 Are you ready for some Christmas fun? Well, here in Monet Cafe, I certainly am. So I am serving you up some easy watercolor postcard tutorials. These can be Christmas cards or postcards. This should be great for artists of every level, lots of fun. You could even have a painting party and host it with your friends and family. That's how easy these lessons are. Now, I'm going to be going over all of the supplies so you can get everything ahead of time to get started. Also, I've provided the 12 traceable designs for this lesson in my coffee shop. It's $5 for all 12 or whatever you would like to pay. And if you're a patron of mine, you will be getting these traceable designs for free. As always, thank you guys so much for your faithful support. It's how I keep these videos coming. Now, let's talk about these products. This is my setup in my studio on my craft table. And to make these Christmas postcards, I'll be using some pre-cut postcards that I got from Arteza. They're nice enough to send me some of their products. I absolutely loved these. And it is 100% cotton. So these are quality. I love Arteza's packaging. These postcards come in this nice little tin that you could repurpose. And there are 30 cards. You see it's even got the little pre-stamped postcard address information. But you don't have to have these postcards to do this lesson. You can make your own. Just cut some watercolor paper that is 4 inches by 5 and 3 quarter inches. And you're good to go. Now, my brushes, I really only used this one brush. I'd say for the majority of all the paintings. It's a 40-50 round by Princeton Brush Company. That one was a number 10. This one is a number 6 if you wanted a little bit of a smaller brush. But just like the paper, use what you have. And these lessons are supposed to be easy, relaxing, and fun. Of course, you'll need some water. And I like to fold up little paper towels to keep near me for water control. I'll talk about that more during the lessons. Now, I will be using watercolor paints in tube format. But I work with such basic primary colors that you could even use one of these little kids watercolor sets if you wanted to have some fun during the Christmas holidays. Now, you could use a set that's already arranged in a dry watercolor format such as this Arteza 36 set. I love this set. But there are many manufacturers that make their own watercolor sets. Now, I'll be working with these little porcelain palettes. I love these because they wash up so easily with no staining. But if you're working from tube paint, you could even use these from the dollar store. So, once again, the options are limitless. All right, let me talk a little bit about these colors regardless of whether you're using tube paint or not. You'll need some basic primary colors. I like various blues. This is an ultramarine blue. The one you saw before was a cobalt blue. I like to have a blue that's a little cooler and a blue that's a little warmer that leans a little more towards green, which this one does. This is a Prussian blue. It makes a great teal type of greenish blue. And I like a purple and this one is a quinacridone violet. Don't let that color scare you. That's a big old word, isn't it? It could just be any type of purple or violet color. Also, too, I have an Indian yellow. This is a warmer yellow. If you see it already in the little tray, it leans towards orange. Now, that dark there that I just pointed at, you can make your own dark. You don't need this, but this is called Payne's Gray. I don't work with black often, but you can make your own darks by combining some primary colors. So, I'll be sure to show you that. Also, too, I'm using a sap green even though I like to make my own greens. You don't even have to have green. What colors do you use to mix green? This is a test. Yellow and blue. Okay, so we can make our own greens. The Alizarin Crimson is a nice red. And if you want a red that's a little bit more leaning towards pink. Permanent Rose is a great red. And I also have an orange here. You can make your own orange, though. Well, how would you make orange? Red and yellow. Now, here is a color I really like. Again, you don't have to have it for this video, but it's quinacridone gold. There's that big word again. It's basically like a really beautiful yellow gold. And another yellow I like is azo yellow. It's a little bit cooler than the Indian yellow, which lends itself towards orange. This is a product that I will use towards the end to add some snow. I'm using gouache rather than watercolor. You say that word like squash, gouache. And notice there's no white in watercolor. It's because it won't show up. But gouache is opaque. That means it will show up as white on top of the watercolor. I also am going to be making some outlines to my designs. And I love this Micron marker. This is the 0.45 millimeter size. And it's awesome because it doesn't smear when you add water to it. So you don't have to have this brand, but some type of water friendly marker would be helpful. You don't need this tool either. But I love my Posca markers. This is a white acrylic marker. It shakes up like a spray can, a spray paint can. It has a little ball in it. So you have to shake it up. But it, like the gouache, can be used to apply snow or white when you want to get the white back from your watercolor painting. And that's basically it. But if you want some little flair and maybe a bit tacky, you might want to add some glitter. I play with some glitter with some of these. Now if you're going to actually send these as postcards, man, I wouldn't want them to get messed up in the mail, right? So these are clear bags that I get from clearbags.com. They are awesome. And by the way, these are the bags that I use to store my pastel paintings in. I put them in with a piece of foam core cut to fit foam core board. And that's one of the most common questions I get is how do you store your pastel paintings? Well, just so you know, I never spray fix it at the end. You might also want to use some salt. I'm going to show you in this very first tutorial how fun it is. This is another product. It's called Masking Fluid. What it does is it preserves the white. You do not have to have this at all. But it's kind of a neat effect. All right. These are some of the simple designs. I told you they're traceables. And what's neat about these is they are already sized to fit the postcard size. Also too, I created the traceables in reverse. So when you use the transfer method I'm going to show you, they'll come out forward facing. And I created the designs by altering many of the photos that I got from some copyright free websites. One of them is unsplash.com that I've been using quite often. It had some great Christmas photos. Another is from pixabay.com. So many of the images are ones that I altered to create these cards. I did this one in Photoshop. Added a little candy cane under that little fella's feet. And just as with the traceables, my patrons will get all of these images as part of their post. But I'm going to be putting up these photos while I paint. So you can paint along during this tutorial. All right. Phew! That was a lot of information. But I wanted to make sure you guys have the right products. So this is successful. Now here's what I meant by the traceable. You see a little gray kind of border around that. And that's what we're going to use to line up either our Arteza postcard or what you pre-cut yourself. And I've got to mention they sent me this little Arteza pencil pouch. I love that. I promise this is the last Arteza product I'll talk about. But I really did like it. And purple is my favorite color. So what I'll be using is a charcoal pencil to do an outline. This is how we're going to transfer the image to your postcard. So if you purchase the traceable or your patron of mine and you have the traceable, you just print it out. Get yourself. I don't recommend pencil because it's not going to transfer well. You'll see what I mean. Get yourself a charcoal pencil or something that will transfer more easily. And just give it a decent outline. You don't have to press super hard if you're using charcoal. And I do have my pencil pretty sharp. I'll show you a little sharpening tool soon. A lot of people, a lot of pastel artists who use pastel pencils. There's always this challenge of how do you sharpen charcoal and pastel pencils without them breaking so easily. But I'll show you that sharpener in a minute. So now all we're going to do is take our our postcard or our watercolor paper we've already cut. And we're going to lay it down on top of this to transfer the image. Now I like to tape my watercolor paper to the traceable image so that it's not going to wiggle around when I go to transfer the image. So now I flipped it over. Now you need something sturdy like a credit card. This is actually a burnishing tool that came with another product of mine. My dog chewed it up but I still use it. It has one edge that's kind of somewhat straight. So again some sort of straight hard flat edge. And all you're going to do is just rub that image. And like I posted in the text, this is the simplest of all of the designs and trust me anyone can do this. Now we turn it back over, we take off our tape, and voila we have a transferred image. Now as you can see the transfer is very light and that's what you want. I actually lighten it up even more. I use a kneaded eraser to kind of make the charcoal a little more subtle because I don't want it to blend with the watercolor. But I have another technique that I'll show you later that works well too. Now by the way this is the only time I'm going to show this transfer method. It's the same one that's used for the rest of the the tutorials that I'll have on this lesson or this video. So just keep that in mind and trust me most of these especially this one are so simple you don't need a traceable. Okay but we're going to get to painting now. And here's where the micron marker comes in. I don't trace all of the designs with the marker. I would say most of them. I'm going to have, I don't even know how many paintings I'm going to have in this lesson yet, but I am going to be doing a lot of them just like this where I just give a little outline of the image especially whatever is the focal point. And in this painting the focal point is the are the ornaments. So just trace the ornaments if you like. But I made a little mark there. But trust me you don't have to trace these. You can just start painting with watercolor without the markers. It just makes it kind of fun. This lesson is supposed to be festive and fun and a little break. I needed a break. How about you guys you sometimes need an artistic break. So I just wanted something that was fun and relaxing. All right so we've got our main shapes in and that's it. We're going to add watercolor now. There are a couple of different ways to approach applications of color with watercolor. Well there's a few, but one is called a wet-on-wet technique and that's where you're going to end up with a more smooth application. That's where you wet your paper with water and then you apply your color. It makes the color just flow into that little area of water so nicely and smoothly. So that's the technique that I'm using with the ornaments. I am just applying water first. I'm using painting on the right ornament first. You see I already applied the water. Now this is all real time by the way. The rest of the lessons I'm not going to give as much instruction and I will speed them up. This video would be way too long with all these little watercolor paintings. And now I'm just applying that particular color. It's the one that I like, the Quinacridone Nicolaiso Gold, Quinacridone Gold basically. But you could use yellow. This could totally be that Indian yellow that's right next to it. So I'm first just getting kind of a nice even application and now I'm adding a little bit more paint. Now when I was first watercolor painting it would bother me that little just dabbing it on like that. I would be like oh my gosh I gotta fix it. I gotta fix it. I gotta blend it in. Well what I didn't realize is when it's wet like this it's gonna settle in. It's gonna blend itself in. You don't have to keep working with it. Now what I'm doing with this little extra layer of paint is I'm making kind of a shadow. The ornament that's in front is obviously shading the one that's behind. And so you see how I gave it a kind of a rounded strokes too. I used my strokes a little directional and you can very easily give an object a feeling of being three-dimensional by just a little value change. So the outside of it it's the lighter that I did with just the wash and the inside to the left behind the first ornament is a little bit darker. Alright now I'm mixing up some color for the second ornament. I'm sorry it's not in the screen there but this is basically just a red. I think this is the permanent rose. See it's kind of pink. And notice I didn't do a wash with this one. I wanted to show you how you can do two techniques. All I'm doing with this one is adding the red but notice the directional strokes and I'm going to leave that bottom section there a little lighter. So I'm just adding a wash here. So I'm adding a little bit of water here and then the paint will kind of blend those little edges there and so you already have a feeling of it being round because of that little highlight right there. And now I realized I wanted that same highlight on the yellow ornament. So all I did I got water on my brush and I'm lifting up the paint. So this is another watercolor technique. So you have a little ability to do this when the watercolor is still wet like this. So I'm just using water to kind of lighten this area and lift up some paint. And now we've got our initial layer of color down. We're going to add a little bit more value. Value just means the lightness or darkness. So I'm giving this some mass or some form like a three-dimensional object with creating more of a darker tone on the area that's not catching the highlight. I even just added some of the yellow onto the red ornament and I'm adding a little bit of the red into the yellow ornament. Why would I do this? Well color is always interacting with other objects especially nearby. So this yellow object would be catching some of the reflected light from the red ornament and it just makes color interest. And now while the paint or the water and watercolor is still a little bit wet I'm going to apply some salt. And you don't have to do this but I thought I'd share with this first lesson just a few different techniques that'll help you with the remaining lessons. Salt just gives a neat little textured effect. Now I wasn't even sure if this would work. I'm using my pink Himalayan salt. I don't use the regular iodized salt but typically and it did work but typically you would use just regular table salt. So I sprinkle a little salt on the watercolor that's still a little bit damp. You don't want it super damp and you certainly don't want it dry and then you wait. And now you should be able to see the neat little textured effect that the salt added to the ornaments. And once again you don't have to do this. I just thought it was fun. Now I'm just adding a little bit of the yellow or gold as in my case to the tops of these ornaments. The little part that holds the string and just dabbing in a little watercolor and it's as easy as that. And now we'll be doing another little neat effect. I wanted in this first lesson to kind of give a really basic watercolor instruction information for those of you who you may have experience with watercolor but you may want to do this tutorial with some friends and family. Like I said it's the holidays. I was trying to make something that might be neat for friends and family even kids you know to just have a fun painting experience. So now you can see I'm just adding water all around the ornaments. Now just so you know if you don't let the ornaments dry the red and the yellow and you touch the sides of the color it's going to bleed. And in this case I didn't really want this one to bleed. Sometimes in other words the color will run into the water. Water acts as a channel and it just pulls that color. And for the background I wanted some cooler colors since the ornaments were so warm with the red and the yellow. So I'm using I believe that's the cobalt blue and the one right underneath it is the ultramarine blue. So I'm mixing up some blue and some green. There's the ultramarine blue so I have it in its little well there. Once again I love these little porcelain palettes. They clean up so nicely. They don't stain at all. Now I'm going down to my sap green rather than pre-mixing a green. I just grabbed that green and I'm cooling it off a bit. I didn't want it that warm so I have a blue on the top that I mixed kind of a combo of the cobalt blue and the ultramarine and then I have a little bit of my green that I mixed with the ultramarine and the sap green. So with the blue I am just using my brush on the side. This is something early on that I did wrong in watercolor too. I would just paint with the tip of the brush and everything looked very tight. It didn't look painterly at all. Now I'm just grabbing more of just the cobalt blue. You see it's very blue blue without anything added to it. So often I like to mix colors and sometimes I like them to mix on the paper rather than mixing it in the well. It's really interesting that way. So because the paper is already wet these colors are going to dry lighter. I've got some flexibility. I can move the color around and once again use the side of your brush and just keep the strokes loose energetic and free. Also you don't have to fill in every bit of the paper. I'm not going all the way to the edges with this. I'm leaving some blank space in spots and that's what's going to make your painting look more free painterly and impressionistic. And that's the style I like to go for. So you see how easy that was and it really doesn't get much easier than this. So you can play around with this but don't overwork it. That's something that has a tendency to happen with watercolor. Especially when I was getting started with it. It's not like pastel painting acrylic or oil where you can just continue to add value on top of it. You will very soon muddy your colors or get them too dark too quickly. We want to preserve that beautiful luminosity of the white of the paper showing through. And really the only thing I do more to this is I enhance the color a bit more. Now these ornaments are dry so I'm just getting my paint liquid enough. That's another challenge I had when I started. I had my paint too thick. I forgot to let the water do the work. We want to embrace the water. So I'm just giving a little bit more of a shadow and it's okay that the salt is on there. I'm just kind of dabbing in where there would be a darker value. Once again that one ornament behind the other one. And then I do the same thing with a little bit of the red. Being careful not to overwork this and not to contaminate color and get the muddy looking. And wasn't that easy? I did decide to do one more thing to this. Like I said I like to use this first very simple one as a learning opportunity for you guys to learn a few different techniques. So what I decided to do was give it some of the watercolor splatters which are fun and carefree. Now if you do this technique when your paper is still wet the paint that splatters is going to bleed which is kind of soft and impressionistic. So if you want that look go ahead when your paint is or your water and your paint is still a little wet. Otherwise let it dry and then the splatters will be a little bit more like flex. So what I did is I grabbed some color. This is some red and you'll see how these are the paper is still a bit wet. So these are going to kind of get subdued. I always have a problem with getting them in the right direction. So sometimes I flick the paint off my brush and sometimes I tap my brush. But my favorite technique is just tapping it on my hand. I didn't like where some of these splatters fell. So once again the flexibility of watercolor is really awesome. I'm just softening the edges with my brush and ended up liking the end effect of that. I splattered a few of the other colors some of the gold. There's the technique where I do it on my finger. I seem to have more control that way. And once you let this dry if you like you can add a caption to it. Merry Christmas. Praise the Lord Jesus is born whatever you want to add to it. So this was easy peasy and you learned a whole lot of techniques. Now it's time to move on to the next painting. Now this little guy was so cute. I just had to paint him. This is that little sharpener I was telling you about. It's in my Etsy shop under other painting products or something like that. It's a German made pencil sharpener and it is so great about for not breaking the soft ends of the charcoal. I decided to add some little birds. Like I said I kind of altered these images. This one I believe was from Pixabay. Just a cute little snowman. I think he was kind of like a little snow doll somebody had made. But I thought he was adorable. So I'm doing the same thing like I mentioned. There's no sense in doing this all real time again. I'm just tracing over the image. Like I said if you get the traceable you can print it out. And I've designed it in reverse so that when you put your watercolor paper or the Arteza postcard on top of it and burnish it to get the image on it it'll come out right side. Same as the photograph that you'll be seeing that I'm using to paint from. So a lot of pre-planning work went into this tutorial that's for sure. All right here we go again. Burnishing and now we have our little light image. With this one I did use my kneaded eraser to kind of really lighten up that tree in the background. I want that to be so subtle and subdued. So I just blotted it off a little bit. But I realized I don't need to erase these marks for something I'm going to be tracing over. And the reason is because I can just use the eraser afterwards. This marker worked fine over the charcoal. So once again speeding this up you don't need to see this whole thing for every video. But that just gives you my method now. I don't have to erase the charcoal if I add marker outlines to it. And now it's time to paint. I am putting the little image up here that sometimes I'll have to move it if I'm grabbing some paint I want you to see. But basically what I'm starting with is a little bit of the ultramarine blue with the paint's gray. And I have not added water to the paper as a wash as I did with the first ornament in that example. But I've made my watercolor so diluted with water that it almost appears as a wash. Now I am doing a wash for this background. And notice in the reference image that's a lot of white, right? But I still noticed a little bit of gray tones. I want the just like in the photo the background sky to just blend right into the snow so there's no real horizon line there. So I'm going to be adding some color. Once again the trick with this one is very diluted. I put this back to real time so you could see what I'm doing here. I wanted to warm up that blue. I noticed in the reference image it was a little gray. So I added a little, I think it's a burnt sienna I added to my palette there, but you could do the same thing by adding a little bit of green and yellow to your blue. You're basically trying to just neutralize it. And you can get neutral colors by adding compliments together and compliments are what's opposite on the color wheel. So I just kind of grayed down and warmed up the blue a little bit so that it wasn't the exact same cool colors in the tree. Now you see I added a little bit more of the blues to the tree and I am just getting a little bit more of that wash established. And be sure not to add too much color too soon. Because this is still wet I'm dabbing in a little bit of that neutral gray tone there. And it's going to kind of represent some of the darker values in the tree. Places where the tree is deeper in between the leaves. And that will all kind of blend together because it's so wet already. Now I added a little bit of my prussian blue. It's that little teeny bit of blue I stuck down at the bottom of my green. It's a little blob of blue right below the green. And notice how I said it has a hint more green. It's a little bit more teal colored. And so I thought the blues the cooler blues like the ultramarine and the warmer blues like the prussian blue would make a great very cool wintery palette. In winter scenes like this you're not going to get a lot of warm tones reds and yellows. I mean unless the sun is really shining on something. So I'm using a little of my panes gray. A little bit of my burnt sienna to neutralize some of these colors. And I talk about neutral colors often when I do pastel paintings too. And what power they have. Often we think we have to add this bold color to everything in the painting. And if you do that then it's nothing is standing out. So now what I'm doing I notice the snowman. There would be a tendency to paint him white. But in the reference image he was a little warmer. And plus I wanted him to stand out from the snow. I mean if I just have him as white as the snow on the ground then he's not going to have much dimension. Plus he seemed to be a little bit in shadow. Almost like the sun was at his back. Well you can tell that based on the shadow underneath him. By the way creating shadows is another way to give objects three dimensionality. Dimensionality to them. And now I'm adding shadows with some neutral tones around his face. It was like his cheeks. He was smiling and his cheeks were kind of poking out. So they stayed in the light. But the areas like his eyes were almost indented. And of course his mouth is all cuddled up with that scarf. So that's going to get a little bit more of the shading. And now I'm just kind of blending it together a little bit so I don't have such stark edges. But see how I got a little bit of those brownish tones in the snowman. And now to add the only warmth that is in this painting. His little smile. I just added little rosy cheeks. Well also the nose. And I added a bit more orange to the nose. In the reference image I'm not sure what the actual nose was made of. But I wanted it to be more like a carrot. So I made it orange. Also I apologize for not being able to keep all of these real time. But it would make the tutorial way too long. And let me give you some advice though. If you're following along with these. The ones that are a little bit sped up. I recommend that you of course watch the first one. Because most of the learning is on the first one with the ornaments. But also to just pause it. Listen to my instructions. Pause the video. Do what I say. And come on back to it. Start it up again. Now I'm adding a little bit of blue to that shadowy area. Just to kind of cool it off. And leaving the highlights again around the cheeks. And around the little carrot nose. But not so stark. You see how I'm just kind of using some water to blend it. To kind of soften those edges. And now let's get to these little birdies. I used pretty much pure Prussian blue for them. They're just that beautiful little blue bird color. And I kept it wet enough. But not nearly as diluted as some of the washes I did at the beginning. Because I wanted them bright and bold. And if you've worked with watercolor you know that watercolor dries lighter. You can see that tree in the background. It's already lighter and more subdued than when I first applied the color. Now I'm combining a little bit of the Prussian blue. And some of the Cobalt blue. Just to get a nice blue. Again if all you have is blue. Just use blue. But this will give you something to aspire to. If you really get into this. And you want to buy some more colors. This will help you. So all I'm doing now. I created kind of a little bit of a wash. Or a more diluted color on a scarf. But then I'm going in with other blues that aren't quite as diluted. It's a little more paint to water in other words. And I'm adding where I see little shadowy areas. And usually shadows are where there are folds in things. Also those little weird clumps you see. If you were wondering what they were. They're little clumps of snow on his hat and his scarf. I thought the ones on the hat on the top of the hat were cute. They looked like hearts. So I just drew them as hearts. So now I'm adding just a little color to a scarf. Blowing in the wind. I love that. I accentuated that a little bit more. And so just working around. I'm trying not to hit some of the snow clumps on a scarf. But I didn't want it so cartoony. Or what do I say. You know how people just like paint by numbers. You fill in just the numbers. I like things to have lost edges. So things bleeding or blending is often a good thing. But you got to know when to do these things. But you learn the more you do. And now I'm adding a little bit of purple. I mixed some of my magenta color with some blue. I didn't want it so magenta. That quinacridone violet that I have is borders on pink. So I wanted it to be a little more blue-purple. So I added a little blue to my magenta. And purple is a great color for shadows. It's also just a great color for interest. You know. It's just such an interesting color. And also too. I find that purple is great for snow. Along with these cooler colors that I'm using. So now I'm just kind of working on his hat with the same principles and philosophy as before. Get kind of a little wash in. And then you go back and add your darker or more paint to water ratio colors. And he does have a little bit of a shadow underneath that brim of his hoodie. His little cap there. And that's going to give a three-dimensional feel too. I'm blending it in up top. And I think I go back and even make it a little darker. Again where there are crevices and folds and things. That's the best way to do it. And notice I have just let the watercolor and the water do the work. And that's what gives it that really beautiful fun watercolor feel. It's just something that's just intrinsic to this medium. That's why I love it. All right. Now I'm going to add some color to the ground. Now it's cute like this. But I thought it'd be better if I add a wash. And just add little bits of texture to the ground. You know there's going to be snow where there's little humps and valleys. And so I'm adding a little bit of blue in some areas. My grayed down blue. And once again using the side of my brush I grabbed some that I had. Also I'm going to warm it up a bit with a little bit of the the snow area. So you see I'm going back and forth with some of the colors. I'm keeping usually I keep darker colors at the borders of my painting. And I'll keep that snow behind him lighter. But I am going to do more with adding magenta and blue here to get a purple. And now I just add a little burnt sienna to that. And now I've got a warmer tone. You see that it's kind of a purple brown. A neutral purple you could call this. And I thought that would give I didn't want it so bright bold purple. Remember what I said about neutrals. If everything is a bold color nothing gets attention. So I didn't want to take anything away from the snowman. So that's why I neutralized that purple shadow. And you know I just I loved this little guy. This was a lot of fun. And another place I'm adding some of this neutralized purple is in the shadows underneath the scarf. Kind of around his face where the scarf is coming up around. And I'm just adding little bits here and there to give again more of that three-dimensional feel by giving it some depth. And now is when we're going to have a little bit more creative fun with this. I decided to add some glitter like you heard at the beginning. I said maybe it's tacky but I don't care. This is Christmas time. We're having fun. And if you decide to send these little cards to friends and family members. I mean add a little sparkle make them smile. So this is a product called Mod Podge. It's great for applying if you want to add glitter. It dries very clear. I do recommend you use an old paintbrush if you're going to do this. Along with if you ever use masking fluid the product I also showed at the beginning. Because it will clog up your brushes and you really don't want to waste expensive brushes using this product. Now here's some glitter I had. Oh my gosh when I was doing some art lessons for kids I had just like four different colors of glitter. I thought this blue would be pretty in the background for the snow falling. And notice I didn't put the the glue obviously on the snowman. It's just on the background. So I shake it off and I just have one more thing to do. This is really just for an example for you guys to see how some of the future paintings in this lesson will have snow. Now this is not going to show up as much on my snowman because he's the background is so light already. But what I do is I have my gouache. This is the Arteza gouache. You can use whatever brand. Again it's opaque. It's not see-through like watercolor. But it's a water medium. A water based medium. So I'm going to mix up. I know you can't see it. Well no you can. Mix up some of my gouache to do the same technique with tapping it on my finger. You have to add enough water to it for it to come off the brush. You can see some of it on the ground there underneath the little birds. But again this technique is going to show up more in some of the other paintings that I do. Hopefully these two lessons have provided you a lot of instructions so that you can use that information to paint the rest of these from your traceables if you choose to get the traceables. So these next ones are going to be really sped up just so you can watch and get an idea of the colors that I use. Now if you're a patron of mine let me know if any of these other ones that I haven't given a lot of commentary to. If you would like me to maybe pick one or two of them and provide a more detailed lesson on them. So just one of the perks from being a patron. All right I'm not going anywhere. Watch these to the lovely Christmas music. Enjoy Christmas. I mean really we should be praising and just celebrating that Jesus Christ was born and he died for our sins was resurrected on the third day and we have the most beautiful hope. I'm going to see my mama again who just passed away not long ago and that is something to celebrate. Oh I will add these little gingerbread people. I had so much fun painting these little guys. One of the tricks to making them not look so flat is the dimension that I give them in the shadows. Kind of on the edges of their you'll see kind of where the little shadow is under their feet in their hands. See I'm giving a little darker there and then also afterwards you'll see me add shadows underneath them. They're sitting like on a platter or something but I add like some little blue and purple shadows underneath them. That's going to make them feel like they're you know three dimensional. So have fun with these. If you haven't subscribed to this channel and you enjoyed this so far hit that subscribe button and hit the bell icon because that means whenever I post a new video you'll be notified and you'll get to see it right away. Also if you're a patron of mine thank you so much. You don't know how much you guys have helped me out. I don't share this often. My husband and I we lost our jobs due to COVID and if I hadn't had my Patreon account I don't know what we would have done. You know it's not like I have as many patrons as a lot of people but I certainly do appreciate that support. So God bless you and I have the greatest friends my virtual friends. Y'all are awesome. Also too if you would like to join the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook that's just a free group on Facebook. You can join. There's a lot of great people on there. Also find and follow me on Instagram. I am at Susan Jenkins Artist. So just follow me at Susan Jenkins Artist and I'm loving when a lot of you create artwork from my tutorials and you tag me on Instagram. I get to see what you do. I love that so keep that up. Alright guys here's some lovely Christmas music. I will be back at the end. So let me know what you thought about these though. Leave a comment and definitely if you're a patron of mine I can't wait to see what you do when you share it in our homework album. Alright guys enjoy. Happy Christmas. God bless you all and I hope you're learning a lot. Oh that was fun. I hope you guys enjoyed that. A little bit of a departure from my more serious pastel pieces but hey we got to let our hair down and have some fun especially at Christmas time. So if you've watched this far please like this video. It really does help. It helps when you comment as well of course subscribe and as always happy painting and blessed Christmas.