Spend Christmas With Me! — Let’s Paint Whimsical Watercolor Christmas Critters Together!

Hi everyone and welcome to the first of our Christmas Critters 2025 series of Christmas cards where we'll be painting animal themed Christmas cards and gift tags together. Over the next few weeks we're going to be painting lots of little festive critters, perfect for turning into Christmas cards and gift tags for your friends and family. Each video will bring you a different creature with its own bit of Christmas charm and today we're starting with a rather curious Christmas cat. So get your paints ready, make yourself comfortable and let's enjoy a few quiet moments of watercolour and Christmas magic together. Okay so before we get started I'll just quickly run through what I'm using in the way of materials, it's the boring bit I know but you'll come back to this later no doubt. I've got here a set of Paul Reubens paints but it's been adapted, I've added to it and I now have in here just about every colour that you could possibly wish for, I think this is going to be my Christmas go-to from point of view of paints, just make a change from the Kuretake ones. So we've got Paul Reubens and Yulan in here and every colour you could possibly wish for and you can definitely get this one on Amazon at the moment, I'll put a link in the description below. I'm going to call into play possibly my new Karatac Horel watercolour pencils from Stetla which I bought here in Cairo and they'll be used for adding odds and ends to the paintings as we go on properly making them into mixed media. So we'll pop that over here and then I'm going to use this paper, now I could, in fact I might, what I'll say is this is a good size for making a card, if you divide it in half, this side here works perfectly well for your painting and so on and so forth but I think so that I can actually work a little bit bigger, just take my word for it, you can scale it down a little bit to this size, I'm going to work in the middle of this 10 by 7 here because partly also if you do that, if you work on a full sheet and give yourself a bit more breathing room around the outside, you can always cut your design out once you're done and then glue that to either a pre-existing greetings card that you might buy from, I think it's Strathmore isn't it, that do them and there are other people that do them too, inexpensive cards, use double-sided sticky tape to fix your design to the front of those and you'll get a much more sturdy card altogether than just using plain old watercolour paper. But if you use 140 pound watercolour paper, it does do the job reasonably well, although it's better if you do stick it onto a pre-existing card, also those cards come with matching envelopes so that's a good thing too isn't it. So today we're going to start with a Christmas cat, I know how much you all love cats and I do too, so my cat is going to be sitting in the middle of this page here, I'm going to give him something to stand on or sit on, so we'll just put a little line there, just using an ordinary HP pencil here, doesn't have to be anything special, and over the last couple of years, few years, I started off when I first had the channel trying to draw cats that looked really, really accurately like cats and I've gradually moved away further and further and further from that idea over the years because, I don't know, I just think life's too short to paint an accurate cat, so we're going to have fun with our cats and all the other animals as well that we're going to be doing in this series of paintings. I don't know whether the ground is going to be in the right place but I've done his ears like that, I think we'll probably have sketches of these available, they might all be put into a compilation or something like that at some point in the future, but this year you'll probably find, I'm pretty sure that we'll be able to do it, I hope so, if the scanner works, so I'm just putting in a nice snaky tail like that, okay, I'm just going to alter that a little bit and the reason why I'm doing that, you'll see later, make his tail come out a little bit further, like that, okay, now to make a cat look cute you need to make sure all his features are quite close together in the middle of his, I think it looks better that way, of course there's more than one way of painting a cat, paraphrasing my father, so anyone who's born in London will know what I'm referring to but I'm not saying that one here, so we just do a little heart-shaped nose and then a smiley face and I usually put three little dots there for whiskers which we'll put on at the end and then his eyes are going to be quite close in, we'll just put little pupils, there's so many different ways that you can do the eyes of a cat, you can do big circles or you can do, you know, eye-shaped eyes or you can do small circles, it's up to you, I often do something like that and then I give them eyebrows and the eyebrows kind of very much give them character, depending on how you slope the eyebrows you get different features, he looks kind of quizzical, we could rub those ones out and give him optimistic ones, he's hoping for Christmas presents, so maybe we're doing like that, I'm not sure if it's a girl or a boy, now I'm going to give him a slightly open mouth like that and then in his mouth he's going to have a twig of holly, okay, and we'll just draw the holly leaves over here and we'll put some berries as well, it doesn't need too many though, put one more down here, this is how you know he's a Christmas cat because he's got holly and berries, and then he's also a Christmas cat because he has got a nice Christmas bauble hanging from his tail, okay, then I think I'm going to make him a little bit shorter, I did say I thought maybe I started a bit too high, so let's go up a little bit, make him a little bit shorter like that, and we'll put his putties in like this, big ones, we'll give him big feet, and we'll put his toes in like that, and you can if you want, you don't have to give him legs, but you can if you want, if you want to make him you know a little bit more real, so then we have our cat, and if you want you can give him, if we make him a ginger cat, you might want to give him stripes on the side or something like that, oh and mustn't forget to put the insides of his ears in like that, okay, so there we are, that's the drawing, and as I said you'll be able to get the sketch from our website annanton.com, so let's paint him now shall we, there's different ways you could do this, you could actually colour him in using watercolour pencils if you wanted to, and then just wet the pencil and that would turn into watercolour, that would be quite fun, we might do that on a future video, but I don't think I'll do it today. Now Tamzin had a request and she said I think he should be a ginger cat, and we'll call him Arthur after our studio cat, who we are missing because we are away for a few weeks, and it's always hard, isn't it, when you're away from your animals, yes, so we'll paint him in orange, and let's start with his tail, once I've painted him I'll probably go round him in pen to make him a little bit more solid perhaps, we'll see how he looks, it's a lovely orange colour there, there's nothing wrong with these Chinese paints, it has to be said, nothing wrong at all, so I'll just paint round the outsides of his ears, I'm going to leave his nose a little bit white, a little bit whiter, and try to kind of just miss his eyes and his nose, we can always come in later and work on that, so there we are, it's a nice, quiet, peaceful way to spend a few minutes, getting away from all the hustle and bustle, as my husband would say, of life, he sometimes says bustle and hustle, so we'll just paint all of this the same colour, and we might put some details on, like I said, using the watercolour pencils perhaps, and maybe I'll pick up some brown, now I have got my swatch sheet, which you really, really need, otherwise you don't know what you're doing, I think this one should be, hope I haven't moved anything, yeah that's burnt sienna, so let's just give him some nice colours in his sides here, and let it run, so it's got a few stripes, I don't want him to be too, what's the word, exact, his little feet, and that can bulk into his legs a little bit, and then we'll give him some pink, it might be a girl actually, I'm saying him, oh I thought that was going to be pink, it turns out it's not, never mind, where's my pink, and I'm going to soften this up, just by coming in here and wetting it a little bit, let's make the auburn red, oh yes, and I've just remembered something, while I let that dry, I need my pencil quickly, we are going to put a little robin on here, and that's what made me think of it was the red, so I just take a little bit away from there, this is an English robin by the way, and he wants to be a little bit brown on his back, okay, so then we might want to put a little bit of ground underneath him, and I was wondering what colour to do that, I suppose if he's a Christmas robin, he'd probably, sorry, a Christmas cat, he'd probably be sitting on sort of snowy ground, let's say, so we'll just make it a little bit bluish, so it looks like blue shadows on snow, and then we have to pick up a smaller brush, I'm using, this one is only a three, so it's really tiny, this is the one that I used for most of it, isn't it, and that is a four, is it, I think that's a four or a five, and I didn't use this one, but I had it here already, it's about an eight, sometimes the numbers wear off, let's see what colour, we want to mix a bit of yellow with that to make that into more of a holly colour, I think that will probably work well enough, I'm going to actually just dry that quickly because I don't want to smudge everything. Okay, let's paint our holly with a fairly fine brush, I hope that you get some Christmas inspiration from some of these paintings that we're going to be doing over the next three weeks, you don't have to copy them exactly, but it's just kind of an idea, really, to get you started, and I thought an animal theme would be nice, a little bit more dark in the middle of Robin have a little bit more red on his chest, and I think I probably am going to use a pen to do the berries, because it's just so fiddly to do it with a brush, so this is a brush pen, I think these were, who were they from, Palatigaia, unfortunately you can't get them anymore, I don't think, I haven't been able to see them for a while, and then we could use our pencils while it's drying, I'm going to use the black pen too, in a minute, but I'm going to look for a brown, and we'll just emphasize his feet a little bit, although I have a kind of tendency to want my animals to look a little bit cartoony, a little bit cartoony, I just quite like them to have some sort of texture to them as well, and everybody does their own thing, don't they, so we'll put some brown stripes on his tail as well using the pencil, a little bit of shadow in his ears like this, perhaps he's got some furry bits coming up here, and I'll give him a pinkish nose perhaps, and tongue, and just an ordinary pen in some eyes, and we need to put in the twig for the branch that he's holding on the string for the bauble, and oh, let me grab a gold pen, and we'll put some gold on here, all right, and the bird's eye, and I'm trying to sort of go around everything with this pencil, uh, with this brush, yeah, that's the trouble, you see, you're trying to concentrate and say the wrong word, I do this a lot, I do that a lot, I do, so I'm going around it with this pen, it's very simple, very similar to a pencil, pencil, pen, brush, all very similar, do like his nice flat feet, and we need to put some whiskers in, and let's put some circles around his eyes, and we'll go around his tail, okay, now I'm just going to wet some of this pencil that we put in, it's very good, these these watercolor pencils, because they do give up their colour really well, if you buy really cheap ones, they don't necessarily work all that well, you can get some nice subtle colour variations if you use these ones, so there we are, there's our little cat, um, might just darken the back of the bird a little bit, he's perfectly happy sitting up there on the top of our pussycat Arthur, so there we are, how about that, I think that makes a charming card especially for a child, and you can do a smaller version of that one as a gift tag too, I tell you what, I'll just sketch it for you and we'll let you have that one as part of the package when you download your sketch, I'll sketch the little tag as well as the card, okay, so I hope you have fun, like I said, so take care, look after yourselves, and do a lot of painting, bye for now everybody, bye-bye.