How to paint holly

What's Christmas without a little holly? This week, we have created a step by step tutorial to help you have a go at painting your own corner arrangement, perfect for our square mountboards.  

For this project, you will need: 

General Supplies 

Paper Towel,

Wet Palette and water pot

White/Black Transfer paper

Tracing Paper

Black practice paper

A4 Black Mount practice board (or similar)

Pen/pencil

Dotting tool (optional) 

Pattern

Brushes 

No 8 flat or angle luxe label brush for floating colour (you may find the angle brush easier to use) 

Liner brush 

DecoArt Americana Paints and Mediums…. 

I worked with this months colour palette with the exception of Lamp Black. 

Tomato Red (but any bright red will work)

Titanium (Snow) White (again any white will work)

Avocado 

Honey Brown 

Light Buttermilk 

Emperors Gold 

Skills 

Floating Colour

Liner Brush skills (optional)

Dry brushing

First, you will need to transfer your design onto your practice board.  Once you have done that, follow these steps... 

Some DecoArt colours are more transparent than others so, if you are painting on to a dark surface, basecoat your design with white first to create a solid block of colour.  

Depending on the colour of your background and the final look you prefer, you may wish to float a darker colour around the leaves.  Play around with these ideas and discover for yourself which ones you prefer.   If you aren't confident in how to dry brush, check out Carol's video here. To dry brush the Gold, we used a small old round brush so I did not ruin one of my 'good' brushes. 

Now for the berries....

Basecoat your berries using a series of C strokes with the Flat or Angle brush.  Again, you will probably find that you need to give them two coats of red before adding the comma strokes.  If you do not feel confident to use the liner brush, create a comma stroke using the small end of the dotting tool.  

Using different techniques creates a range of different looks.  Floating colour around each berry can be tricky but creates a lovely soft shade to the berries.  You can get a similar look by dry brushing with an old round brush (which also gives you a little more control).  

We hope you have as much fun playing with these designs as we have designing this festive bunch of holly. 

Happy Folking xx