How to Make a Watercolor Christmas Card - Easy Snowy Pine Forest

Cut a panel of 140 lb cold press watercolor paper and tape it to your table or a board on all four sides. Low tack masking tape or washi tape works well. With a light pencil, draw one low, gentle hill across the lower third of the panel. Keep the line faint. It only marks where the sky stops and the snow begins, and you will paint right up to it.

Load a big brush with clean water and wet the whole sky above the pencil line. A soft mop brush covers the open space fast. Switch to a flat wash brush along the hill so you can follow the line with a neat edge. Leave the snow below the line dry. That dry paper is what keeps the hill a crisp, clean white later on.

Mix Payne's gray with a touch of burnt sienna and blue so it is not too cold. Touch the brush to the damp sky and swish a little colour in here and there. This is wet-on-wet painting. The paint spreads by itself into soft, cloudy patches. Leave plenty of white sky between them so the card still feels light and snowy.

Mix sap green with Payne's gray and burnt sienna to get a dull, gray green. Distant trees look faded through winter haze, so keep them pale. Once the sky has lost its shine but is still damp, use a size 2 round brush. Draw a thin trunk line from the hill up, then scribble short branches out from it. The edges will feather softly, and that blur is the look you want.

Paint two or three more pale pines behind and beside the first one. Start each with a vertical line and keep the brush light and quick. Vary the heights so they read as a forest, not a row. Do not paint below the hill line. The dry paper there stops the colour and leaves a crisp edge where the trees meet the snow. Then let the whole panel dry completely.

Now switch to wet-on-dry. Add more Payne's gray to your green so it is deep and dark. Paint a pine partly tucked behind the hill. Hold the brush low to the paper and work down the trunk line, scribbling branches out to each side. Let small gaps of white show through. Those gaps read as snow on the boughs. Stop at the hill so the tree sinks into the snow.

Draw a longer trunk line for the main tree, so you see the whole of it. Build the branches from the top down with the same scribble. Keep the top narrow and only widen near the bottom. If you spread out too fast, the tree looks like a tent. Go in with a bit of confidence. Messy, loose branches look more like a real pine than careful ones.

Rinse your brush and blot it. Touch it to the wet paint at the bottom of the tree and pull it sideways into the hill. That soft gray becomes a shadow on the snow. Add a few extra streaks of the pale sky mix across the slope. Snow is white, but it shows shade, and these light touches give the hill its shape.

With a fine round brush and almost pure Payne's gray, add a few dark marks low on the front pine. This extra depth pulls the tree forward. Let the painting dry fully. Then peel off the tape, trim the panel to size and glue it onto a folded card base with a tape runner. Write your message inside and it is ready to send.