Watercolor Paint Christmas Motifs

1. Introduction and Class Project: Hello and welcome to my class on how to paint watercolor, Christmas or holiday motifs. I really wanted to bring something fun like this to you guys because it's the holiday season. And I know personally I'm always looking for a fun watercolor tutorial. So I hope that this is that for you. This is a beginner level. I'm going to walk you through all of the steps. Of course, you will need some tools for the class. You will need watercolor paper. If you're not using a watercolor block, makes sure you tape your paper down just because we're gonna be using a lot of water today, a paintbrush, I used various sizes, but if you have a size six brush or a size four, then something for details like a size one or zero. Watercolor paint, of course, I like to use to water cups to make sure I don't make my watercolor paint too muddy. And then a paper towel, a pencil and eraser, and either a white gel pen or white gouache, because we're going to be doing frosting on these little gingerbread cookies. We'll be painting gingerbread cookies, a snowy Christmas tree. Some candy canes and peppermint candies, as well as some holly berries. So your class project is to just paint along with me. Whatever you want to paint. You don't have to do all of the classes. I split, these are all of the sections. I split these into four sections so that if you want to do the candy canes, you can just do the candy canes and you don't have to worry about fast-forwarding through the tree or whatever. So everything is split up and I would just love to see what you paint because everybody paints things just slightly different. And it's really cool to see how everybody interprets, interpret the prompt. I hope you guys enjoyed this class. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I also love your feedback and let's get started. 2. Paint A Snowy Pine Tree: We are going to be painting a quick and easy like snowy pine tree. And to do that, I am going to have a size six brush. We're going to start by mixing up some green. So we want a pretty dark shade like a pine shade. Then we want to have some lighter variation as well. So maybe adding a little sap green. I'm not sure what my really dark one is here. I'm sorry. But if you don't have a dark green, just add a little black to it. And you can also add a little bit of indigo if you want to make it slightly blue. Okay, That should be good. Now we're painting in more of a loose style. So if you need a guideline, just grab a pencil and make a straight line. If you feel like you really need a guideline, you can also make a triangle. So it'll just give you a rough outline. Now how we're going to make sure that there is snow on this tree is we're going to skip some parts. So grab your paintbrush and we're going to start at the top. And I'm about at a 45-degree angle and I'm just making a little wine. If you're familiar with, like, I think it's a Douglas fir, just like some little lines up here. Then I'm going to make it come out. And I'm just using the point of my brush to make these little branches when to leave a spot right there. Now I'm going to skip down and grab, grab a little bit of a lighter color. And I'm making, leaving a pretty big gap, but I'm always coming out from the center here. Same thing. Just these little swishes. Maybe I grabbed a little dark again that I'm going to rinse off my brush and grab just water. I'm going to lightly tap this. I'm just pulling down a little water and a little color, but I'm making sure to leave parts of the paper completely dry. Just grabbing that water again and pulling down some of that color. And right here you can connect it because it's not going to be a perfect line of snow. And then just pull out that diluted color out to the edges. And then maybe you want to do the same thing up here as well. Then we move down to our second branches. Now we want this to look interesting, not like the same thing over and over again. So maybe we touch in some of that darker color and then pull down these branches. And we're going in a cone shape. So it's going to get bigger as we get to the bottom. Grab a little more saturated color. You can also poke in some different colors. And then maybe you make some of the branches go down a little bit. Maybe this one comes in a little bit more. Then I'm going to rinse off my brush, grab just water, and just lightly tap some of this. An almost making it look like the snow's coming off the edge by just bringing that watery green color down. And you're just going to do this all the way down the tree. Make sure you're alternating between colors. Otherwise, it'll get kinda boring. And maybe this part, there's a lot more green showing. You can also do like barely any snow coming on this side. And then just grabbing that water and lightly touching that top branch. So it bleeds but not so much that you're covering up the white of the paper. And I am going to make more of a whitespace here to show that maybe there's a big pile of snow right here. And then the same thing, it's important to make sure that this is still wet when you come in there with just water to make it look like snow. Basically what's happening is you're wanting to make it look like the snow is reflecting the branches and it's going to change a little bit. But when we get to the bottom, we're going to add in some new colors. So stick with me here. I'm just, again, I'm just using the tip of my brush at an angle. And everyone's thrombin at grab maybe that sap green color. So it's not too much of the same over and over and over. And sometimes your branches can go up, sometimes they can go down. This is nature. So it's not going to be perfect. I'm grabbing just water again. I'm just putting in some of make sure if you start to get too much paint on your brush to rinse it off again. So you're getting just water. And we're starting to get to the bottom. So I'm going to show more of the center leaves coming out or branches. Maybe it's just a little more thick down here. You can use more of the belly of your brush by pressing down to make it a little thicker. But something I really like to do here is I like to come in with a blue, not like super dark blue, but something like that. Then I do the same thing. It looks like I'm drawing branches, but essentially what I'm doing is showing that there's snow down here. Then I'm going to grab just water and lightly blend it in. So to me what this looks like is the branches hit the ground because they are flooded with snow. And then I like to grab a darker color, blue, indigo and just lightly tap it in. You really get that shadowy close to the ground. Look. You can grab just plain water and pull it down even more if you want to. So we need to grab water and come up here to some of these areas to give that snowy shadow feel. You have to work pretty quick because it's drawing as we go and it's really dry where I live right now. So one other way I want to add some interests to this, as I'm going back to my really dark green color, you can add black if you want to make yours dark. And I'm just going to poke in where I think there'll be more shadows. So maybe down the center, there's a little more shadows. Just to make it here and there. You can also use the tip of your brush to just show more dimension. I guess. You don't want to add it everywhere, but here in there we'll add a lot to your painting because it draws your eye in. So it's looking like deeper and deeper up here. And I would say that this is just about done. There you are a snowy tree, super easy and fast. 3. Paint A Candy Cane and Candy: We are going to paint a candy cane and some Peppermint Christmas candy. First thing we're gonna do is we want to sketch out our candy cane. So if you guys have one on hand or you can grab a photo, we're just going to make that classic candy cane that's like a hook. And make sure you do the edges rounded because it's a candy canes, so it should be rounded. And feel free to use a ruler if you have a hard time drawing a straight line. I'm actually going to make this little hook come in just a little bit more because a little far out. There we go. Okay. I'm drawing a little bit darker so you guys can see, but feel free to draw as light as you want. The lighter you draw the better. Because you don't want it to show up since there is white on the candy cane. And then something that I like to do, you know how candy candy canes have that sheen? It kinda looks like shiny. The way I get that is I draw a line down the middle. So one line and then two lions. So it's just really thin area that I'm going to keep completely white. And this is going to give the appearance that there's like a shine to this. You can also cut it off so it doesn't go all the way down the candy cane. And we're going to leave that white right here. Another way you can do this, if you have masking fluid, you can paint this with masking fluid and that way you can just peel off that masking fluid and you have the white paper underneath. But today, I'm just going to paint really delicately and make sure that I don't paint over that. Then we want to come in and paint our stripes. So just paint those, are sorry, draw those candy canes stripes. This will just help to be a guideline and I kinda like to do them at an angle. So that's our candy cane. And then we're going to do our little mic candies. And we're going to paint two of them. So draw a circle and then draw a little.in the middle. And it's like a pinwheel. And there's four sections. So just draw that pinwheel like that. Wait, is it 4123455? Wait, that's not right there. The circle than a.in the middle. And it's actually going to be, there should be four sections. Right? Why am I having such a hard time with this? Sorry, three sections. So red, white, red, white, red, white. Draw another circle over here. Feel free to grab something in that circular if you're having a hard time grabbing a drawing a circle. And then this one, I want to have eight sections total, so I'm gonna make them a little bit smaller. 12341234. There you go. It's okay if some of them are skinnier than others. Okay? Now that we have, are our pencil down, what we wanna do is if you drew a really dark, just lightly erase it because we don't there is white on here and we don't want it to be we don't want the pencil marks to show through. Now I'm going to grab my size two brush and make sure you have a brush with a pretty good point on it. Makes up some red. I have scarlet lake here. But whatever red you have is fine. I actually wanna make this red a little deeper. So I will add just a touch of blue. Sometimes if it's too like poppy red, it doesn't it's not really like a Christmas red. I have a good amount of paint on my brush. It's pretty thick, kinda. The texture of butter I would say. And what I'm going to do is just come over here and I'm going to outline that first stripe. But I'm going to make sure that I do not touch remember our white shine line. I'm not going to touch that. I'm going to paint around it. So I'm outlining it. I'm going to rinse off my brush, grabbed just water. Sure. Not too much water. And then I'm just going to kind of pull that paint around. I'm gonna do that all the way up this candy cane. Again, making sure to not get that white line in the middle. And don't worry too much about the white stripe in the candy cane right now. You don't have to worry about that. If you feel like you put too much pigment down, just grab a dry brush and lift it up. Going all the way down and now we're back to having that white line down the middle that we do not want to touch. Because that's our little highlight. It seems like something so simple, but you guys are going to see it come together and you're going to know, oh yeah, that's why you did that. I think that is one of the things about watercolor is figuring out how to make something look if you want to paint in that style more realistic. It's really about the lighting, like how the light is hitting things. Because it would look really flat if we didn't just have this. Highlight them at all. Okay, one more. And we're going to graph just a little bit darker. I want to pop in a couple of areas. So grabbing that darker red and just lightly touching the underneath. So this is where it's like the underside of the candy cane. And why I'm doing this is I want to make it look like a shadow a little bit. Then I'm going to just lightly dab off my brush so there's not a ton of water. But I'm just going to make this little teeny line here. And not too much. You don't want to do the whole thing, but just a little bit. It's going to guide our eye along the edge of this. And I'm going to mix this is just add a little more water over here. We're gonna give this a second and we're going to come back to it. But for the most part, it should be darker on the inside here. And then on the outside it can be lighter. Now right here, I'm going to add just a little line. Oops, I add too much water on my paintbrush. Soak that up. I just wanted to add a little shadow over there because that was looking a little too dark. So I'm going to do the same thing here. Just with the tip of my brush. It's really important you have a brush that has a good tip. This is a Princeton heritage tip on these brushes is amazing. Okay. So as you can see, it's already starting to come together because we played a little bit with those shadows. We're going to let it dry and we're gonna move on to our little candy cane candies, pinwheel candies. For these, we're grabbing that same red color and we're doing the same thing. We're just outlining where the red would go, rinsing off our brush. Just moving it around. And I can tell that I have a little too much water on my brush right now. There we go. And if it's looking just kinda block like this looks really flat. Rinse off your brush, dry it off on the paper towel, and just pick up some of that paint because you want it to have that watercolor and look. I'm just pulling a little highlight there. Same thing over here. He really got to watch your brush. Sometimes water builds up around here, and then it goes down your brush and onto your artwork. And that's not what you want. I'm going to dab in just a little darker color and let it bleed. We're gonna do the same thing to this guy. This one had kind of uneven pinwheels. That's okay. These are great. If you wanted to make a little gift tags or a card. Oh, there we go again. Dropping away too much water on here. Another thing you can do to make this look a little more interesting is, okay, I'm going to outline it. Then I'm going to make a little triangle here and I'm not going to paint inside of that. So it looks like another little highlight in the candy. Actually should have done that for all of them because that actually looks a lot better. Okay, we're coming back to our candy cane and we're going to grab a like frosty grayish blue. We don't want black because that's just too dark. So I want to lighten it up by this is like a lavender color. And then I have a little bit of Payne's gray and I might just do a touch of black. So like a grayish blue. I'm going to make sure that I definitely do not. This is really watered down and I don't but I don't have too much water on my brush. Then I'm going to come in and I'm just this with the tip of the brush outlining where the white part of the candy cane would be. And I'm making sure that I am not painting that center piece right? Because that's our little highlight. And it's okay if it bleeds a little bit. And I know you might be thinking, oh, that looks really, it looks like the candy cane is dark. It won't look like it because we're going to come back in and do one darker shade. It seems weird, but it'll look okay. Plus something else that I do. When you digitize your artwork, appear in Photoshop, you can bring the white out more. So sometimes I'll paint dark. And then when I get in Photoshop because I'm digitizing it for like art prints or cards or whatever. I am able to basically make it white again, but keep all those shadowing details. We do have a little bit of bleeding because the red is not totally dry, but I'm okay with that. Actually kinda like that look. Okay. So we're going to let this dry and then we're gonna come in with a second layer to just get these details a little stronger. But do you guys see already it's already creating the shine. Back to our pinwheels. We're gonna do the same thing with the white sections. Think I'm going to darken my color. Just a tad. Going to outline it along the edge. Just bring in a little water that's actually not dark at all. So outlining it. But making sure that I'm leaving white. Because if you don't leave white, it's just going to look like dirty candy. So make sure you're leaving some of that white. Same thing over here. A little wet still. So I'm getting a little bit of the red in it, but it's okay because it's kind of giving it a creamy look, like a cream color, not like a creamy candy. But again, makes sure leaving that white. And you can see it's kind of looking more freely now because we're adding in these layers were adding in the shadowing. So this looks good. I want to add another layer if you're happy with it, as is, you can totally be done with it. But I want to add just a little more layering. But we need to wait until this completely dry. So I'm going to let it dry and then we'll come back and add the details. Now that we're dry, we're going to come in here and just add some details. I can see that this one got a little washed out, so I'm going to definitely add a little more red over there. I have a pretty saturated red. And I'm just going to add a little line here and a line here, but make sure they don't touch because we don't want them to bleed into each other again. That I'm just grabbing water and letting that kind of bleed. Same thing over here. Like I said before, we're just adding depth by adding a shadow, basically. Good. And I should have painted this one first because I'm right handed and I tell my hand is going to go in there. We're gonna do is we're going to come in here for the red one, and we're just going to add a little line on the left-hand side of that white. And I'm just doing this to add another dimension to it. You could even do like a slight line on the top if you want. Just a real thin because we don't want to make it look like there's too many shadows. I'm actually going to blend this with some water. And I'm going to grab that gray color, senior lots at that lab and nourish gray that we had. And just on the tip of my brush, on the inside, I'm going to make a really light line here where that white is. Rinse off my brush because I actually got too dark. So I'm just going to blend it in with some water. Again over here, I can tell my brush has a ton of water on it, so I just dab it off on a paper towel. Maybe just a little line over here. And I think that about does it for the candy cane. I don't wanna get too. There's definitely, you can go too far when you're painting with watercolors. So there's a happy balance there. You did want to add a little more red over here. A touch over here. Help over here. Because, okay. Alright, I think I candy cane looks good. Now, last but not least, another little peppermint candy. We're gonna do the same thing. It's kinda outlined with the red blended in a little bit with just water. And I am going to grab black gray again, greenish blue. Just on the tip of my size two brush. I'm going to make a slight line just to outline it a little bit. Same thing over here. All right. And if you feel like you want to make this highlights tick out even more, you can grab an even darker shade. It's kind of an endless process like you could always tinker with it for a really long time. Just adding in. Like just every few, just really small. This is a darker shade. Do that but not gonna touch it anymore. I think we look, they look really good. All right. Those are our candy canes and our peppermint candy. 4. Paint Holly Berries and Leaves: We're going to paint a more loose style of cranberries and kind of like Christmas, like mistletoe and stuff like that. I wanted to paint a more loose style because I know I often do the layered style, which takes a little more time, but now we're going to do a loose style. So I have a size six brush. Make sure your brush has a pretty good tip on it. It really does help. When the tips dole, it makes it a little more difficult. I mixed up some red paint and add a touch of blue to it to give it just a little more like depth. Because I'm using scarlet lake and it's really bright. My paint is kind of like a butter melted butter texture. Hopefully that's helpful. And what I'm going to do is I am pointing my brush. It's like at a 45-degree angle. And I'm just going to make, I'm pressing down, making a circle, but I'm leaving a little white space in-between it. Basically, I want that little white space to be like a little highlight. I'm going to rinse off my brush and describe a little bit of paint, but with more water. I just spelled it. Then I'm going to come in and just make a circle again. Again, I'm going to leave a tiny whitespace making that circle. And then I'm going to let it touch and it's going to bleed a little bit. And I'm cool with that because we're using a more wet on wet technique. Then I want to add some fun little leaves. So I'm going to grab some green. You want a green that is pretty bright and vibrant. Not Neon of course, but something not too muted, this color that I just grabbed his really muted. So I'm going to try to brighten that up with some of my other greens that are bright. And I do want it to be pretty strong. The pigment, I don't want it to be too watered down. Maybe grab a little sap green. And you don't want your brush dripping with paint. So if it if it feels like it's about to drip, just lightly tap it on a paper towel. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to point and I am going to touch that red. I'm going to bring it around all the way back. And now I'm going to grab that same pigment but maybe just slightly darker. Same thing. I'm lightly touching little berry and then bringing it around. And that's our first little one. As you can see, it's going to bleed, but we're okay with that. We'd like that texture right now. Now let's do some berries again. Let's do three berries. Grabbing the tip and then I'm pressing down, kinda make this little circle. I like to leave a little white so it looks like a highlight. Rinse off my brush, grab maybe just water and paint a circle. I like to paint the outside and then come up close and then I'll start to bleed. And then for this other one, if I went and touched it, it would just look like a big blob. I'm actually going to leave this little whitespace between it and make it look like it's not touching. Just paint it like that. And instead of having this kind of like mistletoe style leaf, I'm gonna do more of a pointed leaf. And let's change the color of the leaves just slightly, maybe a little darker. And a lot of pigment. I am going to point it. I'm going to press down. And then I'm gonna do that same thing, point, press down. And then as I'm pulling, pull up, so I get a little point here. And now I'm going to grab a green that's just slightly lighter because I want to see it does a little variation. Same thing. Make sure your brush is not dripping with water. And I did touch it a little bit. But that's okay. Pointing, pressing down and pulling up. Beautiful. I like to just, sometimes it's really kind of relaxing to do stuff like this. I'm gonna do some yellow berries now, just paint along with me. Sometimes I do a loose style. It's nice to just play and not have it be so. Syria is I have to make this perfect and look realistic. It's just fun to play. So now we're gonna do some yellow berries. So the same technique. And I'm going to think of a way that we can make, make this a little different. So now I have that more watered-down paint and I can lightly tap it and they can touch. Another thing you can do is rinse off your brush, dry it off on your paper towel, and then you can come in and just soak up some of that paint too. If you want it to look a little less bright. Another thing I like to do is maybe grabbing more of a golden tone. Just poking it in here. Like so. Then maybe we have one down here that's more golden. And leaving that little white highlight. This one got to be quite big. And maybe for this one I want it to be on a branch with leaves coming out. I'm going to grab some brown, darken. I'm using a red brown, so I'm going to darken it just a bit. And I'm going to go just the tip of my brush and I'm going to touch the berries. So you're going to see where the branch heads into there. That I want to have some green leaves grabs slightly darker. And it's not our same technique that we're using over here. So I'm going to point, press down, pull up to a point, and then I'm gonna do the other side of the leaf. Same way. Hello, rinse off my brush and get something that's maybe a little more yellow. And I have a dog hair on my brush. I'm going to press down, lift up to a point. And I'm actually going to do something a little dangerous here. But it's our wet on wet technique. But don't touch the yellow Barry and see what happens. I'm not gonna go all the way over it because I don't want it to go completely over it. But I'm going to touch it and then I'm going to pull over here like so. And I think that looks cool. Then maybe I'll just stick one more out here, just a little leaf and have it come down in here a little bit. Okay. Now the last one I wanna do is kind of a hanging mist. Technically, it wouldn't be mistletoe because mistletoe berries are actually white. So we're going to do something that kinda looks like hanging mistletoe, but it's actually going to be holly berries. And I am going to start off by grabbing that brown. And it's going to be hanging down. So take the, just the tip of your brush and make a branch coming down. And then going, oops, that's kinda thick. Going in a couple different directions because your leaves are going to hang off of this. Then I'm going to grab that green. We're gonna do leaves that look like this. So I'm going to start up in this brown the point, and then I'm just going to sweep around. You can also move your paper if you want. I don't want to move it because I want it. I didn't want it to be easy for you guys to see, but you can move your paper around. That helps to. Then maybe I'm gonna do another one up here that comes and touches this one. I want to put my berries them because they're very important. Grabbing red. And I'm just making little circle and leaving a little white highlight. Now you don't have to do them all like that, but you do want to vary the shade. So right now I'm adding a little bit of blue. I'm gonna come over here and this is super saturated. I want to reduce, I mean, I don't want all of them to be like that. I'm grabbing just water with a tiny bit of red that's more diluted. And I'm just making a circle again. They're all touching and that's fine. Same thing. Maybe do one just poking out over here a little bit. Now, I'm going to get a green that has a little more bright because that's a really dark there. And I'm going to just lightly come in here to show that there's a lease back here. And that's looking really dark and really muted. We add in some sap green and just lightly touching. And then that's swooping to make it rounded leaf shape. Maybe just putting like a line back here. So it looks like there's some green back there. Same thing over here. And don't be afraid to leave a little whitespace like that. If you don't want it to bleed like crazy. There's really, I mean, there are methods to watercolor, but you don't have to do exactly what somebody else tells you to do. Experiments with it. That's why it's so fun. Maybe just add a little red berry up here. This berry is looking way too dark for me, so I just rinse off my brush and dry it off. And I'm going to pull up some of this color. And if this isn't completely dry, I'm going to pull up a highlight on that leaf too, because it's way too dark, in my opinion. Perfect. So it's not too dry. So I just again rinse off my brush, dry it off on a paper towel and I'm just pulling up some of that. I'm gonna do that to a lot of these. And this branch, because this branch turned completely green. That's so cool thing about watercolor is it can be pretty forgiving. For the most part. Then maybe bringing in some of these little tiny branches. I think we need one more leaf down here. I'm going to touch it but not touch on this other side here. Maybe another leaf over here. Alright. You have your cute little holly berry branch. And these are just some loose style cranberries, holly berries and whatever we're going to call those guys. 5. Paint Gingerbread Cookies: We are going to get started with our gingerbread cookies. Now for our gingerbread cookies, we are going to do a couple of different shapes. I am going to be painting them and then adding white on top of them. I want it to feel like we're decorating cookies essentially, but we're doing it with paint. Another way that you could do this is you could draw all of your details and then just paint with a brown paint around the white. But I want this tutorial to be any level. And sometimes when you do that, That's a lot of detail work. So I want to take that extreme detail work out and we're going to just paint the base of the cookies. And then we're going to come in with white gouache in the frosting. It's the first shape I'm going to draw is just your typical star. And I'm going to be keeping all of my artwork on one side of the page just because I'm trying to be better about saving paper. So I'm drawing just a regular five tips star. And I'm realizing that I'm actually drawing this pretty big. I'm going to draw a pretty dark so that you guys can see what I'm drawing. But feel free to draw as light as possible. Because the lighter you draw, the less likely you're going to see your pencil marks, your watercolor paint. Now we're going to draw your typical gingerbread man. And for that, I'm going to do a round head. And feel free to bring up pictures of gingerbread cookies. If you guys need them for reference, then it's five points, right? We have a circle here, circle, circle, circle, circle. And then you connect them to make the legs and the arms. If you feel better doing this, you could draw those circles like this. Just really lightly. It's kinda like half circles for the feet. Then you can come in and just kinda them. My dog is walking around and I can hear her little pit or pattern. I'm drawing these pretty big today. This is a large sheet of watercolor paper. This is 12 " by 16, but you can draw these as small as you want. I typically do them a little larger just so you guys can see the details a little more, a little better. Then I'm going to make a Christmas tree So that triangle shape, but I'm going to make it. So it has like a couple indentations. So just that triangle on top. And then coming in triangle, triangle. And don't worry about these being perfect, I'm going to put a little trunk at the bottom, so just make like a little rectangle. These don't need to be perfect because when you make cookies, as we all know, they're never perfect. We could also do a candy cane shaped cookie. So just that hook and then thicken it up. Like so. Don't worry about the details. We're gonna get into all the details later. A snowflake. For a snowflake, I'm going to do something that has six points. So I'm actually going to draw an ax and then one with a line through it. Just so I have more of a guideline when I do this. Then what I'm going to do is just make a little circle around this part. It's going to make more sense when we decorate it. It kinda looks like a flower right now, but when we decorate it, it's gonna make more sense. Okay? So these are our gingerbread shapes. Like I said, I drew a lot darker because I wanted you guys to be able to see what I'm drawing, but I'm going to come in and just lightly erase some of this with a gummy eraser so that we don't have too strong of pencil marks. Then we're going to start painting. Now I've gotten most of my pencil marks taken up, and now we're going to mix up a color that is a light, light gingerbread color. We are going to be working with layers today for the gingerbread cookies. Since we're working with layers, we want to start with the lightest layer. When you're working with color, you need to start with the lightest first. There is actually a technique where you can start with the darkest first, but that's not how I paint. Mixed up something with some yellow in it. Maybe a little bit of reddish brown. Should it be a light tan color? You're just going to come in. I have a pretty good amount of water on my brush. My brush is not dripping though. You never want your brush to be dripping with water. And C, dot that up real quick. Okay, so grab your paints and I'm going to just make a basic. I'm just painting this bottom layer, so nothing fancy. You don't have to worry about it like a bleeding technique or anything like that. You're just putting down that first layer of paint. And I'm going to paint along with you because I personally don't like it when I'm following a tutorial and they speed it up because I want to I don't want to feel like I'm behind. And it makes you feel like that when they do that. So we're just coming in and painting this first layer. Something that you can do to make this a little more interesting is grabbing a slightly darker color or maybe a color that has a little more red into it. And you can just.in some color if you want. But you don't have to do this because we're essentially going to be adding in shading on our second layer. But this is more of that wet on wet technique that I like to do that in my layering. But if you feel like your base layers super flat, feel free to add in something like that. Painting in that base layer. And we're going to be doing three layers today for these cookies. Now, I will fast-forward the drawing part because nobody wants to watch paint dry. But if you want to, maybe you want to speed that up and you don't have the time to let your painting dry naturally, grab a hairdryer or depending on what time of year it is, where you live and how your weather is. You can also put it outside in the sun. I'm in Southern California so I can put, I mean, it's sunny right now, there's some clouds, but it's sunny. And this will dry in like 10 min. So feel free to grab it, dryer or place your artwork outside. And we're just painting the really light wash that bottom layer. Okay, our first layer is done. We're going to let this dry and then we can come back and put on our second layer. Now that we have our base layer down, you can see it dried a lot lighter. So we want to mix up a darker colors so we can get a more vibrant color. So we're going back into our well, in grabbing this is yellow ocher that I have here. I'm going to grab a good amount of that. You want your paint to be thicker. One time. I want to say the texture of like melted butter. I know that sounds weird. But then a little bit of that red brown, a little bit of, I think this is Van **** brown here. So a nice toasted brown color. Then we are going to come in. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to ask, okay guys, I accidentally set off the emergency notification. I don't know what it was. It's like when you're trying to dial emergency number on my phone because the thing that's recording this was pressing the two buttons that if you press them, sets off an emergency thing. So that is why this happens. So let me get back to this. We're grabbing that paint that's thick like that, butter texture. And I'm just outlining the edge of this cookie. You want this to stay wet. You don't want it to be dry at all because you're going to need to add water to this so you don't want it so light that you're not getting any pigment, but you also don't want it so dry that it's not making a smooth line. So you see how my line is very smooth and shiny because it's white, it like that. Then you're going to rinse off your brush and grab just water and coming here and just touch that edge with the water. So this is this is a wet on wet technique and it's going to help it bullied. We're going to have to help it along to get to the middle. But you could use like a circular motion. And basically what we want is it looks like our cookie has crispy edges and the inside is nice and tan, but the outside edges are a little crispier. If you feel like you want more color, you can also.in more color like this. You can just leave it and see what it does. Usually will bleed quite nicely and blend in. But if you feel like it's too harsh, you can always move it around. We are going to be doing one more layer. So if this isn't dark enough for you, don't worry, we have another layer. So just go ahead and do that for all of these. Now, something to be aware of is where if you're left or right handed, you don't want to be putting your hand in wet paint, so paint accordingly. So e.g. I'm right handed. So I'm not going to paint this one. Wait. I'm not going to paint this one. And then this one, I'm going to paint this one first and then this one so I don't drag my hand across it. So that same technique that I used on the star, I'm just lightly outlining the edge. I'm using a size six brush. But depending on what, how big you painted things or small, you might want a smaller brush. You might want a bigger brush. Rinsing off my brush. Usually I have to water cups, but today I'm just using one because I have all the same color. Just grabbing some of that water. It's okay that it's tinted a little bit like orange because that's the color will be working in. And then I'm literally just adding that water along the edge. Kinda helped me move. You can already see that they are really starting to look like you might have to mix up some more color. I know that I'm having to that got really dark. I don't want it that you can always pop in little bits of color and see what happens when it dries. Okay. Going on to my next, I'm gonna do this guy down. I do like this. I like, I love this part where you add the water and it just bleeds. It looks so we're going to do our labs and just getting water touching that edge so it bleeds in. If at any point you think like, Oh, I have too much pigment right there, what you can do is rinse off your brush and then dry it off on the paper towel and come in with a clean dry brush and press down. And it's going to pull up that color. So Pulls like a nice highlight. We have to let this layer dry and then we're gonna come back. We're gonna do one more layer just because I want these cookies to really pop. But you could really just leave it at this if you want to. But I want to make them just a little bit darker because we're gonna be adding white and I want the white to really stand out. Let your painting dry, and then meet me back. And we will add that third layer. Are lovely cookies are ready for their last layer. So go ahead and if you don't already have enough of that same color, you might want to darken it just a tad. Just so you get a little variation. And again, you're working with a consistency that's pretty saturated. That's going to be like a burnt cookie. I don't want that. You want it to be pretty saturated because you want there to be a good amount of color, but you also don't want it to look burn burnt. I can't talk today. Okay. I think that's good. So I'm coming in with a lot of pigment and I'm just drawing, painting this edge. Remember you want to make sure that your paint stays wet because you don't want it to be dry because you need it to stay wet until we add that water to it so you get a nice bleed around the edge. Rinsing off your brush, getting just that water. And then just lightly touching the edge and letting the paper and the watercolor do magic. If you are finding that your paper looks like it's not doing very well with this water. You might not have high enough quality watercolor paper. So make sure that you have something that is 140 pounds or hire 140 pounds and standard That's what I use. But anything less than that is not enough to soak up all the water. And if you feel like you want your cookie just to be a little bit darker, feel free to poke in some color here and there. If you want to do some cool little things, I loved the wet on wet technique because you can get some, some cool texture to your painting. Feel free on some of these. If you want to add more yellow, if you want them to look slightly different, you can totally do that. Same thing. I also broke my rule. I should've painted this one first, but I'll just have to be really careful that I don't put my hand in this. Make sure this outer edge is staying wet. I've got a really good tip on this size six brush. So I'm able to do some pretty easy like painting with it. But if you feel like your brush is not that good, a smaller one. But you do need the larger one when you come in with the water because you need it to cover a good amount of space. So as you can see, this one has a little more yellow in it. Again, if you need that technique, if you were like, oh, that's way too dark. Rinse off your brush, dry it off on the paper towel and then just pull up the paint. If you feel like you need that. These cookies are looking more as if they have molasses in them, like a traditional gingerbread cookie. You guys like gingerbread cookies. I personally thought I hated them. And then I made my husband and I made gingerbread houses last year, and I made the gingerbread from scratch. And it was actually delicious. Who would have known? I love all the ****** in them. One's really good. So I used to hate on Gingerbread, but the truth is, in my opinion, it's delicious. I might add a little more yellow again. Hi. This is a really great way. I'm actually going to pop in a little extra color here just to make it more interesting to look at. So since this is all wet, I can just lightly dab in color and it's just going to bleed nicely for me. Then I'll just go back over here and continue this one. But these layers are a nice way to add a lot of depth to your, something simple. Like the cookie is pretty simple. But I would say that these look pretty good and a lot, even if you're a beginner, you can really get it to look pretty neat by using I'm just this layering technique. Then our last little guy down here. Once we finished these, we need to let them dry completely. And then we're gonna come in with white gouache. I'm actually going to be using something called Ph Martin's or Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white and is essentially gouache because it is not waterproof, but It's a white paint. I used to use a lot when I did calligraphy, but it's definitely not permanent. So if you get it wet again, it's just like watercolor. Like if you get it wet again, it can bleed and stuff, but it's perfect for this. And I use it on a lot of my paintings that I digitize. Because once it's digitized, you can put it on anything and you don't have to worry about it being waterproof. You just need it to be white. It's for the scanner. Okay. I'm pretty happy with this. I might add the candy canes looking a little bland to me. So I am going to just poke in a little color. I can see that the shape right here, I went out. The line, there's two options. One, I'll just leave it like this because it's a cookie. And if you've ever seen any cookies that I've made it When definitely a little bit this. But also I could fix this in Photoshop if I digitize this because I can just cut that off really easily. But if you feel like there's any areas that you want to darken up a bit. Feel free to do that. Just make sure if it is almost dry. I can see up here this is not going to bleed very well because this is starting to dry. Just grab a little bit of water and lightly help it along its way. But be careful because once you enter and you guys will learn, if you're new to watercolor, it's really, you learn as you go with watercolor. The more practice you get, the more you start to understand how things dry and like how long they take to dry. But since this is on its way to being dry, what's happening is I have to add in a little water to move the paint around. But I have to be very careful because I can also start pulling up the paint that's already there. So there's definitely this sweet spot with watercolor where you want to work when the paper is wet. But once it starts entering into that drying period, you have to be really careful because you can pull up some of the paint and then you can start to get these really harsh lines that you don't want. Okay. That's my soapbox moment. Let this dry. We're going to come back and add those frosting details with the white paint. Now we're ready for the fun part. Not that the other stuff wasn't fun, but this is like the decorating part. I am using, like I was saying before, the bleed, proof white. But if you have a gouache or you could even use white acrylic paint. You can also use a gel pen or a paint pen like a mall. A towel, white paint pen can work as well. Okay, So I'm going to start off, I have a size two brush, but if you guys made your cookies really small, you might want something smaller, like a size one or a zero. I'm just grabbing that white paint. I'm going to start with my star and I'm going to outline my star. So if you guys are familiar with cookie decorating, they usually outline the edge. And of course, don't worry about it being perfect. You want whatever white you're using to be pretty opaque. Opec, okay. And you might have to do a couple of layers. I'm only going to do one layer for this tutorial, but I might go in and add more later if I choose to digitize that. You have that outline and then you could totally add something to it if you want to or you can leave it just as it is. I think I might add a line. I'm gonna do a circle in the middle. Then align. Maybe, maybe it will be kind of like, uh, actually make it a little bit of a snowflake. So I'm going to put a couple of lines going up that middle line. Feel free to make these cookies look however you want them to look. Sometimes it just comes to you when you're painting like you might not know exactly how you want it to look and then you'll get started and you find it. For the gingerbread man, I am going, I think I want to give him a bow tie. A bow tie right here on him. And I think I want to, or actually I want to outline him all the way. So same thing, I'm going around the edges. I'm eating more of this white. I recommend not drinking too much coffee before this. A little bit tighter line work. So just outlining him like you would outline with frosting and then two eyes. You could also make it a girl and put little eyelashes and put a Smiley face. Maybe I'll do some eyebrows, like going off the edge and some buttons down the middle. Moving on to our tree. Going to outline the tree. Again, I like to outline all the edges. If you look on Pinterest at gingerbread cookies, they usually have the white frosting go all along the edge. So it kinda reiterate what the shape is. You don't have to do it that way, but that's what I saw. And so I wanted to make this feel as realistic as possible. Then I want to do basically it looks like kinda strings of lights all the way down. I'm just going back-and-forth. You could even add color here if you want to add color, add it on top of the white after it dries, but I'm just going to put some little Christmas. You could even do Christmas ornaments on the tree if you wanted to. Now to our candy cane. I think with a candy cane, I might not do that outside line. I might just do, Yeah. I'm just going to do stripes. Just as thick stripes. You can always leave a little bit of the cookie showing through if you want to. It's really amazing how they can, people can decorate cookies. It's totally an art form. I have seen some because I worked in the wedding industry for a long time. And I've seen incredible cookies. Some of them they have printed out, but other, other people like actually do the artwork and it's amazing. Okay, So that's like candy cane, mean cookie. And lastly, this guy down here, I want it to look like a snowflake and I don't, I'm not going to outline it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make a circle in the middle. Then kinda similar to this. From this circle, I'm going to make a line down each of these little petals. But I'm not going to let it touch the top because we don't want it to go all the way to the top line, line, line. And then I'm going to do like a almost like a long teardrop shape. I'm going to do two of those. Then I'm going to do a circle in the middle of all of the petals. So you should have as many as there are points, so there should be six. So for this, you just want to make everything symmetrical. If you guys use an iPad and Procreate and you're used to this symmetrical tool. It's basically that, but you have to do it by hand. I find myself sometimes because sometimes I'll work on my iPad. I don't like it as much as analog, like working on stuff like this. But I'll find that I tried to zoom into my art work. Like it's a computer. It's definitely not. It doesn't work. You can turn this if you need to. If you're not taped down, then maybe I'll do some little ones down here. I didn't say this when we started, but make sure that the cookie layer is dry. If it's not dry, you're definitely not going to get the opacity you want and it's going to bleed. So these are cookies, they're all decorated. Feel free to add another layer of white if you feel like you're white is not opaque enough. So we're all done with this painting. Please share your artwork. I love to see what you guys create. You can tag me on Instagram at lavender and see.