Paint a Gouache Christmas Wreath

1. Introduction: Hi there. I'm Sarah Douglas, designer, crafter, and small business owner. I love using paint in my handmade cards. And in this class, I want to show you how to create a beautiful hand painted Christmas wreath card using quash paint. I'll show you step by step how to create each layer so you can create a card just like this. Or, of course, you can do this project in your sketchbook, too. Set aside some time for your creativity, and let's relax and enjoy painting together. All you need to get started is a card blank, paint brush, and gouache paints. This class is suitable for beginners, and I'll talk about how to achieve the right consistency of gouache paint and how to create soft and pretty pastel colors in amongst all the bright ones. We'll look at how to shape each leaf and berry with your brush strokes to create this delicate look. By the end of this class, not only will you feel more confident painting delicate leaves and foliage, but you'll have a go to card design that you can adapt for each different season, spring, summer, and autumn, too. Are you ready to paint? Let's get started. 2. Class and Project Overview: Oh. Before we begin, I want to tell you a little bit about how the class is structured. So first, I'll cover what materials you need for the class. Next, I'll show you step by step how to paint the wreath, mixing each color and practicing as we go. Finally, I have some great tips for you on other ways you can adapt and use this design. I'd also like to invite you all to upload a photo of your finished project to the project gallery here on Skill Share. I love seeing how everyone's projects turn out. Everyone has such a different style. If you have any questions, please do pop them in the discussions tab and I'll reply as soon as I can. Now let's dive into looking at the materials that we'll need for this project. 3. Materials: For this project, you'll need a card blank. I'm using these five by five white card blanks. I got mine from Hobby craft in a big pack that comes with envelopes too. You'll also need quash paint. I'm using Windsor and Newton guash paints. The colors aren't super important as long as you have maybe a range of greens, but we can mix different colors. You will need a white. I've got a big one and either a black or maybe a dark blue that you can mix as well. You'll need a palette for your paints. You'll need a brush. I'm using this size four brush, but use whatever you're most comfortable with. Experiment and see what gives you the best brushstroke and the best control when you're painting your leaves. You'll also need water to clean your brush, kitchen roll as well to dab it off in between colors to create the wreath shape, find something to draw around. It could be a mug or I'm using this masking tape, which is the right size for my card blank. Also some scrap paper. We'll use that to test colors before we use them on our card and to try out the different shapes of leaves first. Let's begin. 4. Painting Leaves: To create the shape of your wreath to begin with, find something to draw around. I'm using this masking tape, and I'm going to draw around the inside. I want to leave space around the outside to fit all my leaves in, and I'm going to do it fairly lightly. You can rub out at the end, or you might find that you've painted over most of it and you don't need to. Then we're going to start with painting these sage green leaves in the background. So to mix up a sage green, I'm going to start with a bit of this permanent green light color in my palette. Which is quite a vibrant color, so we need to mute that down. I'm going to add white first to make it a paler color. I'm also going to add black to take out some of the brightness. I don't mind mixing up a lot of paint in my palette more than I need because I often just leave the colors. The great thing about gouache is that it's water soluble so you can reactivate your colors with water anytime similar to watercolors. It doesn't dry and become unusable like acrylic paint. I want to add a bit more white to make that paler again. That's why I've got such a big tube of white. I find that I use it for pretty much everything. It helps to make nice soft pastel shades, which I love using. I'm happy with that color. In terms of the consistency, the ideal consistency I've read should be similar to that of double cream. But in practice, this means adding a little bit of water to your paint so that it's slightly runny, but not so much that it becomes watercolor like. I found that if I leave my wash paint too thick without using water, I find it harder to control the brush marks and sometimes it leaves a streaky dry effect, which can be good if that's the texture that you want in your painting, but I don't want that texture for my wreath today. I've added a little bit of water to this. But before I start on my card, I want to test out my brush strokes and my leaves on this scrap paper here. A nice way to create leaves is to let the brush do the work for you. Gently press down and then lift off again. Press down and lift off. At this point, you can do as little or as much practice as you want to for your leaves. I quite like painting just leaves. It can be quite a calming exercise. But when you're happy with how they're coming out and the pressure that you need to use for your brush strokes, then you can start to paint the leaves on your card. One thing you will need to do to get the wreath effect is to decide which direction you want your leaves to go in. Mine are following a clockwise direction round and I'll paint them by turning the card as I go. You can space them out quite far between because we're going to be adding lots of other layers as well. M If you find that your paint is going on a bit too thickly, you can add a little more water to your brush as you pick up the paint. Okay, that's the first layer done. 5. Fir Leaves: For the next layer, I'm going to use my permanent green light gush again, but I'm going to use it as the original color, which is nice and vibrant. For the next layer of foliage, we are going to do some fir tree leaves, any branches. So just spend some time getting your paint the right consistency because we're going to be painting quite fine little needles on the stems. We need to try and make our paints a little bit more fluid, not too blobby. Again, let's test out how we want to do these leaves. For mine, I'm going to do a center stem and then come out the smaller lines again on the other side. Take some time to practice again until you're happy with the appearance and the amount of pressure you need to use and the amount of paint you need on your brush. And then when you're ready, you can start adding them to your card. So again, make sure to go in the direction that your wreath is flowing. You can come off it at different angles, but as long as you're kind of following the same direction as you paint round, that will give it a more cohesive look. Okay. I've added a couple of extra sprigs just to try and balance the way the foliage is flowing, but don't worry too much at this stage. We've got lots more elements to add to make the wreath look balanced. Let's move on to the next stage. And 6. Mistletoe Berries: Next, we want to paint these berries or mistletoe type elements using a muted yellowy beige color. Let's mix that now. I'm going to start with this medium yellow. We'll add some white and we'll add a teeny weeny bit of black to take out the brightness and give us a more meted color. We won't need much black. Now again, let's add a bit of water to get the right consistency. I've seen some artists use a little spray nozzle to get the right consistency by just adding a mist of water to their gouache paint, which is quite a nice idea. Let's test out our color over here. Then for this element, we want to paint a stem first and then add some berries on top. Trying not to overload my brush with paint. You want to do quite a delicate stem to begin with. Quite a short stem and then 3-5 mini stems coming off it. I'm finding my paint a little thick, so I might add some more water. When you're painting delicate elements like these, I think a lot of it is down to practice. It's down to practicing brush control to get the result you want. I found that if I don't paint for a while, when I come back to it, everything I do is a lot more blobby and not as defined as I'd like it to be. Some of that is down to not getting the right consistency of paint, but some of it is just down to not having practiced my brush work enough to have a steady hand. Try and make your lines thin if you can. If your brush isn't working for you, swap it out for a different one. I like to paint quickly, so I tend to just use the same brush for the whole card if I'm doing something this size. You can see whether you prefer to have larger berries or smaller berries. And then again when you're happy, move on to doing them on your card. Mm. Another thing I love about using gouache paint is that you can layer it so easily. When I use watercolors, I find that I use a lot of water with them and they take a long time to dry. I'm too impatient to wait, so I just paint on top and generally make a bit of a mess. But with gouache, it seems to dry more quickly and you can layer light colors on top of darker colors, which means I'm not too worried about the order that I do my colors in because I know that I can paint white on top of a dark color if I need to. Uh If you overwork them, the colors can mix because they're activated by water. But if you're just painting over once or twice, you can layer them. I'm not waiting for my layers to dry in between painting them. I'm finding that they're just about dry enough by the time I move on to the next stage. I'm going to add a few extra dots too just to give it a bit more interest in a sense of movement, I suppose. This is a Christmas wreath, so perhaps there could be sparkles. Okay, now we're ready to do our next layer. 7. Vibrant Leaves: For our next layer, we're going to paint some more leaves and we are going to choose a really vibrant rich color this time. I'm using cobalt turquoise light. I'm going to use that in the color that is straight from the tube. It's a very vibrant color, almost blue, but it's nice to have a range of different greens and blues and different tones. That's what makes each element stand out in the wreath. We have a mixture of light and dark, a mixture of bright and subtle. If you want to practice your leaves again, you can do on your scrap paper. Remember we're just using the brush to go down and then lift off down and lift off to create the leaf shape. You can do it in an S shape as well, so you're going down and then a little swish the side and then back up like that creates a slightly different shape of leaf, or you can go down and then flat and then up again. Okay. So on my card, I'm just looking for where there are large gaps, and I can start to add leaves in those areas. Again, you can vary the direction of your leaves. But having them go around the same way gives a flow to it, which is nice. So sometimes I'll just lean back, step back, have a look and see where I've got some gaps or anywhere that looks uneven. And then we'll think about filling those spaces in next. It's okay to go on top of elements to overlap them and layer them. Okay, this stage is done. 8. Dark Blue Stems: Next, we want to create a very dark color to add some depth to this wreath, which is looking slightly flat because it saw one kind of value of color at the minute. So I'm going to mix up a dark green using this medium green gouache and a little bit of blue and darken it with some black. This is a primary blue. So that's made quite a dark rich shade, which looks nice. Test that out a little in your paper and then we'll add a bit of water to get the right consistency. With this color, we are going to paint some small stems that are going to have buds on top, little flowers on top. We want to do quite small delicate elements in this dark color so they don't overpower the design too much. We're going to do short stems like this with maybe two or three mini stems coming off like that. And we add maybe four or five of these to the wreath. You'll notice that my last layer is still not dry. It came out quite watery, so I'm going to avoid those elements with the dark pink it will mix. Okay. I've done more than four or five. That's right. They're quite small. Here we go. And then we'll do the flowers to go on top of those stems at the end. Next, we are going to paint some holly leaves. Okay. 9. Painting Holly Leaves: For the holly leaves, I am going to use this medium green color again. I don't know whether I want to use it as it is or whether it seems too similar to the color of these elements that we did. Let's have a look. I think maybe I'll take a tiny bit of this color here to mix in to darken it slightly. Just give us a little bit more variation. That seems a good tone. Okay, so for holly leaves, I normally, I'll show you how I paint them. I do kind of a sort of flicking outwards type shape. So I curve out out and out and then join them at the top and fill them in. Curve, curve, curve. Then the other side, three of them, two or three, and then join them at the top. And fill them in. Practice your holly leaves for a while. If you need to. They can be tricky to get right. But I think with the holly leaves, it's okay if we do these quite large in our wreath, I think that's what's gonna give it, you know, the big indication that this is a Christmas wreath. We are feeling very festive here. Okay. Like that. So let's do these on our card. God. We'll start here. There's quite a lot of paint on my brush there. So oh curves out on the other side, and then join them at the top. Let's see if we can squeeze one in here. The sky is a little bit blobby, but never mind. That's a nice thing with handmade cards, I think, and that's why I like painting cards. They don't feel too precious. Yeah, this is something that you could give away as a Christmas card to someone. And even though it took you a long time you hand painted it, you don't have to think, Oh, it's going to hang in someone's living room. It has to be perfect. It can just be, you know, a way to experiment and then have a use for the things you've painted. It's practical. There probably is a nicer way to do these holly leaves, but this is the way I do them. I. This is going to be the last foliage element for our wreath before we add on berries and flowers. Again, just step back, lean back and have a look at your wreath as a whole, identify where any gaps are, and just fill those in with more holly leaves or if you want to add a few simple leaves in this color, you can do that too. Sometimes find that when I haven't used any white in my color mix, it's a little bit patchy, it goes on a little bit more like watercolor. And if you want that really smooth opaque look, then you do usually have to use some white in your mix. It took me a long time to realize that. I got frustrated with a lot of what I painted before I realized that to get that perfectly smooth opaque color, it usually always needs some white to it. Unless you've got a very bright mix, this one seems to be quite smooth. This turquoise color sometimes it's just a case of experimenting with what you've got until you find the colors and the opacity and the smoothness that you like in your paint. Okay, I think I'll squeeze in one more holly leaf. Uh here. I know, I at crowded in that corner? Maybe we'll just add extra berries. Let's leave our holly leaves there for now. 10. Berries and Flowers: For the berries, we are going to use some red paint, primary red squash, I'm going to use this color as it is out the tube, we're just going to add some berries near the holly leaves. They don't have to be exactly below them or part of the holly. They can just be around nearby to give the impression of holly wrapped around the wreath. Oops, that's a bit of a big one. I should have practice first, shouldn't I? Then we go. Try and get your berry sizes ripe before you go straight into doing them on your card. I think the berries look nice in threes. But you can do kind of a random berry here and there, or just two. Oh Again, just lean back and see why you've got some gaps where you need to balance out the areas that the eye is drawn to and just add a few extra berries on their own. Then when you're happy with the berries, we're going to use this red to make a pink to do the flowers. For that, we just need to add white. We don't need much of the red. We want a fairly light pink, but because we're using white card, it needs to be enough of a pink shade that you can see on the white. But we can keep it subtle. Again, just add a bit of water to thin that down a little bit, so it's not so gloopy. And then just test out that color again, make sure you're happy with how that looks. I think we can pull a tiny bit more red in. Okay. Now let's paint the flowers on these dark stems because they're small, I'm just going to do a simple V shape. It's quite blobby still. Like a V, like this. Then if you've got space, one in the middle. Or if there's not much space, just a blob on the end so it's a tiny bud. O. And then we're going to use this color to finish off the wreath by adding some extra dots or blobs. I'm doing these quite large because they're a light color, so I think it's okay if they stand out a little bit more in size when they don't in color. Look. There we go. That is our finished wreath. One more little dt. I hope you're happy with how your lovely wreath has come out. Each time I do one, they come out a bit different. You can see in my first one here, the colors were different. They're darker more traditional Christmas colors. But this one here feels more modern with that vibrant turquoise in. Keep going, keep practicing and hop on over to the next lesson where we'll talk about some other ideas that you can try. O 11. More Ideas: As well as varying the colors for your wreath, you can also adapt it for different seasons. For example, here, I've created a wreath that is a bit more summary. I've done some bright pink flowers and I've used the white quite thickly to layer on top. Gone for bright oranges and that bright turquoise again mixed in with the darker colors to balance it out. I've also used a craft card blank for this because I wanted to see how the bright colors would stand out on that and I really like the effect. Your wreath doesn't just have to be for Christmas. You could try a summer design. You could also try your spring Easter design, which would be really nice and something else you can try is to do a large one. Here, I've used watercolor paper and gouache paint still to create this larger piece. This would be nice to frame and put up in your home somewhere something nice and vibrant and beautiful to fill you with joy whenever you look at it. If you want to finish off your cards a little bit more, you could add a stamped sentiment in the middle. You could if you have a little stamp that says Merry Christmas or something like that, you can use black ink to stamp that in the center. Or if you've got beautiful handwriting, you could do some calligraphy to write season's greetings or happy Christmas or something like that. My handwriting is a mess, so I will not attempt that. I quite like my cards as they are. If you're worried about ruining your very carefully hand painted card by stamping in the middle and having it go blurry, then have a try at stamping on some separate card and attaching that as a piece in the middle, or you could always stamp first and then paint around it once you're happy with the stamped impression. 12. Conclusion: Thank you so much for joining me in today's class. I really hope you enjoyed painting your handmade cards. Before you go, I have three final steps for you. The first one, please remember to upload a photo of your painted card to the project gallery here on Skill Share. Second, I would love it if you could please leave a review. It actually does make a massive difference to me. It helps this class get discovered in the search results by the students, and it helps other students to feel confident that they've picked a good class. And thirdly, if you want to find out more about me, then please do pop over to my website, which is stickkitten.co dot K. If you want to hear more updates from me about when I release new classes or new products, you can sign up to my mailing list, which is stikitten.co dot k forwardslash NELETE. You can also find me hanging out on Instagram and over on YouTube. That's all for now. Bye.