 Welcome to Monet Cafe Artist and Friends. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and oh just take a deep breath and let's just try to enjoy and cherish the holidays. Today's tutorial is going to be simple and fun of some Christmas tree that you can make little green cards out of if you like and oh praise the Lord that love came down one night. This was me doing a little intro to the snowman video. This was all kind of part of the same day of painting and I was trying to get in the spirit even though it's hot in Florida. Alright let's get started. You know I almost forgot that I had this little video recorded of the Christmas trees because I already shared the video of the snowman painting. So if you'd like to see that I'll put a link at the end of this video and I'm just showing here how it was kind of a project to maybe do greeting cards if you'd like to do some. And most greeting cards, this was a painting of mine that I literally just had printed out to send as greeting cards, but most greeting card sizes, if you do a five by seven painting, kind of like this little card, they fit. Also if you'd like to send original artwork, ClearBags.com has a neat little frame card option. They have various sizes, they have envelopes that these fit into and you can check it out at ClearBags.com. I'll put a link in the about section of this video. I thought I'd also share something neat about this particular card. It was sent to me from a ministry, a worldwide ministry that's by Johnny Erickson Tata. It's called Johnny and Friends, J-O-N-I. She is a paraplegic and an amazing artist and a beautiful soul. If you need encouragement, find her on YouTube. She has the most beautiful ministry. This is some of her artwork. It's just amazing. Also my son actually went on many mission trips with her ministry and met his wife in Romania there and his wife is a precious daughter-in-law. Alright, let's have some fun here. This is going to be a relaxed, easy, and carefree video tutorial. I'm using Arches 100% cotton watercolor block. The reason it's called a block is it's a pad of watercolor paper that's glued on the sides. There's a little notch at the front or at the top that that's how you basically just get like a sharp edge and run it along it to peel it off after you're done painting. The reason this is a good idea is because it keeps your watercolor paper nice and flat. Now what I'm doing here, you can't unfortunately see the white tape I'm putting down because of the white paper, but I'm dividing this off. This is how I did the four paintings. I'm doing some little measurements there. What I wanted to do is have a white border around each of the five by seven cards. So what I did is I literally just used the white tape as the border on the insides of each card. Then I put more tape around the outsides and I measured to where when I pulled it off I could cut kind of in the middle where each of the tape strips were and it would allow me a border at the end. You'll see at the end how it works. You don't have to go to all this extent to do this. I just, my time is very precious as my husband and I have so many other things and businesses that we're trying to do to make ends meet and I need to maximize my time. So at the end you'll see how I cut these. The supplies for this tutorial are very simple. Some brushes, some water, of course your watercolor paper, some paper towels, any kind of watercolor. I'm using this little neat Arteza 36 set. I really love this little handy dandy set that they sent me. It's got a neat little travel pen. You can put water in the back of it. It's also got a little holder if you want to paint on the go like holding your little palette and the little individual wells for putting your watercolor. Now let's get started with this. First of all what I'm going to be doing is what's called a wash. I've already got my paper nicely divided. I'm choosing on the first one. I want to do two different color themes. So I'm choosing kind of like a Prussian blue and I think I use a different blue after that. I'm speeding this up because it's it's really pretty simple. We're going to just paint our surface with water for the wash. It's called and I'm using, oh actually I changed my mind. I'm using two different types of blues and what I do is I mix a nice little puddle of water and watercolor so it's kind of nice and liquidy and then I just brush it on nice and loosely. I've learned with watercolor just to let it have more freedom. Don't be so fussy with it and I'm doing a wash where it's a little bit darker at the top. Kind of like it's a midnight sky or something and then I'm going to, I don't think I do add multiple colors. Yeah I do. There's my, that one's a little bit more of a maybe a phthalo blue. It's just a brighter pretty more of a blue than a purple like the other one and so I'm just combining that on there. Actually in hindsight I would have rather just let them mix a little bit more than I than I did it. Now I said don't dip your brush in your candle. I had to move my tea and my candle back so I didn't accidentally have an accident there. Now the same idea. I'm going to be using more of these cool greens. Brush on the water on the paper. Make a nice soupy mixture of watercolor and water and just paint it on. Now if you want to intensify the effect you can prop up your watercolor paper. It'll kind of drip down and I choose another color to add with this I believe and I'm going to find out what it is. I'm sorry I have to do these voiceovers after but sometimes my house is just noisy. My husband and I both work from our small home and sometimes our businesses collide. But that's all right. I appreciate him very much and I will definitely work around him. All right so I've got my two colors on each one. I'm just blowing it dry because I don't have time to wait and then we're going to get started with doing something you've probably seen if you've watched my videos. Well first of all, no I do that later. First of all we're going to make a neat little watercolor kind of a general start for our tree and I'm using a dark color. I think I'm using a dark blue and almost like a black. It's like a gray black. And I saw this little technique done on another watercolor artist's YouTube video. I can't remember her name right now but she did hers all in watercolor. I'm going to be adding pastels but I thought this is going to be very simple for anyone who doesn't know how to do a tree. You basically make like almost like a big leaf-like shape or like a teardrop almost shape and I end up making mine bigger and I'm making this dark on purpose. You don't have to make it this dark. I'm going to put pastel on top of this and then after you get this in it's just kind of a easy neat Christmas tree shape instead of drawing a triangle. They're not usually don't have hard edges like that. Then she just took, I'm not sure if she took a fan brush but I got a fan brush and you just kind of splay out the edges while it's still wet. You just kind of take it and smudge them out from the sides. Now for this next one I'm going to do a different color for the other tree and I think I'm going to do it on the opposite side. So same idea. We're just going to take and make a trunk and a little tree shape and it's again it's just an easy nice beginning shape. I make this one a little bit more squared off at the bottom a little bit more like a triangle and I did really like this green color with this. So they both kind of look when this is done they're both going to look more like a an evening scene a little darker but one the one on the left is going to be a little more moody and now is where the fun begins. We get to blow this dry. I already did it and apply what I was going to say before the clear liquid gesso. Now why do I use this product? Because I'm applying pastel only to the trees in this. Okay so the rest of the paper is watercolor and the trees need something for the pastel to stick to. If you put the pastels on this watercolor paper it's not going to adhere very well. You won't be able to get many layers and there's something wonderful I don't know who originally discovered that clear liquid gesso has a little grit a little bit of sand to it just blowing it dry which allows the pastels to stick. Now don't get the regular gesso because it doesn't have the sandiness to it for some reason the clear does. Now I've magically added some pastels there. All I'm doing now over my little teardrop shape is I'm doing a little zigzag design kind of a gray dating from small to large as you go down. You can see it a little bit better on that one and this technique does really emulate the shape of evergreen trees and also I'm using the dark because I wanted to have a base for the different colors and lighter values that I would use to represent the trees and I wanted the trees to be pretty dark because I really wanted those lights to look like they're illuminating and the dark background helps that. Now I'm adding kind of a deep blue bluish green to this one you know see how it makes those leaves look like evergreen leaves and am I doing the same kind of the same color with that one doesn't show up quite as much but it gives it that evergreen feel of different layers. Now I'm adding a little bit lighter and you're just kind of turning your pastel a little bit sideways and going along zigzaggy a little bit random but you know kind of an idea of where highlights would be on the Christmas tree. Alright now fun fun fun I've got a combination of some bold colors and also those at the top are the iridescent Mount Vision pastels. I'm going in with this really deep blue and you go why are you putting that deep blue? Often when you want to do something that represents kind of lights if you put something dark down first and then put a lighter version of that color on top of it it gives it a base and it makes it appear brighter and and glows more so I did the same thing with those purples and I'm just going to keep doing this process kind of random. Now see I'm putting down the red deeper richer high chroma and then I add a little orange with that iridescent pastel from Mount Vision. They're fun I've got another neat idea. Now you see how those yellow ones now look like they're glowing let me zoom in a little bit. Alright now you can probably see this a little bit better but you see how those lights on the other tree they're just kind of glowing. Alright I'm putting in some of that deep red now a little bit of the orange kind of just to where you still see a little bit of red underneath it and a little bit of that bright yellow on top of that orange and a little extra in other places but that that really does give it more of a glow when you put down layers of different values of colors. Alright now I'm doing some other little random lights a combination of some blues that blue really shows up more on the darker tree and some random marks of stars in a sky. Now be careful with stars because we have a tendency to put things in a pattern and you really want to try to make them random. Random in spacing random in size and sometimes it's real neat there's a process you can use where you kind of scrape off a little bit of pastel and you sprinkle it on and then you kind of put some glassine on top and roll it on with like a even like a cookie dough roller but if these will be sent as cards or mailed that's not the best technique. This is something I was experimenting with I had some gouache that I kind of mixed up a little soupy and I it's more opaque not translucent so I tried tapping it and it worked a little bit but it didn't show up as white as I as the pastels did but hey I was experimenting making some snow but this is another technique that you can do with water color but again there is no white watercolor once you lose the white on watercolor paper you can't get it back unless you use something opaque oh look at that to to put on top of it so that's why I'm using the gouache it appears as white because it's uh it's more opaque like I said not translucent. Alright so finishing this up here now you're gonna see my next experiment which was not a great success sometimes I sometimes I kind of like hand lettering but I just don't think I was in the mood for it this day and I took a little micron watercolor pen these are great because they don't smudge and so I just tried doing it in black and I didn't really like it in black I thought white would have been prettier so I thought hmm let's try white on the next one and I wasn't super happy with my hand lettering but you'll see a fix that I do for this at the end kind of cheated now I'm using gouache to do the lettering in white on the next one and I did like that better than the black it just felt more clean and fresh and so I'll speed through these a little bit and I'll show you the final and what I did to fix my poor hand lettering. Here is where I will peel off the tape and cut these. Now I did learn a little trick about actually I've already peeled off the tape here when you pull off watercolor or tape from watercolor paper do it gently and slowly and also pull your tape away from your painted image kind of at an angle away instead of straight down you don't want to pull up the paper so so just be gentle and now here is where I was saying that I had measured so that when I cut these in the center strips or areas they will have the same measurement as the outside borders so then they will all have this nice little clean white border around each one now you don't have to do the borders you can tape it off to where you just paint all the way to the edges and you don't have a white border but I thought it made them look really neat and they were a lot of fun so here are the finished cards and here's my little solution and my trick I put them in Photoshop and fixed the lettering it looks much better this way and I can make prints from these cards I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope if you like these videos you'll consider subscribing to this channel also you can find me at all those links above and if you'd like a little bit of behind the scenes or would like to just support this channel please consider becoming a patron of mine alright guys happy painting