Day 22 - "T"

"T" is for Christmas Tree, often the centrepiece of our holiday decorating and a point of gathering early on Christmas morning. I've included a little colouring tutorial below to show you how I colour pine trees to get a great three dimensional look.

YOUR TURN: Create a card using the letter "T" as your prompt.

Click the link below to add a photo of your creation to the challenge:

CLICK HERE

INSPIRATION WORDS:

Three Wise Men, twinkle, turkey, tidings, tinsel, toys, tree, trimmings, teal, turquoise, tutorial, techniques, tent card, tilt card, tri-fold card, two-fer cards

Stamps:

Colouring a great looking Christmas tree comes down to getting an obvious contrast between the light and dark areas. The dark colours will recede, creating the illusion of depth, as if the branches are disappearing back into the tree toward the trunk. The light areas will pop forward, making the tips of the branches appear much closer to the viewer and tricking the eye into believing it's seeing dimension. Sound confusing? Let me show you how simple it is in practise...

Start with the dark areas. I'm using green copic markers - G29, YG67, YG17 and YG25. There's a good range of tones across these four markers, from the deep pine green of G29 to the warm yellow green of YG25.

Have a look at the image. You'll notice there are little branches within the tree represented by jagged, pointy lines. The tips of the points will be the lightest part of the branch since they are the ones that are extending out of the tree. On the other side of those same lines will be the darker areas, and that's where you want to start with your darkest marker.

Now colour over the dark marker with the YG67, bringing the lighter colour a little bit further. This will help to blend the colours while also creating the transition between light and dark. Remember to keep those pointy tips blank for now.

Repeat the process again, this time using the YG17. You'll only have a little big of blank space left at the end of the branches, which is more than enough to create that illusion of depth.

Complete the branches with the YG25, remembering to colour a little over the previous colours to help with blending.

Since you really don't need ultra smooth blending, it's fine to colour the entire tree at one time, which is how I usually do it. Add all your dark green first, then come back and add the other colours one at a time.

Don't worry too much about the colours not blending together smoothly, the effect is better when you have a stark difference between dark and light. Take a close look at my colouring... you can see the definite change between each of the four colours, rather than a smooth blend.

Time to colour the ribbon. I'm decorating this tree with cool blues and violets, so my shadow colour is BV04. I've applied it using little flicking strokes, which have a jagged sort of edge and help to give a much smoother blend to the finished image. 

The next marker is BV13. Again, start by colouring over the darker ink and flicking a little further out. You want to leave just a little bit of white space where the ribbon would naturally curve outward, that would be the position of the highlight.

Blend the ribbon with the BV02, filling in the remaining white space.

Colour the baubles using three tones of blue - I chose B16, B14 and B12. As you can see from the photo below, I added the darkest colour around the entire bauble, adding a little more under any overhanging branches, on the right hand side and underneath each bauble.

Blend the B14 into the B16, bringing it a little further in until you're left with just a small white space in the upper left quarter of the bauble. There's no need to be overly particular about the size or location of the highlight, but do try to keep it in the same basic area.

Finish each bauble by blending with the B12. That means adding the colour to the white area and also over-colouring some of the B14 and B16. (If you wish, you can add a little white dot with a gel pen to each of the baubles for a very high shine).

Since I wanted a silver star on this tree, I added a cool grey "glow" around the outside of the star by blending from a C3, which was right up against the outer edges of the star, through to C2, C1 and C0. With each application of grey, I gently altered the shape of the "glow" so that it went from a star to a circle by the time I was adding the final colour.

The last step was to fill in the star with a silver metallic gel pen. 

Done!