Demonstration - Christmas Tree Greeting Card in Acrylic

Demonstration – Christmas Tree Greeting Card in Acrylic

These past couple of months I’ve been doing quite a lot of painting so I thought it would be fun to document the process for a small item like this wonderful Christmas tree greeting card. Although this couldn’t be considered a full tutorial, it does show enough of the process that hopefully it can help those brand new with some tips and tricks that I use.

I have been painting with acrylics ever since I can remember; my mother taught ceramics and had a full classroom with any number of colors, brushes and other tools at my disposal. Despite this early beginning, however, I didn’t pick up a paint brush seriously until recently, when my passion for art was revealed in full. Ever since, it has been nearly non-stop painting, and I’m having the time of my life!

Hopefully this demonstration gives you a glimpse of some of the process of going from paint and tools to finished product. If you should have any questions feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to help however I can!

Happy painting!
Roxanne

1) First, I started with a pattern from an old derivitive-friendly crafting book that I had and created a variation in Photoshop. To make sure I was happy with the colors I had in mind, and to decide on a background, I printed a copy of the Photoshop file and painted various colors I was planning to use. I also tried out some thoughts for the background. I finally decided on some simple spattering so the background wouldn’t overpower the colors in the tree and presents.

This line drawing was then sketched onto the canvas paper with pencil. I always spray the canvas with a matte finish after I sketch so the graphite doesn’t smudge once I start painting.

NOTE: All images are clickable for a closeup view.

2) Next I used frisket, also called art masking fluid, to cover the inside of the graphic. This allowed me to spatter the background without getting the paint on my main images.

One important trick to spattering is to be sure to try it out on a piece of paper before spattering your art piece. This allows you to get a feel for how the spatters will look on your piece before you actually do the spattering.

3) Once the frisket is dry it can be peeled off using an eraser to get a corner started. You can see from the photo that the painting area is now completely clean and ready for my paint!
4) Now that I’m ready to start painting I’ll gather my colors together. Here I have quite a large area of green to cover but as you can see the color is quite a bit lighter than in the finished photo. The reason is, some pigment colors are more difficult to cover than others. Red, and green in particular, take many, many, many coats and quite a bit of patience. To get a better undercoat I mix these pigments with white paint first. This saves me at least 2 coats in the end. Also keep in mind that the green doesn’t have to be perfect here because we’re going to add some texture elements that will cover up any imperfections.
5) Now that I’ve gotten the green covered pretty well I decide to move on to the gifts under the tree. This way, if I smudge any of the tree while I’m working I can always cover it with the texture paint I’ll add later. The presents will take quite a bit of time as well, with some dark pigments that require several coats, and the detail. I added shading and other details after the main colors were put in to provide some depth. At the very end of the process I also added some cast shadow under the presents so they didn’t look like they were just floating there.
6) Now that the presents are completed I’m ready to add some details to the tree. You may notice that the presents have changed a bit from the original drawing. Sometimes if something just isn’t working right you just have to change it, even if you had planned for it to be different originally. Here, one of the presents just wasn’t working the way I had added it, so I just filled it in with gold paint and left it an impression of a present in the background.
7) Now to work on the tree; first I added some texture to give it more of a rounded feel. Using a sponge I simple added two lighter paint colors in such a way as to suggest tree branches and a bit of a round feel. I then added some dark shadows under the texture and used a liner brush to add some light strings. The lights were added to the strings next, but I decided at that point that adding the ornaments (from the original pattern) would be too busy, so I left them off. I finished the tree off by adding white “star” patterns in areas where the ornaments would have gone.
Finally I have a finished product! At this point I let it sit over night and the next day I proceeded to do some touch ups, adding more details (the stars were added the next day). As a last touch I added some glitter paints to the presents to give them some sparkle!