, and make sure that the paper size is correct seven by ten. Okay. Now that I have the correct size, now I need to make sure my image is filling the size of the paper. So Right now it's on fit. I am going to move down and look at the orientation is on auto. I don't want it on auto. I want it on portrait, and then actual size. You'll notice that there's a little pink ring around the printable area and it fits the template. I know now that this is going to print on the watercolor paper. If it's auto, do you notice that the pink is not aligned with the template? It has to be on this portrait setting and actual size. Yours might look different on your home printer, but hopefully it looks like something similar if you're using Adobe Acrobat version. I click print, and now we're ready to print. Make sure that you load your paper in the rear tray, and I like to load it one by one. Make sure that your bumpy rough side of your paper is facing up, and then you'll be ready to paint. If you don't feel comfortable printing out the template directly on your watercolor paper, there are also darker templates that you can download to use to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. As soon as you open up the PDF, you'll need to scroll down past the printable templates to the traceable template section. You can use the following templates to print each design onto regular 8.5 by 11 inch paper and then trace it onto your watercolor paper. You'll note that these traceable templates have darker outlines. Scroll down to the template that you'd like to print. If you're printing a watercolor card, you'll notice that it has a box around it. Click on the Print icon. We will not print all. We'll click on the current selection only. You'll check the paper size. Right now, it's on eight by 10 ", so I need to go down to my page setup. Find paper size and click on US Letter. Click Okay. And now, it doesn't matter if we have fit or actual size. Either one will not change the size of your printout. It will be the same size. Once again, make sure that you're printing to an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper and then click print. Since you're using regular plain paper, you can either load it in the rear tray or you can load it in the lower tray. You'll notice that your template comes out nice and dark. To use your tracing template, first, place your watercolor paper on top of your dark template. You'll need to line it up correctly. Then use some masking tape or painters tape to secure your watercolor paper on top of your template. Use either a light box or a bright window to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. Last option is to use your phone to trace the templates onto your watercolor paper. I like to use an app on my phone called Da vinci I. It's a one time purchase where you can upload any picture or image that you'd like to trace. Using the classic mode, you can move and resize your image to help you draw it onto your watercolor paper. To use this technique, you will need a phone holder so you can look through your phone as you're tracing your outline. Please do remember that these templates are for personal use only. It is illegal to paint them and then sell them for money. Enjoy painting them for yourselves or to give them as a gift. Thank you. If you are interested in these designs printed on your watercolor paper, but don't have a printer at home, you can always purchase one of my watercolor kits on my website. Paper, paints, and a brush are included in the purchase of your kit. 4. Berries Wreath Part 1: For this tutorial, you will need the template with your happy holidays card. That's the one with a bunch of leaves and berries on it. You'll need your practice sheet with the colors on the bottom, a paper towel or cloth. The round size two brush included in your kit. A mixing tray. I like to use the top of a yogurt container, but you can also use a plate or a different plastic tray. And a cup of clean water. All right, so we're going to get started. First things first, make sure that once you have your cards out of your watercolor kit, don't fold them yet. We're going to keep them open and flat, so it's easier to paint. And then when our card is dry, then we can fold it. Second thing to notice is that you probably noticed already the deep gold. These little flex of gold can get into all of your other colors very easily if you use the same rinse water when you're rinsing your gold and then if you try to grab a different color. Remember, if you are using gold, you might want to get a second cup of water to rinse just the gold in that second cup of water. All right. So for this card, we're going to start with our leaves. And so the first step is to mix our base layer color. We're going to do a wet on wet technique for these leaves. So I'm going to grab So water and put some water on my mixing tray. I'll need about a quarter's worth of water. I'm going to ground my brush and I'm going to roll my brush around my wet brush in that undersea green, and I'll add it to my water. I might need to do this a few times, especially if your undersea green was totally dry. So I'll mix that a few times, maybe three or four brushfuls of pigment. Now, we do want a fairly transparent undersea green. So I'm going to check this green using my free space. Any transparency level around this transparency is great for what we need. If I'm using this undersea green directly from my paper without mixing it with water, we get a really dark undersea green, and that's not what we want. We want to be able to drop in some darker pigment, and so we need something that's a little bit more transparent. The next step before we get started on our leaves is we want to wet our deep sap green because we will be using our deep sap green. I'm going to take about two brushfuls of water. What that's going to do is it's going to soften that pigment so that we can easily grab some while we're painting our leaves. All right, so this is a two step process. We're going to do the same process for all of the leaves that we have on our card. Remember that you can turn your card around as you're painting, particularly so that we don't rest our hand in something that's already wet. This undersea green, I'm going to mix it nicely. I'm going to grab as much undersea green as I can on my brush, and then I'm going to paint a single layer of undersea green on my larger leaves. I'm going to start with only the larger leaves because it's going to be a little bit easier. Now, as you noticed, I'm starting at the thickest part of the leaf, and then I'm pulling the pigment to the tip. As I pull it to the tip, then it can get nice and I can get a nice fine point at the tip. Now, while this leaf is still wet, now I want to drop in some darker pigment towards the base of the leaf. I don't need to wash my brush. I'm just going to use whatever liquids on my brush. And then I'm going to grab just the tip of my brush in this deep sap grain. Then I'll dot dot dot at the base of my leaf. And as I dot, that pigment is going to get released onto the leaf. If the pigment is going all over the place and it's too dark, I can dry my brush with my paper towel and then use the brush just like a sponge to soak up any of that pigment wherever I don't want it. I'll show this step again. Once again, it's a two step process. The base layer with your transparent, and then dropping in a deep sap grain at the base. Now, you might notice that your undersea green, this transparent color on your plate. When it starts to settle, you might notice two different colors on your mixing plate. That's because undersea green is a granulating color that's made of multiple pigments. There's a green in this, there's brown, there's blue. Every time you use this undersea green, you'll need to mix it. So I'm going to mix it again, and now with a full brush of paint, I'm going to go to my next leaf. I don't want to do a leaf that's touching this first one because I want to let this one dry. So I'm going to turn my paper. And I'm going to do another big leaf that's here. So maybe I'll do this big leaf. Once again, I might need to grab more of that undersea green. I'm going to paint the first layer of undersea green starting at the base, and then pulling that liquid to the tip. Now, as I go back, I'm making sure that this whole leaf is still wet. Then I don't need to wash my brush. I just grab the tip of my brush with the deep sap green. And then dot dot dot at the end of my leaf. I can use my brush then to just kind of pull that deep green wherever I want. If I get some droplets, I'm going to use my paper towel to help me clean. Oh. Le Now, as I'm working on some of these smaller leaves here, I don't need to worry about adding that dark deep sap green towards the base anymore. I can just paint some of these without that deep sap green. Also on some of these really tiny leaves. You might notice that it's hard to get a nice point and a nice fine point to get into these little leaves. If that's the case, tap your brush on your paper towel to release some of that liquid, and then it'll be a little bit easier to paint these tiny leaves. Sometimes there's just too much liquid on our bruh, and then that makes it challenging to have a really small, fine point. So releasing some of that liquid will give us a nice point again. 5. Berries Wreath Part 2: Ohh All right, now that I'm done with all of my leaves. Now I can start working on some of the berries. I'm going to leave these little tiny sprays that almost look similar to eucalyptus sprays. I'm going to leave those to the end, and I'm going to work on my berries now. So I'm going to just a few drops of water onto the red here. You can either use this directly from your paper or if you want to mix a red on your tray, that's okay. Now I'm going to use this to paint my berries. A few tips about painting your berries. Make sure that you're painting them the ones that aren't touching any of your wet leaves. Now I'm going to start with a drop of color in the center of this berry, and I might dot dot dot to release some of that liquid. Then from there, I can push the liquid to the edge using my brush. That's going to help us get kind of a a nice line along the edge, and I might turn my paper so that I can push that liquid to the edge of the circle. Kind of the biggest tip I have for you on making these berries, is really make sure you've got quite a lot of liquid there so that you can push the liquid to the edges. If you don't have enough liquid on your brush, it's going to be really hard to have that nice clean edge. So I might grab a little bit more water, a little bit more of my red. And now I can work on berries right next door. I'm going to make sure there's enough liquid on my brush. So that I can do dot some of that liquid and then push the liquid around. Now, if you are able to, I would suggest leaving a little bit of white paper in between these berries that are touching. If you're not able to do that, it's not the end of the world, but sometimes having just a little bit of that white paper is going to help to differentiate the berries. How do I do that? Once again, I dab that liquid in the center of the berry dot dot to release some of that liquid. And then I'm going to have the point of my brush facing upwards, and I'll push that liquid just close enough to that next barry without touching the next barry. I'll push that liquid to the edge. If you go over the lines, that's okay. Just make your berries a little bit larger. Alright, so we're going to continue working on our berries. Now that I'm done with the berries. I do want to let these berries dry before I do the final sprays because they are so wet. If I touch these berries in the slightest way, I'm going to pull some of that into these sprays. I'm going to this s and then I'm going to come back and do the final five sprays. All right, so my berries are mostly dry, so I'm going to start with my sprigs here. Now, for this color of the sprigs, we are going to use our mixing plate. We'll grab some water first. Same thing about a quarter size of water. And now, I do want to mix a different color. Instead of this deep sap green and undersea green, I want to mix like a teal color for this. So I'm going to start with some hyal blue. I'll grab a brushful of yal blue. And then to that, I'm going to add, I'm going to add just some of that deep sap green. And then I'll mix deep sap green and blue until I get this nice teal color. Now, I still want it a little water down. I definitely don't want to have it super dark and here I'm spray some color all over. I'll use the free space, of course, on my practice sheet to test out the color. I like that, although I think I want it a bit more green than that. I'll add just a bit more deep sap green. Test it again. I think that's good. It's a little bit darker, a little bit more green of a color, but it's still nice and transparent. I'm going to do the same thing, load up my brush. Now for the sprays here, I find personally that it's easier to start at the tip of one of them. And then I'll rotate and I'll do the same thing for the rest of the three. The rest of the four remaining. And I just want to keep in mind that I don't want to touch any of these berries that are still wet. So once again, if you're kind of rushing this process like me and not letting it fly dry, just be aware to not touch your brush to the red berries that are still. All right, so I'm all done. I'm going to let this dry. I can also paint in these little hearts, and then I can sign my name where it is hand painted with love. And then the very last thing, one red berries are. If you want to leave them like this, you can. One little extra thing that you can do is add a little highlight. Now, you don't have one of these white gel pens included in your kit, but they're fairly cheap on Amazon. I'm using a Uni ball Signo, white gel pen. And if I were to add a little highlight on each of these berries, it's going to look like this. I'll just add a little white comma in one of the corners of the berries, and it'll just leave a really nice highlight. You can also use white out or you can use a white acrylic paint. But, of course, it still looks really nice without the white highlight. This is just an extra option for you there. 6. Bow Wreath Part 1: For our season's greetings card, that's the card that has the bow on it, you'll first need your card template, your practice sheet with the colors and the bottom, the number two round brush included in your kit, a paper towel or cloth. The top of a yogurt container, butter dish, or another plate that you can use to mix your colors, and a cup of new water. Okay, so let's get started. So the very first step of my wreath is going to be our leaves. Now, this is the same technique that we used for our first greeting card in this series. And so we're going to practice the same exact technique. So we'll start by adding water on our plate. You'll need same thing about a quarter size worth. And then we'll need our first layer of color, our base layer of color. That's going to be our undersea green. So we'll drop some water on undersea green to activate the color. I'm rolling around my brush. I'm going to add a few brush folds of that color. I want this color to be kind of a medium opacity. So I don't want it to be too light, but I also don't want it to be too dark. That looks like a great opacity. It's similar to the other practices that I did. And then before I start, I'm also going to activate this deep sap green. So I'm going to drop a few drop fuls of water on top just to get it ready for me to paint. Now, remember that your undersea green is a granulating color. If you let it sit too long, your pigments are going to separate. Every time that we paint a leaf, we're going to have to remix our color. Let's review how to do our leaves. We're going to start by painting the base layer of one of our leaves. Now, we will be doing this to start one by one. However, if you get the hang of this really easily, then we can do two at once. Now that I have this base layer. Now I'm going to drop in some deep sap green painting wet on wet. I'm not washing my brush. I'm using whatever liquid I currently have. I'm grabbing some of that deep sap green just on the tip of my brush and I'm going to.it on one end of the leaf. This is just going to show that this is where the leaf is attaching to the wreath. I can then wash my brush. And tap it on my paper towel, so I don't have a sopping wet brush. Remember that you can always kind of mix these this edge if the edge doesn't mix very well, by using a damp brush or by grabbing just a little bit of that undersea green. We'll kind of mix it and tell we've got a gradiation that we like. Sometimes you have your two colors mixing really well. Other times they don't, at all has to do with how much liquid is on that leaf. M. Oh, Oh, my. Alright, now that my leaves are done, I'm going to wait for the little pine branches until the very end. So I'm going to start working on my bow. First, I'm gonna need to the green on my plate because I'm going to need that for the red. H. All right. Now, I should also mention that if you don't want to do if you don't want to paint a red bow, that you, of course, have other color combinations that you can use. You can use blue. You can mix your blue and yellow to get a different kind of green than what we've used. Blue and blue and red to make a purple. You can use gold instead. But since I'm using this for a holiday card, I'm going to stick with my green and red. So first, I'll grab some water on my plate, and I'm mixing some red. I am grabbing quite a few brushfuls of this red because takes a little bit more pigment to not make it look so pink. Ah, right now, I'm going to start with the two little tails that are coming downwards. I've got a little drop of water. I'll clean up first. Only to give a little time for the top of the bow so that these leaves can dry. So I'm still going to use the same technique of painting section by section because if we were to paint the whole bow at once, you're not going to get any nice kind of segmentation happening of your bow. It's going to all look like one solid color. We want to get some tones, some darker tones. I'm going to start by very carefully painting my first layer of wet on dry. I'm only doing one side at a time because I don't want this ribbon to dry. Once again, I started at the top and I worked my way down to these points. It's always easier to pull pigment and pull paint into the points to make a nice point versus to start with a loaded brush at a point. Wherever you start is where all that liquid is going to go. I like to when I first lay down my brush, it's always at a spot that's kind of chunky, and I don't have to worry about details. Now, before this section dries, I'm not going to wash my brush, I'm going to go directly to my red. I'm going to grab some of that red directly from my paper. And then where that ribbon attaches. I'm going to drop in some of that darker red where I should just say some more opaque red. And when I that in, remember, I am going to dot dot dot. Dotting is going to help that liquid to disperse the pigment to come off your paint brush. Then I'll wash my brush, and then I'll continue. All right. Let's do this other side. Oh. All right. Now that our two ribbons are done, now we can start looking at the main section of our bow. Now, remember, since these two ribbons are wet, we don't want to do any section that's touching these two ribbons. So I am going to start with the two centers here. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to be really careful to not touch now on this side, I know it's not going to touch. But I really don't want it to touch the ribbon here. So if you are working and able to take a break to let that ribbon dry, I would suggest that. Otherwise, just make sure it's not going to touch. And just like before, I'm going to grab some of that red directly from my paper, and then.it at the center of my ribbon to release some of that darker red in the center. No. Also, if I notice that here at the edge, it's gotten too dark. I can always clean my brush, dry it. And then I can use kind of the edge of my brush, not the tip. I can use the edge to just pull up some of that pigment on the edge. Not truly the edge, but just right before the edge there, just to create a little bit more of a high light on the end of that bow there. We'll do the same thing to this other side. I am going to flip my paper so that I'm not resting my hand. All right. Now I'm going to look at kind of the rest of my bow. Now, this underside here, I am going to use some of the directly from my paper. Once again, if you do have the time to let these sections of your bow dry, I would suggest that. If not, I also would suggest to try to leave just a sliver of the paper open where the top of the bow meets the underside. It's just going to help with keeping a little bit more of an illustrative quality on this bow so that you can kind of see where that edge is. So I'm taking kind of my darkest opaquest red. And if you notice I didn't have a soaking wet brush when I grabbed this red, I don't want to have to water on my bh, or otherwise, I'm not gonna have a fine point to work with. So when I grabbed some water for that, I just grabbed the tip of my brush in water to add to my red so that I don't have too much. 7. Bow Wreath Part 2: All right, so the bottom section there of my bow is done. Now, for the top section, I'm going to use that water down red again. This time for the top section, I don't actually need it to need to leave that little white along the top section. I'm just going to do a light red just along the top. If I have too much liquid on my brush, and it's hard to make those details, I'll tap it on my paper towel so that I have a little bit of a finer of a point. Now, my last step is the center there of my bow, which I'm going to be doing a light red. So the water down red. Same thing with this step. If you feel like any of the sections of your bow are too wet, let it dry a little bit. Use a little bit of a hair dryer on it. If you are wanting to finish it quickly. So that you don't accidentally push that pigment away and make a really big balloon. I noticed there's a little bit darker of liquid there, so I'm gonna pull some of that up. Alright. And there's my bow. The last section of my card is to do these pine branches. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to need to clean my plate one more time because I'm not using my red anymore. Now, a trick for painting these pine branches in the background, I don't want to be having a dark green like pine trees typically have. I do want to make my pine branches a lot more muted in color. And the reason is is because a light color is going to help one to fill in the spaces without having it stand out too much. And two, because I'm going to be making such small fine brush strokes. If I have a color that's a lot lighter, I'm not going to notice any mistakes that I make. So whenever you're doing fine detail work, at least when you're beginning, I would suggest to really use a lighter transparent color so that you can hide those mistakes until you get more confident, and then of course, you can try a darker color. So I'm going to mix a teal, so I'm going to first start with not my undersea green because it has, I think too much brown in it. I'm going to start with the deep sap green. I already have water on my plate because I want it to be nice and transparent. And then I'm going to add some of my al blue. I think I'm going to lean a little bit more towards blue. And I'm not sure if this is going to be too dark, so I am going to practice it on my test sheet. My first step is to make the center of the pine. And you do have some guidelines here on your greeting card. So I would suggest to do that center line first. When you're practicing it, you're just going to practice it practice any shape, so some sort of curve here. And then with the liquid that's already in that center line, you're going to start. Now, there might be too much liquid on my brush. I might tap my brush first. And then pull some of that liquid outwards. Now, as I'm pulling this liquid out. I'm not pulling it at a 90 degree angle. I am pulling more of at a 45 degree angle. So what do I mean by that? I'm not pulling it perpendicular like this. This is going to look a lot more childish. It's going to look like a whole different plant altogether, more like a fern really or a palm versus a 45 degree angle until I close at the point. Alright, I'm going to try that. One more time, I actually think that I want it slightly lighter in color, a little bit more transparent. Since I have so much liquid here, I think I'm going to pull some of that liquid off and then add more water. Otherwise, I'm left with adding too much water, and it would take me forever. All right, now, let's try this again. So pulling a center line. And then from my center line, I'm going to start at the base and pull diagonal one side, pull diagonal the other side until I reach the top. Now, a few things about this, your diagonals here can touch. In fact, some of them should touch. It's going to look really weird if you have too much space in between. It's going to look more like a Charlie Brown type pine, which is fine, but maybe not the look that we're looking for here. So some of these we can fill in. The next thing to notice is that my hand and where how I'm touching the paper is very, very light. So I'm not pressing down hard. If I press down hard, I'm going to get a very thick line. So I'm barely touching the paper. As I'm making these little lines. If you're noticing that there's to liquid coming out at once and you're getting these little blobs like this, try tapping your paper towel and then try what those blobs on your paper mean is that you've got too much liquid on your brush. Alright, let's try it out and see what it looks like on our greeting card. Oh, my god. Alright. The last thing that I wanted to show you on this greeting card is maybe some options for using this gold, these gold flakes. So you might be happy with how yours looks right now. That's perfect. You can leave it as it is. Or you can always look at maybe some ways to add this deep gold. So one of the ways is to glaze a little bit of deep gold on top of your bow. And what that's going to do is it's just going to make your bow sparkle a little bit. So we're going to use some water. It's going to be a lot of water. Glazing just means that we're going to kind of use mostly water, paint on top of a section that's already dry to kind of change the color a little bit. So I need to do this quickly so that I don't lift up any other of the red as I'm working. I'm not I'm not pushing my brush down hard. I'm just doing it very lightly. Just enough to get that liquid there. Especially in the center here where we added that dark red. If I go over that area too much, that's going to lift up some of that red. So I'll add more water. Makes a little bit more gold, so I can add a little bit more for the ribbons here. Like I said, I'm only going over at once. I can always drop in more gold once it's wet in any of the areas. So it might not be super apparent over the camera. But when you're looking at it and you're shining it in the light, you're going to be able to see a little bit of that gold detail. The other thing that you can do is you can always add a few little kind of gold bulbs as you're working here, so you can add a few of these little kind of gold balls around your wreath. I'm choosing them to be pretty small. I'm just kind of filling in sections where these Pines are not. And like I said, this might not be you might not like how this looks, and if you don't, you are more than welcome to leave the gold off. The gold is just there for you to add a few pops of color just if you'd like to. All right. So don't forget to paint these little hearts, saying that it was painted by you and sign your name so that it's all ready for you to send off to somebody you love. 8. Ornaments Wreath Part 1: Okay. So for the Marian bright ornament card, you will need the template provided in your kit. Make sure to not fold it quite yet. You'll need your practice sheet with your colors. Your size two brush included in your kit, a mixing tray. I'm using the top of a yogurt container, a paper towel, and I'm using two cups of water this time just because our deep gold, when we rinse our brush after using deep gold, it tends to get gold all over our water, and sometimes I don't want to contaminate the other colors. So I'm going to use two water cups today. All right, let's get started. So our very first step. We're actually not going to be using our mixing tray because we're going to be using the colors directly from our paper. And so before we get started, we'll wet our brush, and we're going to add a few drops of water to each color. You might not use every color. So like the undersea green you're not going to use, but I'm going to wet it just in case. We're definitely going to use the deep sap green, the red. You'll eventually use the blue, and then we'll also use our deep gold. Now, for this tutorial, I am going to show you how to make the ornament wreath using our red, green, and gold to make it holiday colors. But if you want to make your ornaments multicolors, that's why you can mix your own colors using the primaries included the red, blue and yellow. So you can always use your mixing tray to mix your colors. All right, the basis of our ornaments is a wet on wet technique. That technique you practiced already. This time, what we'll do is we'll wet the entire ornament first using water. We're going to be careful to stay within the lines. Because remember that wherever the water goes, our color will go. So I'm going to start with some of these bigger ornament balls first. Now that I have it completely with water, I don't need to grab more water, just whatever's left on your brush, and then I'm going to choose the color I want. Now, I'll start maybe with deep sap green. I'll grab some deep sap green on the tip of my brush. This is why we wet it already so that we can give the color a little bit of a chance to soften up. Then around the edge of my ornament, I'm going to drop in some the darkest color along the edge. You're going to notice that this color is going to swirl into the center. But hopefully you're going to see that there's a section of this where the color doesn't fully mix, and so you've got a little section of white there. We're going to leave that. We're not going to mix this together because we want that to look like the reflection of these ornament balls. And then we'll continue moving along. Now, two things that you can do. You have two options here. You can choose to do the ornaments right next to the green if you want your colors to blend slightly. If I wanted my red and green to blend a little bit, I could do the one next door. If I don't want them to blend, I'm going to skip and do a bub that's not touching the one that's wet. So I'm not going to have mine touch. I think I'm going to skip and do the next one. I want to plan out which ones are going to be green, which ones are red, and which ones are deep gold. Maybe that one's red and gold. Maybe I'll skip and I'll do this small one. Same thing, I wet my brush, and I wet the ornament first. Now, two things that might be happening, we're going to troubleshoot here. If you have way too much water, say you've got a bunch of dots of water and it's more of a pool of water. What's going to happen when you drop your color in is that color is going to spread way too much, and you're not going to have that nice little area of wetness. So you see how it's spreading too much. So I'm going to take all that water off and start again and show you what might be happening if you have too little of water. So I'm going to dry my brush a little bit. If you have too little of water, Say I still what the area, but it starts to dry too quickly. What you'll see is that the green then is going to stay really close to the edge and it's not going to come in towards the center. This is a little easier to fix. All you can do is just add a little bit more water to the center and start over. But as you do these little ornament balls, you're going to see, you're going to notice what the ideal amount of water is. And then I'll take my paint and paint all the way around the edge. Now, if I have too much of an open area without the color, I can just dot some color, release some color until I have a shape of a high light there that I like. Clean my brush, and then I continue moving along and do another green one here. We'll continue painting one color of ball and then we'll switch to another color. I'm only sticking to the larger ones, these smaller ones. I can paint just a single solid color once I'm done with the larger ones. And so now I'm going to turn to my red color. I'm going to do the same thing. Once again, I'm going to that ornament. And then remember, I'm not going to add more water to my brush. I'm going to use just what's on here. Grab just the tip of my brush with that red, and then I'll paint along the edge of my ornament. Remember that once I paint around everything, I can always.in more color in the center if I don't want that much of a whiteness from the center. If there's too much liquid and that color is going everywhere, remember that you can dry your brush and take some of that liquid off of your paper using your brush like a sponge. All right. Let's keep going with some of our red ornaments. 9. Ornaments Wreath Part 2: All right. And lastly, I'm gonna add a few of these ornament balls being using that deep gold. Alright, now that I'm done with my gold, I'm gonna go back and probably paint these two green. You can go on back and check and see which colors you think these little ones should be. Remember that you don't need to have a little highlight. For these, two, you can just paint them wet on dry. Oops. And that's what happens when you've got two colors, two of these ornaments right next to each other that are that aren't dry. So if that ever happens to you, I'm going to try to soak all of that up that I can with my brush. And then with a section of my paper towel, I'm going to press down as hard as I can. Then I'll let this dry a little bit before I try to do the gold again. Now that I've finished with all of my ornaments, now I'm ready for some of the little sprays of pine needles. We are going to be painting some pine needles around our wreath, similar to what we did in the second greeting card, our season's greetings card. All of these little sprays here, we're going to do the same technique. But this time you're going to test it out without some of these guidelines. So one thing to remember, well, a few things to remember. Number one, whatever color you choose, we're going to try to keep it a watered down color. That's going to make sure that any sort of mistakes that you make aren't going to look that intense and dark on your paper. The second thing we're going to do is we're going to keep our sprays all going in the same clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Here I have all my sprays wrapping around. None of them are going the opposite direction. They're all wrapping around in a circle. That's important to make sure that you have a nice flow to your greeting card. We'll just keep this one up here for now. I might just use it as a little bit of a reference point. But let's start by mixing our color that we'll use. Now, remember all of our colors on our paper are very dark and dense and opaque. So we're going to want a more transparent color, so I'll need to add water to my tray first. We want maybe a quarter size of water. And now, you do have some options. You can either choose the same color of sprays as you did in season's greetings, where you mix a green and a blue to make a teal. You could add sprays of gold if you're wanting to continue with this gold theme, or you can use undersea green and have it just be a lighter green. I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to I'm going to take a little bit of that under sea green, add it to my water. Going to need a little bit more. Remember, we do want this transparent, but we still want to be able to see it on our paper. So that was just about three brushfuls of color. And now I can test that opacity on the on the free space of my practice sheet. So that's looking pretty good because, like I said, I want to keep this nice and light so that if I do make a mistake, it's it's not as apparent. All right. Just like we did with our seasons greetings, sprays, we're going to start with the center line first, and then from that center line, we'll pull all of the little needles. I'm going to start in between some of these bigger ornaments, and I'm going to come out from in between them. I'll start with the first one and pull out this way. And I've got a little bit thicker of a center line here. Now, remember whatever's left on my brush and whatever's left on that center line. Now from there, I'm going to just pull out and remember that this is a diagonal. I have a little too much liquid on my brush. My needles aren't coming perpendicular 90 degrees out. My needles are coming out diagonally. And I'm having them wrap around in the shape of my ornament. Now, just like with our seasons greeting card, we did alternate more or less. We had a few that had two on one side and one on the other. But we do want to keep alternating inside the wreath and outside the wreath. For my next one, I'll remix my color because remember that undersea green is a granulating color, so it will separate when you leave it, sit. Then I'll skip. Here I did this spray coming out. I'm going to come to the next set of ornaments, and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to have a spray coming out and around, continuing in this counterclockwise. I can have some of these sprays going over the ornaments because it's a light transparent color. When I go over the ornament, I'm not going to really notice it or see it all that much. And I think I do need just a little one here. Just like a little baby. Our very last step on this greening is to paint our hearts in the back. So I'm going to be ing a red and maybe also some blue here. Are you needing more pre drawn greeting cards to paint at home? Did you know that you can purchase them from my website watercolors. They'll come in groups of five, and there's even a new design that was not taught in this class that you can also purchase? Emily Me Watercolors, Custom portraits, watercolor kits, and in person classes? 10. Share your Work and Follow me on Socials: For watching. If you enjoy this tutorial, please follow me on social media. Check out my website, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.