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Green "branchy" background added to purple ornament card.
Painting Christmas Cards

Painting Christmas Cards

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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.

Artist's workbench with watercolor set up for creating cards, including palettes, brushes, water and paint rimmed jar.

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.

Glass jar rim being painted with red watercolor paint.

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

Using clean wet watercolor brush to "grab" red color from edge of printed circle.

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.

Using gold gel pen to add ornament top to purple round 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.

Four pieces of watercolor paper with painted ornaments in a variety of colors.

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.

Golden ornaments decorated with pine greenery and splatters.

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.

Green background added to red ornament card.

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.

Green "branchy" background added to blue ornament card.

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

Green "branchy" background added to purple ornament card.

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.

Using the Screen Printed Rusted Paper

Using the Screen Printed Rusted Paper

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I showed you last week how we made screen printed rusted designs. I haven’t used any of the fabric yet but I did make some greeting cards from the paper. I like to have greeting cards on hand so if I need one, I can personalize it and have it ready in minutes.

All the Rusted Cards

I use standard blank off white greeting cards as the base. The rusted backgrounds are 4″ x 6″ so they fit nicely on the 5″ x 7″ cards. I then had some left over pieces that I had done some leaf printing on several years ago. The prints didn’t turn out all that well on some of them so these were the left over bits. And they seemed to  match nicely with the rust.

Rusted Card 1

Here’s an example of one that I added two pieces of leaf print paper. I use matte medium to glue everything down.

Rusted Card 1 with Details

And then I took a glitter gel pen and outlined some areas. I usually leave the card like this, and then when I need a card, I can add words to it if I want.

Birthday Card

This is an example of a card I made for hubby’s birthday. It is all leaf printed paper without any rust as I made it back in August.

And here is a little closer look at the rest of the cards I made. I really like having the square hole edges of the journal paper included. So that is how I used some of my rusty paper. The rest went back into my journal and I am sure other techniques will be added on top at some point.