Learn to Paint a Christmas Ornament

1. Learn to Paint a Christmas Ornament: Hello, artsy friends. I'm Christa and I am super happy to be painting with you this Christmas season. In this painting lesson, we will practice our bokeh effect and learn how to create an ornament that has shading and areas that make it appear to be 3D. Please remember that you can use any colors you like for this background. The lights or even the ornament in this painting can be whatever color you like, whatever you already have on hand is perfectly fine. However, I will provide exactly what I used in this painting just to case you want to replicate exactly what I've done here. The brushes I used for this painting are my two inch flat brush. My half-inch flat brush, a quarter-inch flat brush in number six round, a number to round and a zero liner brush. Starting up at the top with the black. I used black, red apple, mountain, forest green, skyline blue, warm, buff, cream color, burnt umber, pale daffodil, white, and a metallic gold paint at the bottom. The skyline blue in the metallic gold are completely optional. You can still complete this painting without those two colors. So if you're ready, let's go to the table and get started. 2. Painting the Background: You'll notice I'm painting on acrylic paper. I'm not using a canvas for this painting, but you are welcome to use whatever Canvas you like and whatever size, just scale the painting up or down in order to fit it on whatever size canvas you choose to use. Right now, I'm being lazy and I'm just squirted the warm buff paint all over my canvas and I'm taking my two inch flat brush. I dipped it in a bit of white paint and I'm gonna go ahead and just paint that warm buff all over the canvas in vertical, up and down brushstrokes and actually forgot to put my protect your board down there so that my tarp doesn't get all dirty. So again, I just am painting on this cream color paint. And I have my white on my brush in addition to this cream color paint, just to give it a little bit more interest in the background. I'm just making sure that I have long even brushstrokes. I'm looking at my background and I'm thinking what can I do to make it a little more interesting? And I think I'm going to add a couple of little swipes of this skyline blue paint just in the background, just to blend it in nicely. I don't want it to be too obvious, but I don't want the background to be just solid cream either. So I'm just going to blend that in just a little bit here. I'm gonna do the same thing with this white. I'm just going to add a few sections of white. 3. Painting a bokeh background: I'm going to put my big flat brush away and grab my half inch flat brush. That's the next size, smaller. And I'm going to use some of my light yellow paint, the pill daffodil. I'm going to water it down a lot because I want my paint to be pretty translucent. So I'm going to take my half-inch flat brush and I'm just going to twist it to make a circle. And you can see how translucent the paint is. It's really difficult to see. I'm just putting my brush flat on the canvas. I'm holding the paintbrush straight up and down. And I'm just twisting the brush in my between my thumb and my finger didn't make it go in a perfect circle. Some of them aren't quite the perfect, but they can be easily be fixed. So I'm just going to speed this up a little bit just to cover the rest of my Canvas and my yellow bokeh dots. So put several of the yellow dots on your canvas in random order. And I'm going to switch to my smaller half inch brush. This is the quarter inch brush, and I'm gonna do the same thing in my white paint. I got the white paint on my palette and I'm just putting a lot of water in there to make it really translucent. And I'm going to make sure that I overlap most of these yellow dots with a new circle of white on top. And I'm also going to be putting some of the white dots by themselves as well. You can note here too, that if you don't have a variety of flat brushes to make these circles, you can use the corner of any brush that you have. You can even use your round brush. Just make a circle pattern with very translucent paint and paint it in. That's really translucency of the paint here is what makes it look more like bokeh. It's also important here to make different values of transparency in your paint. You want some of the circles to be brighter, more densely colored and pigmented. And you want some of the circles to be very translucent and barely there. And when you layer all of those on top of each other, it really does start to look like a bokeh or a blurred light background that you sometimes see in photography. So just keep adding those layers and make your circles different sizes, some smaller, some bigger. I'm going to do the same thing in my skyline blue here that I have that I added a lot of white too. This is a completely optional. You don't have to do the three different colors. You can just stick with the light yellow and the white. You can even just do white if you wanted to. I've seen some variations of this painting where they have greens and yellows and pinks and purples and all kinds of different colored lights, bokeh lights in the background and it looks really cute. So you'd this part, you can just make your own and just get creative with it. I decided to add a fourth color. And I took my mountain forest green and add a little bit of white just to lighten it up. And I also of course put it a lot of water in it to make it really translucent. So for my final later layer, you've noticed that I moved to my round brush and I'm just now using pure white paint. I've stopped watering it down. I want this the final layer to be bright white and layered on many of the other dots. This is definitely one of those situations where you could easily just put too many. And I'm on the verge of doing that right now. So just remember that sometimes less is more. When you think you're done. I always like to look at it from a different angle just to make sure it looks okay. What I'm doing here now is I'm taking my small liner brush into my pure white paint. And I'm just putting a little bit of a reflection on these translucent circles just to give them a little bit something extra. This is completely optional. I'm going to finish putting the finishing touches on this background and then I'm going to let this dry before we move on to painting the branches and pine needles. 4. Painting branches and pine needles: So after I let my background dry, I took my number eight round brush and dipped it into my burnt umber paint, my brown paint. And I just printed painted in some branches coming in from the left side of the canvas. The recording didn't work, but I just figured it was a pretty easy thing to paint just by looking. You can copy it if you need to. Know what I'm gonna do here at the bottom of the canvas is take my liner brush and dip it into the mountain forest green and start painting in some wispy pine needles. I'm holding my brush straight up and down and I'm applying very little pressure to the canvas. I'm just letting the very tip of the brush paint in some thin lines. And I kinda angling them out on each side of the branch that I painted here. Don't be afraid to pause and take a look at each branch to see if you need to add more or just move on. I'm turning my Canvas so that I can get a better angle here for these pine needles. And I'm also trying to avoid setting my hand in the pine needles that I just painted. Don't be afraid to turn your Canvas any which way you need to. It's also important here to notice that I'm not afraid to paint over my brown line. I feel like sometimes if you try to put each piece of pine needle on each side of the branch, it doesn't look realistic. You want them to overlap. You also don't want your pine needles to be exactly the same angles. Some of them are, go a little awol and go in different directions. You want this to look as organic as possible, so don't worry too much about everything being very perfect. So here you can see what I mean about painting over that brown stem line, how it makes it look a lot better if you do kind of hide that branch under some of those green pine needles. I'm noticing here that I have a little bit of a awkward bald spot that I need to fill in. So I'm going to paint in with my brown paint and my liner brush. Another little branch coming off right here. I'm just rinsing out my brush and putting green pain back onto my brush so I can paint these pine needles. I think I'm going to add another tiny little peak of pine needles peaking in from the edge over here. I'm going to put another little pine branch coming in from the left over here a little higher up as well. Just to fill in some of that negative space. I'm gonna go into my brown and just quickly paint in the impression of a branch being in those pine needles there. So what I'm doing here is just adding a little more brown paint to my brush. And I'm painting in some darker areas on the bottom parts of the branches just to give them a little bit of shadow. And then I will do the same thing after I add a little bit of white to my brush to paint on some highlights on the branches, on the top half of the branches to give a little bit of a highlight to each branch. 5. Painting the Ornament: Okay. So after you let that dry, I'm going to use the bottom of a jar of paint that I have and you can use anything that you have on hand. I just happened to have this sitting close by. You can use a lid to a jar or just anything around that you have that's pretty small, not anything too big. And I'm just going to trace the circle all the way around so that I have that perfect round shape for my ornament. So now what I wanna do is take my bright red paint and mix a little bit of my burnt umber, my brown into the red paint to create a really dark maroon color. And we're going to just paint in that circle the solid maroon color, the dark red color. And this will serve as our shadow layer for our ornament. She just paint that in being real careful not to go outside the lines. Just keep painting until you get a nice solid layer covering the entire ornament. Now that I have my shadow layer, and I'm going to start adding in the pure red. And I'm just going to add, I'm not even going to rinse out my brush. I'm just going to slowly start building up a bright side by slowly adding in more red paint. Now you might have to let this dry for just a few minutes. If you notice that your paint is just moving around, wet paint, just give your ornament about five-minutes to dry before you start to go in and add your brighter red layer. Now, while my red layer dries, I put a little bit of black on my paintbrush and I'm just going to very carefully and slowly take my time and paint a black line all the way around my ornament here. And I can blend that in some just paint that black line all the way around. And this is going to create that 3D shadowed look, that it gets darker as it goes around away from you. Once you have it outlined in black, you can blend that in toward the middle. Just to make your shadow layer a little deeper. Again, you might want to give this just a minute or two to dry before you add any bright red pane. Alright, so now that minus dry for just a few minutes, I have bright red on my paint brush and I'm just adding in some highlights and I'm focusing more on the left-hand side of the ornament. I want that one to be a little bit brighter. And it's just going to slowly fade into the darker shade on the right side. So while my red dries again, for this next step, I'm going to start working on the gold. I don't know what it's called, the ornament hanger. We'll go with that. So right now I'm just going to create an underlayer of the pale yellow, the pale daffodil light yellow that I have. And I'm just going to create this little part of the ornament that holds the string. You can make this any design that you want. I'm keeping mine real simple and just having some little pyramid teeth at the bottom. But you can make this super fancy if you want to. I'm going to paint in my ring. That'll hold might hang on. I got a big drop of water and let me clean that up before we go. Just dab it without moving. And I should be better. Okay. So just painting the rain that's going to hold the string. I'm going to clean off my brush and add the tiniest bit of black to the very tip of my brush. A very, very small amount of paint here. And I'm not putting any pressure on the Canvas, hardly any at all. I want a very, very thin line. I'm just going to go up over that branch in front of the gold ring on this side and behind it on the other side, and behind the branch coming towards you. If that makes sense. I'm going to clean off my brush and then try to add on another layer of the yellow for the part that holds the string. So that is a little more covered there. Now that my red ornament has had a little time to dry, I'm going to add go back with my my round brush and add bright red paint. And just paint in that left side again so that the highlight is on that side. I'm just going to keep adding in that red paint and I'm not covering that black edge. I want a little bit of that to show all the way around the ornament. I'm also keeping the highlights to the top portion of the ornament. And I'm letting the bottom of the ornament stay the dark maroon shadow color. I'm just putting in that dark red shadow tone back in there that I over painted a little bit. Adding a little bit of black to the bottom of the ornament. Making shadows on either side. Going back in with that bright red to put in that middle highlight. It's really just a fun little back-and-forth between the shadows and the highlights before you get it right where you like it. So now that I have my shadows on my ornament where I like them, I'm gonna take my bright white paint and I'm just going to come in here with my liner brush and paint in a reflection. I'm gonna do a long curved line toward the back of the ornament. And as you get closer to the center, your lines will get shorter and shorter. Well, my ornament dries. I'm going to add a little bit of the metallic gold paint to my palette. And I'm gonna go over my yellow ornament top here. And I'm gonna go over it with that gold paint just to give it a little bit of shimmer, a little bit of detail. And I'm really just covering covering that yellow with this gold paint. Gold paint, metallic gold paint can be very translucent, so I use that pale yellow as and under paint layer to help that gold paint stand out a little bit. You can use silver, you can use white or black. It really doesn't matter just whatever you happen to prefer. I added just a tiny bit of white paint to my liner brush to highlight the string holding my ornament on the branch. 6. Finishing details: And I'm using a little bit of my white paint to mix in with my brown to add some highlights onto my branches. I'm not completely covering the branches. I'm just very quickly painting in a dry brush stroke. It's definitely a less is best situation. You don't want to cover the entire branch. And of course, while I was painting my highlights, I put my hand in my red ornament and messed up my reflection so I can just real quickly go back in there and fix that. So now I'm feeling like my pine needles are a little flat. So what I'm gonna do is add a little bit of white to the green that I have left on my palette and get my liner brush in there. And I'm just going to add a few highlighted pine needles to my little bunches of pine needles here. And I'm just doing a few strokes to lighten each or not to lighten them, but just to add a few of the lighter shades of green so that there's some shadow and some highlights in each little section. I'm going to add a little more white to my already lightened green and then put some even brighter highlights, but just more towards the tip of each pine little segment here. And at this stage you can pretty much call your painting complete. Some people choose to write a word on their ornament and cursive or in a nice-looking print that is completely optional on totally up to you. But for now this is the finished painting and I hope you enjoyed it. And I can't wait to paint with you again. Thanks. Happy Holidays guys.