Happy Winter Solstice! It’s the shortest day of the year so we’re on to longer days now. Yay! The shorter days make it a bit dreary sometimes but I decided to create some Christmas cards to cheer myself up. I saw this method on numerous posts and videos online so I can’t credit one person for the idea. This method makes it fairly simple to create ornaments or baubles for a card with watercolors.

Here’s my set up in the studio. I had several palettes of paint and it works best with two brushes I found. I didn’t use the very thin detail brush until the end. Also, two sources of water, one kept clean, work well too. I found a couple of glass jars in different sizes that would work on my 5″ x 7″ cards.

Get some “juicy” watercolor on to the edge of the glass jar and print it on to your paper or card.

Then quickly add clean water around the edge to get the paint moving. You can also use your other “juicy” brush to add in more color while the paper is still wet. Remember to leave some white spots for the “shine” on the ornament.

I painted sixteen of these in four different colors. This photo shows using a gold gel pen to add the ornament top and string.

Here’s what the cards looked like after that. I wanted to add something in the background or something more festive. I started with the “gold” ones.

I added greenery and some splatters. But I wasn’t particularly happy with the look.  It’s okay but I decided to try something different on the other colors.

I started with the red ornaments, added water to the background and dropped in some green paint. Okay, but still not exactly what I wanted.

I changed my green color and then worked on trying to make the background look more like pine branches. This was looking better.

So I finished out the purple ornaments in the same way. Then I glued them down to a regular 5″ x 7″ greeting card with Yes Paste. I have found that is the easiest glue method with cards/paper. So now, my Christmas cards are off in the mail. It was a fun activity and really pretty simple. If you want to try it, there are quite a few YouTube videos showing the process.