Watercolor Greeting Cards: Fall and Winter Holidays

1. Class Introduction: In this class, we will learn to paint greeting cards. This miniature art pieces help us to express love, friendship, and gratitude. Taking only minutes to paint, each card allows us to be creative and have fun. We'll paint examples of halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's cards. But after taking this class, you will have the skills to paint a unique personal message for any occasion. I will explain how to use photos. They'll find various subjects for painting. Our card designs will be fairly realistic, so we will need photos for reference. We will also talk about composition of greeting cards, the miniature art pieces. The same rule of composition will apply to them as the big paintings. I will show how to pin tricky subject like candle flames, lights, and sparkling glass. We will also review materials for embellishment, gold paint, glitter, and gold leaf. Our greeting cards are waiting. Let's get started. 2. How to work with photos: Hello and welcome to the class. Let's talk about the process of creating a greeting card with watercolor. One way to do it would be to paint from our imagination. After all, we all know what a Christmas decoration or a pumpkin look like. The result most likely will be a stylized illustration type painting, which can be beautiful and fun. In this class, I thought it will be interesting to talk about painting holiday motifs like Jacqueline turn or candles in a more realistic style and create basically watercolor miniatures. Don't worry, our paintings will be all created in 15, 20 min. So you can quickly make them for everyone on your mailing list. For realistic paintings like that, we will need some reference so we can see colors and also lightened shadow. This days, thousands, if not millions of photos available online for free that we can use the paint from. So we shouldn't have a problem finding a suitable one. I'll main criteria for choosing a suitable reference photo will be the presence of clear focal point. There has to be the main subject. Something interesting that we can use for painting the card. I'll tell you why it's important in a second. And let me mention also that all the reference photo that I used in the class are included in the class materials. Why do we need photos to have a clear focal point? The way I suggest we paint our cards is a vignette. We will only paint the main subject, candle, a pumpkin, without the background, with a little piece of background, leaving most of the card surface is white paper, backgrounds and watercolor or hard to paint, the very time-consuming. And we want to be able to get our cards done in a reasonable amount of time. That's why vignettes other way to go. The two sources of free reference photos that I use the most are Unsplash and Pixabay. If you're using Facebook, there is a group called free reference photos for artists, where you can look through photo albums on different subjects or make a post with a special request. All the sources have millions of photos that are free to use as reference for painting with a wide variety of photos. How do we pick the one to use as reference for our own greeting card project? When I look for reference photos, I asked myself the following questions. What is the main subject of this photo? Is there a focal point? You will know at once when you look at photos, but some of them are just asking to be painted on the card, like this one. This is obviously about this bond right here. This one is clearly about this lantern here. But the pumpkins and the turkey make perfect focal points. They are ready-made vignettes. Something like this can look pretty, but there would be hard to work with because this is just an abstract composition kind of like a background. And there is no clearly defined focal point. Photographers also like to crop the photos for various reasons. In the photo is very cropped. That might not be enough information to paint from it. It would be just too hard to use as reference. Focal point can be cropped a little bit. You see the bottom of the bow on this lantern is cropped, but most of the focal point is present and it won't be hard to finish that little piece when we start painting this on a card. Another question I ask myself when I pick reference for my painting is my focal point well lit. Some photos have very soft lighting, like these examples I'm showing, even though they're beautiful, they would be extremely hard to paint from as opposed to, let's say this example where the light is really sparkling. There are clearly defined shadows. I was looking for a black cat and you see that this one just disappears into the darkness. There's just not enough information to paint from this photo, even though as a photo itself, it's very beautiful. And here's another example. This pumpkins are just not well lit. They look very flat and this one is disappearing into the darkness. So it will be hard for us to figure out the form. Another question when evaluating photos would be, am I going to paint everything I see in the photo? Some photos look beautiful. They have nice composition, great light and shadow, a clear focal point, but there's just too much going on there in this fall theme, the still-life to paint this on a card will take way too much time. So what we can do is cut out a portion of this photo and create our own reduced focal point. Let me show you how I do this. I've got my sketchbook out. I have a pencil. One of the elements of the still-life, the draw my attention was that pumpkin, I thought that the surrounding leaves and berries will look nice and will be sufficient subject for holidays like Thanksgiving or for some other fall occasions that we might want to make a card for. So I started kitchen from the main subject, the pumpkin, and then I'm starting to add the elements that I see around it. So in my mind, I'm just cutting out the corner of that photo, but I think this is very important instead of just doing it in my mind so I can actually see what it's going to look like and reduce the risk of failure when I started painting or when withdraw for watercolor, we want minimum amount of pencil lines, minimum corrections. That's why just a quick five, 10 min gage would be very important. In another lesson in this class, you will see me paint this composition with water column while I'm at it. I can also test a little bit that tonal relationships. The pumpkin will be the lightest area, and the leaves and all the surrounding elements can be a little bit darker, a little more subdued. Let me use my marker to bring out the design so you can see it. And I have to say, I am following the reference photo but fairly loosely, if some of the leaves look a little different, if I paint berries in a little bit different place, nothing is going to change very much to the Gardasil work I'm doing what I feel is necessary for my composition for my future card. Here is how we cut out a portion of the focal point. If the photo is too complex, there are too many elements. In this lesson, I also wanted to talk about placing the vignette, the focal point on the card. Most likely you will want to place it in the center. So it's important to define that central likely with your pencil. Maybe even use a ruler to make sure that the focal point is well-placed. You don't want to discover it after you start painting. Some designs will be easier to fix, some not so much. And of course, the shape of the vignette, whether it's oblong or if it's more vertical, will determine whether your card will be portrait or landscape orientation of the paper itself when you start painting. Most of the vignettes that I will be showing you in this class will be kind of self-contained. They will be just placed in the center of the card. But there are ways to do that a little bit differently. There are ways to connect them to the edges and maybe a couple of spots, maybe three edges. Here is an example of such composition. This wine glass, it's obviously not going to work if we isolate it from the edges. So the subject itself requires a connection to the top and the bottom edge of the card. I also wanted to mention if you wanted to add lettering to your card, if you have good handwriting and you want to write Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, congratulations, or something like that on the car. Also considered before you're starting to paint, leave a little bit of space for that. We will not be talking about lettering in this class, but it's just something to keep in mind before you jump in and start painting. In the next lesson, we will talk about greeting card construction and materials that we can use to make them. 3. Materials and supplies: The main question to consider before you start working on the card is whether you'll be mailing it or giving it in person, maybe with another gift. If the current needs to be mailed, it obviously needs to fit in an envelope. So probably sizes like five by 7 " or four bisects that are standard will be better way to go. Paper manufacturers offer pre-made cards with envelopes. They're made from thick paper, but it's not watercolor paper. You can buy blank cards and then paint yours on the piece of watercolor paper and glue or tape it to the front of the pre-made card. Uh, so a couple of options for watercolor postcards. They will not folded, they were just pieces of watercolor paper with some lines stamped on the bag. So it didn't make much sense to buy those. I was never able to find Folded Cards completely made from watercolor paper. If you are going to give the card to somebody in person, than the size, doesn't matter. And you can just make the whole thing from folded watercolor paper to create handmade cards. Besides paper, we will need our usual watercolor supplies. We will need a set of watercolors. Some brushes, since the cards are not very large, we will need smaller brushes. I highly recommend getting a dagger brush. The one I use is quarter-inch. It's very versatile and good for working on small details. We will need a couple of water containers, one for washing the brush, and one for clean water. We will need a regular graphite pencil and eraser. And it's probably good to have some artist's tape, some low adhesion tape to hold the card to our drawing board or the table while we work, you probably don't want to stick pins in your car because they will leave holes. But holding the piece of paper down with some tape would be helpful for painting. If you're using watercolor paper in a small block, you won't need tape. You will need something flat like a small ruler palette knife or a regular knife to cut the finished cards off the watercolor block. This is all the prep work we need to do. Let's start painting. 4. Soft vignettes: Let's start our painting with something fun, a couple of Halloween vignettes. The first one I'll paint is jacket lantern. I'm using an eight by eight block of watercolor paper. I'm probably painting a little bit larger than you would on a greeting card, but I just want you to be able to see what I'm doing. I didn't want to paint something super tiny. I sketched the pumpkin. Very simple sketch is required. It's basically just the circle and I marked with the eyes, the nose and the mouth are going to be and there's little stem on top. And I can start painting right away because pumpkin has a candle inside. We want to show that inner glow. We want to capture that light inside of it. That's why I'm starting with a light wash of yellow. This will be my lightest areas. And hopefully when I built up the layers of watercolor, there won't be many, just a couple of layers. I'm hoping that way to create that glow, to show that, that light inside the pumpkin. Pumpkin itself is orange and the cutouts are yellow. Orange paint runs over a little bit. It's very easy to pick it up with a dry piece of paper towel or maybe you have a small clean rag in your hand. Let's drop a little more orange, intensify the colors right away. The more intense you go from the beginning, the better your card will look. Because watercolor we lighten and there's no point when we work on cards, especially we want to get them down fairly quickly so there is no point applying ten layers, we can achieve intensity of color in just one or two layers. I'm using like a said, a yellow and a couple of oranges. It's permanent orange by Daniel Smith and hold bonds, scarlet lake. If you don't have that many oranges on your palette, they're very easy to mix from any yellow that you have, an, a primary red. I read this was the first layer. I'll let it dry. And now I want to create a little bit of a background around the pumpkin. If I leave it like that, because my background is white, I cannot show that inner glow of the pumpkin. If you look at a light in daylight, it looks very pale because there is no contrast. But if you look at it in the dark, then contrast appears and we can see it a lot better. And we can actually tell that something glows and has a light inside. The way I'm going to create that little piece of background around the pumpkin is very easy. Upper clean water around the pumpkin, staying away from my painting that I've already created. And then I am dropping some paint. This is indigo, but it can be any color that you like that will look good with. Orange, can be purple. Maybe you have Payne's gray that you like to use. I'm just dropping it around the pumpkin. And because I applied clean water all around, the color spreads and creates a soft vignette. The border around the pumpkin is defined, but the outside border is very soft. And I think that looks very painterly and very Halloween like when we do that in just a couple of brushstrokes or created a soft vignette around my main subject about my focal point. There are little cutouts on top of the pumpkin between the main body and that little LED, that little head that it has on top. So I'm painting with a small brush, and I'm going to add just a few brush strokes though the pumpkin itself, to define that a little better, I think it's too light, so I'm going to add some color to it, the same colors that are used for the initial wash. Use permanent orange, or you can go back to yellow, maybe new gamboge to just vary the color a little bit. Pumpkin is obviously not flat. It has some color variation. It's slightly darker towards the edges, but that darkness doesn't come all the way to the edge. If you paint a dark border around the pumpkin, it will flatten it. So stay away from the border, live a little bit of lighter areas there and darken the sides with the same colors that you used for the initial wash. And I like to do maybe a little splatter when yellow falls into a darker color, it looks really interesting. It's kind of like reflected light, maybe behind the pumpkin. We can also splatter indigo and some splatters fly away somewhere where we don't want them. It's very easy to catch them with a paper towel or rub them off with a clean brush. If some areas of our vignette turned out to sharp, we can soften them. All you need is some clean water, clean brush. I'm using a flat brush. It works a little bit easier for that if I lift it too much or there's not enough paint in some areas, I can drop in some more, but it needs to go into the paper. Creative reflection of the pumpkin on the table. Alright, this is all we need to do. I think our Halloween vignette is done. I had some paint ran over into the areas that I want to be light. Look those cutouts for the eyes, and the nose and the mouth. So I'm going to make a tiny little correction with white gouache just to bring back the white and make the pumpkin glow even more if yours look okay, you don't have to do that. Watercolor sometimes goes where we don't want it to go. I also had a little bit of a background run into the pumpkin. And we're done with the first Halloween vignette with soft outlines. Another cute motif that I think will be very suitable and interesting for Halloween is a black cat gets super easy subjects, but the way we will do ours will be very simple. Basically paint a black shape and then add just a little hint of features and some soft background behind him. If you need a little bit of help drawing the cat, they don't feel comfortable just sketching him. You can print out the reference photo to scale the size you need it for the current rub charcoal or soft graphite on the backside and then transfer it on your cards and you can use the same print out over and over again several times, just adding the charcoal graphite on the back side. This time, let's start with the background. I want to reverse the colors. The cat obviously is going to be black, so it will be darker than the background. So I need to paint from light to dark. That's why I'm applying clean water to create my Soft Vignette. I'm dropping in a couple of oranges, the same ones I use for pumpkin, burnt orange, and permanent orange. Let's drop in some yellow too, doesn't matter which colors you can just use. One college, just yellow maybe, or your favorite orange. The point is not to come to the very border of that spot of clean water that you applied so that paint has room to run and create that beautiful soft watercolor edge. And in some areas, if you need to lift paint, just use a clean brush and a paper towel and lifted to soften the color even more, enlighten the border a little bit. Again, couple of brushstrokes in the vignette itself is radium. Here it is. We do need to let it dry. I feel I need to add a little more color, make it a little darker. Mountains. It needs to dry before we can paint the kid. Otherwise, paint will run everywhere and it will be one big mess. You can use a hairdryer to speed up the process or a little kid gun, a craft. He had gun. I left you a link to that Hindi device in the class materials in other way to go about it, to have kind of an assembly line paint, several backgrounds, are several cards in that way. By the time you get to the first one, hopefully it will be already dry and you can work on subsequent layers. Alright, Once the background is dry, we can continue. The cat is not a flat black color. Even though you can paint it with black, it will be alright, but I'm going to give it a little more color variation. I see slightly lighter areas in the reference photo and dark areas, slightly lighter areas, I'm going to paint with ultramarine purple. And the darker areas, I'm going to paint again with indigo, the same color I used for the background on the pumpkin. It's a beautiful, intense color, but it's not flat and boring like some of the black pigments arm. I'm not leaving any space form cats features, they're are way too small to paint on a card. I will show in just a minute what I'm going to do to add the features, there was a little too much water and one of the cat's ears didn't quite work out. So I picked up paint with my paper towel and I'm going to repaint that area. So basically I'm painting the dark shape, that will be my cat. Oh, it's just a tad of color variation. Just for visual interest. You actually don't have to use two colors. You can just lighten the color that you use for the dark areas on the cat a little bit with a little more water. And that way the cat will look more three-dimensional. It will have some volume. He said that colors on the tail ran a bit, but I think it looks great because that way the tail looks ******** and fluffy. That layer will have to be dried as well before we can continue working. That's why I mentioned that an assembly line will be a good idea when you work on the card so you don't waste your time. So you have something to work on while some of them are drying. I'm going to draw the cat's features with colored pencil. These are not water-soluble pencil. They're just regular color pencils. They're pretty soft, so they work great on watercolor. Let's make the eyes green to make him look more scary and spooky. Halloween appropriate, we can enlighten them a little more with pale yellow and I will need black to add the pupils, maybe some highlights with white. He's showing us his fame. So I'm going to draw them with a white pencil and there is a bit of his tongue visible. So I'm using pink to create the mouth. And of course, bucket needs some whiskers and it can even accentuate the shape with a bit of shading or the purple pencil. This additional details are of course, optional only if you have time and inclination to work on the cards a little more. It's like how pencil looks on a watercolor. I think it creates really interesting texture and a lot of interests and makes your card super-special. If you add those little details in black pencil can help us in the areas where we didn't get enough darkness with watercolor. Or we can even create a little more fluffiness in the cat and soften the outline of the cat. Here's our second Halloween motif. In the next lesson, let's talk about another way to create borders on our greeting card vignette. 5. Defined vignettes: In this lesson, we will talk about another way of painting vignettes. We will not be painting the background. We'll use the elements of the focal point to transition between the painted area and the white of the paper. Here is the full composition we looked at before. I explain how to cut out a portion of the focal point to simplify the composition, I did a preliminary sketch, and now let's work on the card and paint this pumpkin with surrounding leaves and berries. I included the sketch in the class materials if you want to use it, or maybe just compare one more time. What I selected from the reference photo, what they look like side-by-side. Now, I'm going to transfer the drawing on my actual card on watercolor paper. Another thing I could have done if I sketched on them, thinner paper, I can just rub charcoal on the backside of the initial sketch and transfer it onto watercolor paper. That actually helps us to avoid extra lines that sometimes show up on watercolor. So if you want to do that, that will be a good way to go as well. Of course, I did my best to place the composition in the center of the card. But with compositions like that, it's very easy to add maybe a couple of leaves and balance it if it moved to the side a little or you're not quite satisfied with the balanced. Let's start painting. I'm starting on dry paper. We don't want any colors to run. We don't want any softness, will want defined elements and defined edges. So we're starting on dry paper. I'm starting with a warm yellow wash with new gamboge and lemon yellow. The overall temperature of the composition is very warm. And that warmth is created by starting with yellow on the painting under the whole composition. Yellow is present in all these colors. It's part of orange, it's part of green. So it will not be a problem for me to cover certain areas with other colors. It will only give them warmth and nice glow. I'm working with a flat angled brush. It gives me a good control. I can turn it on the edge or I can work with it flat if I need to cover slightly larger area for smaller elements, of course, I have to use a dagger brush, which is even smaller. But again, has pointy and gives me a good control overpaid. I thought I could start painting berries. I'm dropping in some red paint, but of course, the yellow on the wash is still way too wet and they float in a way I can pick up the excess with my paper towel or maybe even spread it and mix it with my yellow on the wash to create orange leaves behind the pumpkin, gradually building color variation in details in this little vignette. When working on a small scale like this, the important thing is to paint a little bit drier. And what I mean is it's a good idea to not saturate our brush with a whole bunch of water. You don't see it on camera, but I've washed my brush and then I dab it on my paper towel so it's damp but it's not dripping water. If you drop water with no pigment on a small painting, especially like this one, there is a good chance of getting those unattractive blooms that will need to be corrected. And also you don't want water to run outside of your vignette boundary and making a mess. So this is almost like drawing with colored pencils. The way I'm painting, I'm using a lot of pigment on the small brush with very little water. I'm going to dry this so I can continue working like this little he'd gone, it's not too hot and it's not easy at all. And it works very well and it dries my watercolors fairly quick limb and I can continue working. If you have only one or two cards to paint. You don't want to use the assembly line method using some sort of a drawing tool or hairdryer or a heat gun is the way to go. In my opinion, we're all very busy. We usually don't have a lot of time to work on our creative pursuits. So using the time efficiently is very important. Let's continue working on smaller details. There are some red berries in the composition that I think look very striking alike, adding red accents to my paintings if I can. And to make the pumpkin glow and come forward, we need some darker areas around it. I'm going to use olive green. I think it looks very fall like and very suitable for this composition. It works really well with orange. And I'm going to paint some darker leaves. Behind the pumpkin. And you see the areas between those elements that are included in the composition. There is that the yellow on the wash, and that unifies my composition. And I don't have white paper peeking through, even though that might work as well. But I think it's good when there is that yellow under wash and that unifies my composition. You see the edges of the vignette a well-defined, and they're very interesting because they are constructed from the elements of my focal point. And it's a lot of fun to paint something like this because if you look at the reference photo and you follow it to some extent, but you also have a lot of room for creativity. You can amid some elements and you can add some leaves or more berries or whatever you like, maybe some branches in some spots. So something like this is a lot of fun and not too hard to work on. And you will get good results no matter what. You don't have to worry about putting things in the wrong spot. I'm messing it up. I do try to balance my composition. Even though it's tiny, it still needs to follow all the rules of painting. So you see, I'm distributing those darker green leaves evenly throw out my composition. You don't want them in just one spot because that will tip the balance. But when they distributed like that, it looks a lot better. Let the first layer dry, mostly because I just wanted to get up and take a break from painting. I'm going to put a few finishing touches on the pumpkin and on the leaves around it. Basically painting shadows at this stage, the shadows on the pumpkin are just permanent orange. I'm not using any black or any neutral pigments. I think just intensifying the object colors, it looks a lot better, makes the shadows warm and glowing. Pumpkin has a few ridges, so we need to add that. I feel that my pumpkin is hanging in the air, so it needs something to sit on. I'm going to paint a cast shadow underneath it. I neutralize my olive green with a little bit of mineral Violet. Any purple color will work. And I'm going to spread out that shadow. It's going to be darker towards the object and lighter towards us. Soften it with some clean water. Let's add some shadows between the objects as well to make them even more interesting and three-dimensional. Maybe some cast shadows on the leaves. Maybe they can have darker veins or we can add a darker branches here and there. When everything is super light, it looks a little flat and just not interesting. Berries will cast tiny little shadows on each other. And each shadow is just one brush stroke. You don't have to spend a lot of time applying several layers. Just use intense color, almost dry brush, they're a little water on small areas like that, one brush stroke will be quite enough. Course you will need appropriately sized brush, the one you can control. And I want to use a liner brush for this because it's too long and too floppy. But a dagger brush that I'm using, very small angled brush or their small Asian art brushes that work really well for detailed work like this. So that will be suitable tool for this project. I've spent just maybe three, five-minutes on adding shadows. And another thing I want to add are the highlights. Again, I'm using white gouache, couple of highlights on the pumpkin, maybe on the leaves. And then this case gouache works well to correct small mistakes on the outside border of the vignette. If you painted a little too much, paint ran away from you or leaf looks out of place. It's too big or weirdly shaped or something. Just pick up some white gouache or white ink, whatever opaque white you have at your disposal and make a correction, it will blend with white of the paper. Nobody will see it in your watercolor. We'll be just fine. Alright, here's a full composition with a pumpkin and some foal leaves. Another motif that I found where the elements of the composition can be the border of the vignette is this glass ornaments on a Christmas tree, a fun subject, a holiday that lots and lots of people love and celebrate. I'm starting with a background wash again. I'm starting with yellow and also some pinks and blues. Because there are some colored lights on the tree and they cast all these different colored reflections. I'm painting those colorful reflections first. And you see, even though the border is not exactly certain objects, certain element, it's still defined and it's defined by brushstrokes are various shapes. And I think just painting it like that makes it interesting and really catches the viewer's eye. I dried the first layer and I'm going to paint that ornament. I need to paint a circle. I'm using primary red color for it, but it does have a lot of variation of color and it has a lot of reflections. I'm leaving a little area as the highlight. I'm using a cooler red. This is magenta permanent, which is even not cool enough. I'm dropping in some cobalt blue into the mixture to get those really dark shadows that I see on the Christmas ornament. They're important to keep the circle round. If you need a little help with maybe some drawing tools, you use them by all means, keep an eye on the overall shape to make sure it stays a circle, we have to draw with a brush and control the paint really well. In this case, well one defined borders on that sphere, on that ball. It has that little thing on top where it's attached to the branch. And now I'm using my angled brush and it's cascade green, cool green color to paint the branch of the Christmas tree. Maybe some pine needles here on the bottom. I don't want to cover the whole vignette with green. I want those reflected lights playing in the background to darken green. I'm using magenta permanent. Some needles can overlap the ornament. So those pine needles, along with that splash of light, are going to be the elements that will define the outside of my vignette. Some of them can be slightly lighter, some darker, that creates the depth of space. If you put down too much paint, you can always lifted with a clean brush. And some sprinkles can also indicate that there are other ornaments back there or maybe more lights. I really like eating multicolored splashes to my watercolors. I think that live on the painting quite a bit. Let's try everything that we painted. I'm going to add a little more definition and some small details, although small reflections on the ornament. With colored pencils, there are a lot easier to control than watercolor and small reflections. Smile lights in the Christmas ornaments will be very easy to paint with pencils. So you see me using some reds, pinks, some yellows. Not all the colors will work because watercolors I painted is pretty intense, that we can try different colors and see what works better. I see some purples also, some of the lilac color in the lights. Of course, white pencil will work for the main highlight. Also want to use some green. So I have some darker and lighter pencils and maybe add some distance shadows. My brush was even a little too big to paint smaller elements. So pencils will help me to create even more visual interest. And my card, I'm making this very detailed and I'll mention it one more time. You don't have to. You can just keep it a little more abstract, a little less detail. That will still be an excellent card, is striking and memorable, present to whoever you decide to give it to him. Julie yellow for highlights, I think works better on the Christmas ornament because the light's rounded as a warm white looks all those dark yellow highlights, especially on the right-hand side, I'm drawing reflected light to make my ornament round to give it better volume. Yellow works really well there and creates a little bit of definition on the right-hand side of the Christmas ornament, right? This is what I have at this stage. I use it to soften the pencil strokes. They were very pronounced, so I wrap them with a tortilla, which is just a piece of paper rolled into a stack. And I also felt that my background was too light, so I added another wash of color to it, just a few brushstrokes. Looking back at it, I would say it might not have been necessary, but I had time, so I've worked on that vignette a little more. And of course I used, this is actually opaque white ink. I used it to add the brightest highlights and also sprinkled it. And that kind of creates the illusion of snow, which I think looks very nice and appropriate on them. Christmas card like this. This one took a little bit longer than other ones. I think I spent about 20 min on it. So now you saw two examples of greeting cards with defined edges. In the next lesson, Let's concentrate a little more on lights and candlelight. The subject that is so important for fall and winter holiday season. 6. Candles and lights: In this lesson, let's talk about an important element of fall and winter holidays, the candlelight and lights in general. How do we paint them in watercolor? With touched on that subject a little bit when we painted Jacqueline turn in the previous lesson. And as I mentioned before, the most important thing will be to create enough contrast for the light to look bright and the surrounding area needs to be sufficiently dark for that light to stand out. If you squint and look at the reference photo that I found, that Lantern really close because it's surrounded by darker areas, the background or white, that light will just get lost. We will start in a similar way to that glowing pumpkin that we already painted. But for the background, I will show you something a little bit different. My suggestion is to use varied brushstrokes, creating a defined age that at the same time, we will look very painterly and very interesting. I will paint the lightest areas. You see. The light of the lantern creates that warm glow. So I'm starting with a light yellow wash. And even though I started painting on dry paper, I'm given the center of my vignette, just the tiniest bit of water. Because you see how that light spreads and kind of erases the borders of the objects. So I want to achieve the same effect in my card. Let's paint the bowl and it's my chance to use very saturated, bright red. I'm not using my palette as you see. I'm picking up colors right from the wells and applying them on paper. I also want to create the garlanded the lantern is decorated with the photo, has full background, but we are not going to copy that. We will add that background a little bit earlier and create an interesting age and interesting transition between our vignette and the watercolor paper. I want to draw your attention one more time that I'm painting fairly dry, so my paper is dry except for the tiny spritz of water that I gave the center where the light meets that Red Bull. But otherwise, I have very little water on my brush. And I've used colors straight out of the well, I'm using very little water and a lot of pigment. I want to work quickly and I want to have saturated colors. And I'm working on the small format, so I really need to control the amount of water in my watercolor paint, right? This is the first layer. I'll let it dry. And in a geometric form like this, the drawing will be very important. So I switched to my dagger brush and I want to go over that initial wash that I applied and check my geometry. I'm basically using a brush as a pencil and I'm drawing straight lines to get that form. You see I'm ignoring that white snow that we see on the lantern and on the Garland. We will get to it later. We will be using opaque white to paint this. Some of the bot is in light, but a lot of it isn't shadow. If you squint and look at it, it's almost as dark. It's basically as dark as the background itself. So I'm neutralizing my red. The complimentary overhead is screened. So you see that I dropped some red into the little puddle of green that I had on the palette that neutralized it. And that's perfect color for shadows on the bulb. And we can also transition to lighter areas with a little bit of pure red. This is primary red. The ball on the lantern is fairly complicated. I simplified it a little bit. I did a little bit less. Nobody will know what it really looked like in the reference photos, so don't worry about copying it very precisely. That will probably take too much time. Really want that light to be soft and kind of glowing. So I'm softening it with some clean water with them fled brush in. Now we can start working on the background. I'm using ultramarine blue, beautiful blue color, similar to what I see in the reference. And I'm carefully applying it around the lantern. So this is negative painting around my focal point, around my main subject. Again, you see, I'm picking up colors straight out of the, well. And I'm applying it to my paper directly because I want that beautiful, saturated blue. I don't want it to be watery or transparent. It will be transparent and your waist, because this is transparent paint and you see how I'm using the brush to create an interesting transition to the white of the paper. Don't feel like you need to cover every square inch of your paper you can. But that will take a lot more time. You'll probably need a couple of layers. I think working with vignettes is much easier and faster and it can look very beautiful. I dropped in some indigo and also a little more green there with the branches. I want that branch to be just the hand, just abstract shape people will understand what it is. I don't think that's a problem. And I think those small feathered brush strokes actually show very well. That Lantern is decorated with Christmas Garland. Alright, this is all I'm going to do for the vignette. It was very quick and I think the light is really glowing. I don't want to work with a pick white for just a second because I want, of course the pain this now I think it looks very Christmas Eve, very holiday like this also gives me a chance to correct that lantern. It's a fairly complicated geometric shape. So my watercolor ran over just a bit and I'm going to make small corrections with my dagger brush with white goulash. Of course, watercolor by now is dry. When we work with a pick white, we need to work on a dry surface. Hello little sprinkle won't hurt. And it looks like distant lights are falling snow. Here is our little vignette with a glowing lantern. I have another example. I think this will work for a little wider variety of holidays. I think it will work for fall as well. I thought it would be helpful to show the process one more time. The candle is more visible here. It's not just glowing light. So let's paint this Lantern as well. I sketched it in the center of my card of my piece of watercolor paper. And the process will be similar. We need to start with that warm glow of light. So I'm starting with yellow. It's important to put a yellow under wash on the red to make it warmer because white of the paper tends to cool off the red and it's hard to achieve that warmth and that globe. So I'm starting with yellow under wash, leaving the flame of the candle is white paper. I can make correction later with a big white. But if you can leave it as white paper, if it's not too hard for you. If it works out with watercolor, then we might as well do it from the very beginning. So we don't forget and we have some sort of a reference point. Maintain subjects like this is a little tricky, little harder than painting natural shapes like pumpkins and leaves and flowers. So I'm using a flap, angled brush or just a flat brush will be much more helpful because you can turn it on the edge. And that will help you to draw those straight lines. Again, if they're not quite straight or paint ran away somewhere a little bit, I pick white will very easily fix that problem. You just repaint with white and the current will look just fine. And that bunch of berries, It's just some primary red dots with some cooler red dots to give them core shadows. And some of them are darker as well. That's all it is. And it was important for me to leave a little bit of that yellow on the wash visible between the berries, not to cover every millimeter of paper to show that there is light that light falls on them and they glow in the light. For darker areas, I'm using indigo again. And notice how I dropped it into the yellow wash there on top above the candle while the yellow wash was still wet. And that's important consideration because you don't want a hard edge there. That light gradually fades and turns darker. So we need soft edge there. So it was important not to wait for the yellow too dry, but to drop in those darker tones right away. Let's give this lantern a little more precision. And I think we need to paint the shadow underneath it. Not too dark, transparent. Because if it's an object that's sitting on something that's obviously needs some sort of a surface to sit on. We don't paint that surface. If we don't give it a shadow, it looks weird like it's hanging in space for the background, I think we can warm it up first. I started with green, but I think little warmth won't hurt. I dropped in some permanent orange and now I'm adding cascade green around my painting. This will probably be the part that requires a little bit of time, even though if you use decent size brush, it won't take too long, but you need to take care to paint around your focal point so pain doesn't run over and ruined the lantern that we already painted. This is how I'm going to do the table. Just a few brush strokes with orange and maybe darken the shadow a little bit. It doesn't have to be super defined. And for the top, I want to go with that kind of staggered look and transition to the white of the paper that way and give it a little bit more geometric appearance that will draw the viewer's eye, the card recipient side to the main subject and also look nice and interesting overall, overall composition. The lender needs to be transparent. That's why I'm adding paint above the candle. Otherwise, it will look like it's made of some solid material. I know I'm losing that yellow glow, but if I do too much, I can always lift some paint. I think I'm still good with a flame. Alright, this is watercolor portion of the card. I let it dry. And I think to finish this card with a fairly complicated geometric subject like that, the easiest and quickest thing to do would be to use colored pencils. Here they are again, we will do the same thing we did for our Halloween cat. I am going to bring back those highlights and verify the geometry of the lantern. I'm using light grey, silver color. It's perfect for my subject because I painted a little bit darker watercolors. The pencils show up really well. And I can find all the details, all those subtle reflections on the lantern without any problem, can also define the flame. A little bitter. White pencil is probably not gonna be enough for highlights. It's fairly transparent. So I'm going back to white gouache and adding the highlights to my card. So you saw penciled took me just a minute. And then some highlights makes sure the flame is the brightest part. That's the main subject of this card. And just a few subtle highlights here and there also helped me straighten out that lantern. And there is a little bit of reflection underneath it. And discard is done as well. To summarize, to paint lights, candlelight or electric lights, glowing windows, five places, whatever you like, what you need to do is create a lot of contrast. So the light needs to be the white of the paper or opaque white goulash or ink. They needs to be a warm glow created with the yellow on the wash or orange under wash. Then of course there will be the object itself painted with object color, and then there needs to be sufficiently dark areas to make that light stand out and glow. In the next lesson, we'll continue talking about glow and sparkle. We will talk about embellish in our greeting cards. 7. Adding embellishments: Fall and winter holidays are all about warmth, glow, and sparkle. So to add even more pizzazz and excitement to our cards, Let's look at decorating them with some additional materials. They're not expensive and they can be found in any craft or art supply store. First thing we'll try on these watercolors samples will be glitter glue. It's made by Elmer's. I purchased the whole set. It was very inexpensive. They are different colors, different size of glitter. If you're into glitter and you'll want to add some, this is definitely the way to go. Instead of trying to use that loose glitter that they sell in stores as well, that goes everywhere, sticks to your hair, to your furniture, and you will never get rid of it. This is very clean and easy to use cell, so we'll give you a cart and interesting 3D effect when you squeeze it, it creates a little three-dimensional line and your carnival really sparkle. Another quick and simple embellishment, it will be to use metallic watercolors. A lot of manufacturers produce them. They have slightly different shades. You can use gold, copper colors, silvers. Some sets like this one have different shades of gold. And of course they will look different depending on the watercolor background that you will be painting them all. You can barely see them on yellow but on darker colors like red and especially on indigo here on the right, they stand out really well and look very attractive. I'm going to try all the colors so you can see the difference. Of course, this is not really paint. It just binder with some particles floating in it. So it didn't water creates a bit of a problem, you breaking up the binder. So they really need to be applied in very saturated form with a brush that barely has any water on it. Another material I wanted to show you, metallic oil pastels. This particular ones are water soluble, so I thought they could be an interesting combination with watercolor. I have kind of gold color. There's also a metallic pink that can work for especially Christmas decorations or something like that. There is this aqua color, there is silver. These are very soft, very easy to work with. There will be similar to color pencils in application. Straight or some curved lines will be very easy to draw with this. So this will be another option for embellishing our greeting cards. In this lesson, let's also look at applying gold leaf. I have a very nice set here from Mona Lisa. It includes an adhesive pattern and also some gold leaf. The pen determines where the gold leaf is going to stick. This process will take a little bit of time because you have to apply the adhesive first and then apply the leaf. I'm not going to use the span on the sample. What I'm going to use for adhesive, it just met medium. This is basically acrylic binder, something similar that's in that pan. I just want to show you another option. You don't have to buy this set. You can just get this imitation gold leaf very inexpensively. Apply some acrylic binder or even some acrylic paint will work just something for that gold leaf to stick to them. You see the gold leaf is protected because it's very fragile. It's of course not real gold. Gold is available, but it costs a lot of money. I'm going to cut a little piece, so don't waste the material. Want to show you an example how this works. You see it has a backing. I applied with the backend on top to the areas where I applied the matte medium, the glue. I let it sit for a minute. Acrylics dry very fast. After a few seconds, I can remove the backing and it will only stick to the areas where applied the globe and the rest of it can be brushed away with a soft brush. And all you will have left is the design that you draw on the card. Like I said, this process is a little bit involved. You will probably want to have all your cards ready before you start applying gold leaf and do them all at once. You can't have any drafts, no fans don't sneeze on the other work table. But of course the results are very striking and very beautiful. Here all our embellishment options. Let's see, one of these materials in action. Here is a version of the Christmas tree ornament that I painted. Going to use some metallic watercolor to decorate it and make it a little more sparkly and interesting. I'm using this brightest gold. It looks pretty good on this dark red. And you see all I have to do is just a couple of brushstrokes. And the card looks quite different in a lot more sparkly and festive. I also wanted to find an example of a card suitable for New Year's Eve. Here in the United States, it's not a huge holiday, but in other countries, it's very widely celebrated and people send cards for it as well. So I think this festive glass of red wine, there will be a good subject. It also allows me to show you a little bit different approach to a watercolor vignette. The design is not going to be concentrated in the center of the card, is going to touch two edges of the card. We will still vignette that. We will not be covering the whole card with paint because we want to create something fairly quickly and easily imagined. That pencil line that surrounds my design is the age of the card. I start the same way, applying a very loose free flowing watercolor wash with yellow. I don't even have to use the brush. I can just sprinkle it on to splatter some color gives me interesting texture, interesting variation in the background. And that's basically my vignette. I made sure it touches top and bottom of my card where I draw the pencil line. I'm going to dry this. After I painted the background, I decided to add masking tape so you can see what I'm doing a little bit better. Of course, if you're just working on the five by seven card on four by six, something like that. You will have it taped, likely to your drawing board or to your desk. You won't have to tape the edges like that. I'm trying to paint a little bit larger so it's easier to see you in the class videos. Now let's start painting that festive red wine in the glass. So just going through them all my reds, selecting cooler tones. This is untrue coronoid read. And again, trying to work with very saturated color and try to apply just one or two layers of color and make my designs look very bright. There will be some shadows here. I'm using magenta that has ever been more blue in it, even cooler. Colors are very similar to wine color that I'm trying to show. But I think I need to go into purple even more. Some mixing in Antwerp blue. The shadows on the glass will be painted with purple. It's a mixture of blue and crimson lake, but any purple color that you have will work. I neutralized it with yellow just a tiny bit. So it's not super purple. If you don't have all those reds, I have quite a few on my palette. Just take the red that you have and cool it off with some blue and you will gradually go from Burgundy, the wine color, to purple for the shadows, couple of brushstrokes to show the shadows on the glass, the structure of the glass. Again, this card is quite geometric. I'm using a dagger brush to have good control of paint. We can pretend that the wind splashing, so we will add some splatters. Maybe it's a sparkling wine. Let's traditional for New Year's Eve, I added a little highlight to finish my design and let everything dry. Now, I can use metallic watercolor again. I really liked that brightest gold. I think it looks best. I can use that metallic watercolor to add the design on the rim of the glass. And we can even make this stem gold. Let's see if we can splatter the metallics. Yeah, there's bladder really well at some festive sparkles, our glass, or I can even just paint them with a brush. I think that will look better. We'll pretend that the bubbles reflect in the wine. And as you see with just a couple of restaurants, I was able to decorate this card as well. So here is another motif for New Year's card, or birthday or anniversary celebration. 8. Black background fun: Another motif that I thought would be suitable for winter holidays is fireworks is any light. They will require a dark background to look realistic. First, I tried to create a vignette with a burst of light in the center and a little bit of a dark background around it didn't really work, in my opinion, looked a little scary like the great eye of Sauron. So I thought maybe the whole background needs to be dark without the vignette, I turned my attention to black watercolor paper. This also gives me a chance to use my pearlescent watercolor. If you don't have pearlescent watercolors, you can purchase iridescent medium. Holbein makes it, and you can mix it with any watercolor that you like, any color. I'm going to use these ready-made colors. They're all a little bit tricky to use. They don't really work on white watercolor paper, but I think they will make all the difference on a black background. I'm going to start with that burst of light. Those different colors that I see in the reference photo, those software lights. There are some pinks there, some oranges, some yellows. Just going through all my adolescence trying them very transparent, very light. We have to work with them with high saturation. You see, I'm trying to pick up as much pigment as possible. It's not really paint, It's all those colorful particles that are mixed with a binder. They require some density to actually show up on black paper. The black paper I'm using here is Van Gogh brand. It comes in different sizes. You can even buy it as four by six cards. I think the brands have similar material as well. Sometimes it's called mixed media paper, which might not be suitable for watercolor, but it's worth checking it out is with any other handmade cards, you can make the whole card out of black watercolor paper if you purchased a larger format or you can do the design on a small piece and then glued on a regular white folded card after first layer of paint dried, I can really see it better. I can see the subtle shimmer on black. Let's try another layer. It actually intensifies the color quite a bit important here to use a soft brush, those colors are very delicate. If you rub them just even a little bit, they will come off the page. Then another thing I want to do is maybe soften the edge because you see how that color is more intense than the center and then it softens towards the edges. So I want my fireworks to look natural. So that's what I'm trying to do. Just a couple of brush strokes to soften them. And let's maybe try splattering some gold. I'm picking up some of my metallic watercolors and we're going to go all out on this one, because I can really see those golden sparkles in those fireworks in the reference photo. And of course, there will be traces of lights where those explosions fly away from the center. They create those colorful traces. And for that, I'm going to use my metallic pastels, also different colors. Maybe add a little more burst here and there, little explosions. And the last thing I need to do for this card is add the highlights, those bright white traces of light that we see in the center of each explosion. To get good coverage, I'm going to use my opaque white ink and I'm going to use a liner brush because I really want them to be thin. Minimum amount of water and very quick kind of calligraphic movements. And they will be like little stars going from the center. Then traces of light going in different directions. Kind of like flowers, like when we paint flowers, this will be similar. This is like when the particles fall down, we see also those little white reflections. I think sprinkling will be good here as well. Let's intensify the centers because they're the brightest in the center. I'm doing 33 is a good number for composition, and that's it. This was a quick and fun painting, festive fireworks using now kinds of sparkling materials on black watercolor paper. So this could be another option for a lot of occasions, a lot of celebrations. 9. Class project and summary: For the class project, use one of the photos I provided this reference or your favorite one to paint, a fall and a winter themed vignette. Try to make one of them with soft edges and the other one with hard ones posterior miniatures. In the project section, I would love to see them. Let's summarize what we learned in this class. The quick and easy way to create a greeting card is to paint a vignette. Vignette is a small illustration that fades into the background. Border between the vignette and the paper can be soft and undefined or more defined to show lights successfully like burning candles, we need a lot of contrast. This can be created by surrounding the light with darker background or by painting on black paper. And easy way to give our cars more excitement and hope is to decorate them with golden glitter. For additional inspiration, don't forget to check out this fall and winter themed videos on my YouTube channel. I hope you enjoyed this class, and I hope it will inspire you to paint some special handmade gifts for your loved ones. Stay creative, and I'll see you in the next class.