My 13 year old daughter and I decided to have a go at this course as it looks fun.

Here are our first paintings of candles, with mine of the left and my daughter's on the right:

Whimsical Christmas Watercolours - image 1 - student project

And here are our boots, mine on the left, my daughter's on the right. We modelled the boots on wellies, with added fluff.

Whimsical Christmas Watercolours - image 2 - student project

Our third painting of a reindeer in snow. Again mine is on the right, while my 13yo daughter's is on the right.

Whimsical Christmas Watercolours - image 3 - student project

We know the difference between a reindeer and red deer stag, hence other than the background, we ended up painting a completely different animal to the class. Interesting fact, only female reindeers have antlers during the winter, so these are lady reindeers.

I think these turned out well. We wet the whole of the paper as in the lesson, but painted our yellow background around the reindeer, allowing the yellow to bleed in a little on the animal's back. We used purple as our base colour for the reindeer, applying brown, paynes grey, more purple and white as needed.

Next up is my version of lesson 4 - Christmas baubles:

Whimsical Christmas Watercolours - image 4 - student project

This one was very tricky. My 13yo tried to paint it but gave up as she just couldn't control painting wet on wet baubles. The paints just bled together, leaving her very frustrated. To be fair to my daughter, I had trouble too and this is my second attempt to paint these baubles. My first attempt the paint dried too fast on the top half, while I frantically tried to control the bleed of the baubles on the bottom half. For my second attempt I made sure I had pre-mixed all the colours I needed and worked fast. I also avoided painting too much blue over the lower baubles and used a thirsty brush to clean up any blue colour that was there before I painted on the red. This improved things enormously, but the painting was still nearly dry by the time I got onto the background snow.

Next up, our version of baubles in the snow. My painting is on the left, while my 13yo daughter's version is on the right.

Whimsical Christmas Watercolours - image 5 - student project

We had fun with this one, breaking out our metallic watercolours to add a bit of sparkle. The photograph doesn't really do the paintings justice, as the metallic paint catches the light depending on the angle you look a it, changing the number of visible bokeh. We both decided against adding snow splatter as we liked our paintings as they were.

This is our version of Lesson 6 - Christmas Tree String Lights. As before, my painting is on the left while my daughter's painting is on the right.

Whimsical Christmas Watercolours - image 6 - student project

We approached this a little differently, trying to leave spaces for our baubles as our red is not opaque. I think we were a little more heavy handed with the colours in the sky, we were both expecting it to dry to a lighter tone than we'd laid down, but for some reason this time it didn't. We're not unhappy with the results and think our paintings look very dramatic.

This is our last painting for this project as we're past Christmas now and we both feel it is time to move on. For now at least :-)

Julie Spriddle

Aspiring artist and illustrator.

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