Snowy Tree Bookmarks in Watercolor

1. Intro: Everyone loves handmade gifts, right? For the book lover in your family. And maybe that's you. Learn how to paint a gorgeous snowy tree bookmark with a unique textured watercolor background. I'm a creative professional who lives and breathes nature. My Art is influenced by my home, the beautiful West Coast of Canada, but that's wild natural beauty. This snowy tree motif was inspired by my snow shovel adventures on beautiful Vancouver Island. By the end of this class, you'll know how to paint a snowy evergreen tree using watercolors. You'll understand the how the salt technique works and have confidence experiments the future. I've inherited my dad's love of teaching. I get so much satisfaction from sharing my skills and seeing people light up when they get a concept. And as a nature lover, I'm excited to share an easy way to paint a wintery for a Scene. This class is for beginners and intermediate painters. For supplies, you'll need a couple of watercolor brushes, some good quality watercolor paints, and 140 pound Cold press watercolor paper, poster board of the same size, table salt, a paper cutter, Glue stick or spray adhesive. You'll also need a Hole punch and a ribbon or Jute string. By the end of the class, you'll have some gorgeous snowy Tree Bookmarks to share with friends or family, tech into your own books. The project will follow step-by-step from painting the background, wash and salting to painting the tree and the snow. And finally, we'll finish off the bookmarks by punching a hole to thread some strength through. Alright, I'm stoked to get started. Come paint some snowy tree bookmarks with me 2. Materials: For materials, you'll need a one-inch brush like this one for the background wash. This is my favorite brushes. This is a Da Vinci casa nail mop brush that holds a lot of water with this well here. This little guy here is just a little one. And that's for the details. For the snow. We've got some white gouache, indigo, sap, green. I use this tray, this is a Windsor and Newton Cotman tray. I use this yellow for the background. We've got two glasses of water here. This is a little ceramic palette that I really like to use. And we've got some paper towel. This is 140 pound French watercolor paper by arche. I really like their quality. Paper is the most important part of watercolor painting. Second comes the brush. Third comes the paint. This is poster board. You could get really cheap at the local Dollar Store. And regular old table salt. I've done some experimenting and it's actually in my opinion, the best salt to use for this technique. You'll also need a Hole punch like this. I've got some Jute. This is for you can use ribbon as well. This is for finishing off the bookmarks, Glue stick. And some painters tape to tape your paper down. Also, if you have one, these paper cutters are super handy. If you don't. You could also use a knife like this and a ruler 3. Painting the Background: The first thing we're gonna do is just wet the paper. I usually just do this in just nice. And even you have to work fairly quickly while you're doing this. You don't want to get it to too wet, but you also don't want to miss any spots. Make sure you get around the edges here. Sweeping back and forth. That's pretty good. Now, without wasting any time, what we're gonna do is we're going to grab some of this blue. And it really doesn't have the nice thing about this as it really doesn't have to be all that accurate. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna do some nice sweeping back-and-forth with the blue. If you don't mix watercolor very well, then you'll get, you'll get harsh spots. You don't want that. Alright, now, we're going to switch to yellow. Now. We're gonna get our brush nice and wet. We're gonna get this yellow. You don't want to get it to too harsh. So I'm just mixing a little bit here on the side. We're going to throw that down here. Bright colors work really well for this. This yellow kinda mimics a Winter sunset. Okay, now, we don't want to waste anytime. We're gonna just quickly rinse off our brush hairs. Good brush care. Now it's time for the salt. What I normally do is just sprinkle just a little bit into my hand. I'm not too too much. The trick here is to not overdo it. So I'm just going to pinch a little bit in my hand and just sprinkle. You don't want any spots where it's really concentrated because sometimes that's hard to get off. So it's best just to start slowly and just sprinkle it at a fairly high distance here, not super close to the paper and just pinch and sprinkle. Okay? And now we wait 4. Cutting and Prepping: Okay, now I've let this fully dry. It's important to just leave it alone. I would not recommend putting a hairdryer on that because it could blow the salt crystals away. It looks really beautiful. So we're just going to peel the tape off here. I've cut a piece of Bristol board here are poster board the same size as this. So what we're gonna do is take this Glue stick here. And I'm gonna Glue both sides. Make sure you cover all of it as close to the edge as you can. Then I'm also going to Glue the back of this guy here too. Okay, Now, we're gonna do is very carefully line this up. We're gonna be cut in the edges. So it should be fine. First thing I'm gonna do here is just trim. Trim the white edges off for the tape was so we are going to cut 2 " at a time. So we're gonna start here with the 8 ". So I have one, kind of wide one and then six. Then for two. Right? Okay, So we are now ready to start painting our Trees. 5. Painting the tree: I have a little spray bottle here that I just gently spray here. It gets everything kinda wakes all the paint. I'm just going to be using some blue, indigo and some sap green. So here's my first bookmark. I'm going to do the yellow at the top and the blue down below, but you can, you can flip it if you like. Doesn't really matter. I'm using my favorite mop brush here. I'm gonna do here is just grab a little Blue. Make sure it's fairly strong. Go right down the middle and very light touch, barely skimming the surface. And then we're going to scumbling, starting really late at the top and then gradually getting wider as we go down. I'm just tapping the brush a little bit here. I'm not pushing it. I'm just letting it do its thing. And that's important to, to stay nice and random with your brushstrokes because nature is very random. Going to wash the brush off here, tap it a little bit on the paper towel, and now we're just going to blend, blend the bottom here 6. Painting the Snow: Keeping in mind that gouache, white gouache dries lighter than you see, can be a little tricky. Usually just start at the top and work my way down and make sure it's kinda lumpy. And then just make sure you just curve it. Make it organic looking. No straight lines in nature really. Just all on top and don't forget the middle. I usually just make a shape like that in the middle. Even they can't see any branches in the middle they are there. So helps with the illusion. Pilot nice and high. Nice fresh snowfall arsenate. And so this is laden with fresh powder. Do some little bits here, just kinda random. Always making sure that you keep everything soft and rounded. There's usually quite a bit of snow near the bottom, so don't be shy. Looks like we need just a couple more little blobs in the middle here. Couple up here. Top, there. We go. 7. Finishing: To finish it off, we're just going to punch a hole in the top. Sometimes it's kinda hard to eyeball the center, but it looks like the trees right in the middle here. So I'll just go right above the tree. Then. Punch not too too far from top, somewhere around there. Cut a little piece of Jute folded in half. Push this through the whole loop it through. And then I usually sign the back. There you go. And here's some other the other ones that I've done. They turned out really well 8. Conclusion: I hope you enjoyed painting along with me and congratulations. You now have the skills to paint a snow-covered evergreen and you also understand how to experiment with salt for some cool backgrounds. Please remember to post your projects. I'd love to see what you made. To recap, you learned how to paint a graduated wash, how to play salt for some neat effects. You also learned how to paint an evergreen tree and how to add snow onto the boughs. In addition, you also learned how to create bookmarks from your beautiful Painting. Keep in mind, you don't always have to create bookmarks from your watercolor painting. You can use these techniques for just a regular old paint into. It really helps me if you can post a comment or review. Thank you so much for joining me and we'll see you next time.