O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

Christmastide can be expressed through arts and crafts in so many ways, it’s hard to choose a project. So, we chose many!

The first resulted in some gentle, atmospheric, snowy landscapes, allowing the viewer to glance into a magical world of Christmas Spruces, against a starry sky. These were made using mixed media; watercolour block paint, poster paint and watercolour paper.

Experienced lead artist Veena, first showed a short clip demonstrating the technique of painting “wet-on-wet”, using soft sable-imitation brushes. Her group of artists learnt to use white space, building a composition using a carefully designed palette of colours of Prussian blue, fir green, violet and charcoal grey.

First up, the group mounted their watercolour paper to the desk, using masking tape, ensuring to leave an even frame surrounding the space to paint. Next, the paper was painted with clean water, working at a moderate pace, to prevent the water from drying, on the other hand not too hastily or the paper will start to break up, the watercolours were applied to create the sky.

The artists used their imaginations to decide whether it was day, night, sunset or twilight. See if you can guess when these are set?

After the background had dried fully, it was time to add the foreground. This was made up of a forest of fir trees. Using different sizes, the viewer can decipher the distance the trees are from one another. The smaller they are, the further back they appear, but the larger they are, the closer they seem. The artists also used colour to depict time, the darker the silhouette, the lower the sun must be in the sky – but it there’s still colour there, it must be before sunset.

Lastly, fresh snowflakes were added to the paintings. This visual effect was created by flicking the paintings with white specks of poster paint, sometimes scratching patterns into the paint whilst it was still wet using the end of the paintbrush as you can see here.