Easy Glowing Christmas Candle in Watercolor for Fun Holiday Card

A cheerful red candle will make a lovely card for your friends and family, and you can paint this. Just follow along with this video, and you can also download the outline page etc free at watsonwatercolor.com, so have fun. The candle is the center of interest, so give the candle a coat of red paint. I wet the candle first, but you could just start painting, it doesn't matter. Just test the reds you have on scrap paper and pick the best one. Paint around the green branches. Try to make the candle a little darker near the bottom, and just under the top line, and then lighter at the middle. The candle is going to get several coats of paint, because you wanted a beautiful saturated red, so don't sweat the first wash. You can use the same red paint to paint the berries. I'm trying to leave a little white highlight on each one, but you could add that with white at the end. For the flame, I'm not sure what's best, so I'm just going to play with it until I have something I like. Dry the first coat well, and then give the candle a second coat. This time I'm using thicker paint at the bottom to make it darker, but it still takes some fussing to get a smooth blend from dark at the bottom to light at the top. Getting a smooth change of value is a challenge, but the small format of a card makes it doable, and it's great practice. Dry the candle again, and then give the pine cone a first coat of paint. I'm using brown with a little gold. Pine cones are fun and easy, and I have another video for that if you like them. Dry the pine cone, and next we're going to paint the greenery with any medium green color. You can add darker green lines for the center of a couple of the branches, or make the green in the back a little darker. It's just nice if they aren't all the same exact green, but anything green you have next to the red candle is going to be a great addition, because red and green are complementary colors, and you can brighten up your greenery with a few white highlights at the end. Once I dry that, I make the pine cone darker at the bottom too, and leaving a few lighter areas. I'm still not sure what to do with the candle light, so I tried just leaving a white circle around the flame with some yellow or gold radiating out, but I decided to just leave it for now, and to put in the dark foreground and see how it looks. I'm using dark brown for my foreground, which is ultramarine blue plus burnt sienna. The in-person students did different colored foregrounds. Some of the other colors that looked good in the foreground were purple and dark reddish brown. I tried dark blue, but it was just too many colors, so I don't recommend it. Be careful when you paint the foreground, and go carefully around the greenery and the berries. Finally, we're ready for a gold background. Gold is a great color for Christmas cards. If you don't have a good gold, you can mix yellow with brown for a similar shade. Try to keep your gold lightest near the candle, and darker near the upper edges. Now that can be tricky, especially when you're trying to go around all the centerpiece. Mine is looking about all the same, so I make the center lighter by dabbing up some of the paint with a paper towel. Now everything has a coat of color, so it's time to tweak your colors and values. What looks good and what needs work. My candle is a little wimpy, so it gets another coat of paint. I want the bottom darker, so this time I'm adding a little of my dark brown to the red. Cards and small paintings are just easier to play with than a big painting, so they're great learning opportunities. You can try a lot of things. I also put a line of darker red under the top edge. The pine cone gets a few darker slashes of color, and that looks better. The pencil line around my candle glow, I personally don't like pencil lines, so I'm going to use opaque white to cover it up and add some highlights. I'm using bleed proof white, which isn't expensive, but it makes painting easier because it covers in one coat. And bleed proof white would be a great gift idea for painters. A line of white around the top edge of the candle gives it a nice glow, and a few white highlights on the rest of the objects can also brighten the picture. The left side of my candle isn't great. The red smeared and the gold is missing, so I just throw in a suggestion of another pine cone back there. That draws attention away from the area I don't like. And with that, I'm going to call it quits. I can always paint another card and try different things. That's the great part about cards. On the finished cards, you can see the nice deckled edge around the card. I cut them out with a special scissors called a deckled edge scissors. It's easy to do, and it gives you a nice look. I also use my brush to scrape a little leftover color around the edge of the card. It's almost like a matte to give it some color. This sets it off from the card. And that's about it for this holiday card. Paint them with your friends. Paint them with your family. If you have a retirement home, get a group together. You can all have a great time painting. Happy Holidays and Happy Painting!