Hey friends, it’s Sarah from @essjay_florals and I’m so excited to share this quick and easy watercolour Christmas Card with you all! The fun thing about this design is you can easily use other tools and colours to create it.

Here are the materials you’ll need to recreate it:

• A piece of watercolour paper (I have used a student grade piece of paper approx. A5 folded down to A6, if you have an envelope you want the card to fit into just work backwards from there and double the envelope size, allowing a little bit of space for the card to fit in)
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Watercolours (I am using the primary palette from The Watercolour Factory)
• Round brush (size 4)
• Blue Willow Acrylograph pen in size 0.7mm from the Cool Fall Collection (but feel free to use other colours)
• Black fine liner (I’m using Sakura Microns in size 02)

Remember you can use my affiliate code SARAH10 to get a discount on your Acrylographs or any other Archer and Olive products! For a quick overview of all the steps to create this card, check out this video:

Here are the steps!

1 | Measure up and pencil greeting

First find the middle of your page, draw a line to write your greeting in pencil, I have chosen to go with “Merry Christmas”. Draw a line above and below the greeting, giving a little white space around the text, put washi tape along these lines.

2 | Watercolour leaves and berries

Using a blue green and pink watercolours begin painting little branches with a few leaves in the top and bottom section of your card. Add interest by making these face all different angles and varying number of leaves. Then using red, paint a few little berries scattered, make sure at this stage you leave some space. Lastly, if you like, splatter a bit of the red paint about (do this by tapping your paintbrush against another paintbrush or a pen, if it doesn’t splatter much add extra paint/water)

3 | Inky leaves

After your watercolour has dried (you can speed this up by gently using a blow dryer) start outlining some of the leaves and berries with a Micron 02 fine liner. Again, I choose to do it quite randomly, you can do all or none, whatever you’d like. In any of the empty spaces, draw in branches and leaves with the fine liner, keep doing this until you have filled the space.

4 | Pen in greetings

Remove the washi and then using your Micron 02 write in your greeting. I am not very good at calligraphy so I thicken up the down strokes to give a faux calligraphy look.

5 | Make it pop

Using a ruler, draw lines to outline the text area with your Acrylograph pen.

Some tips:

• If the paint isn’t flowing smoothly out of the pen, put the lid back on and give it a shake and pump it on some scrap paper until the paint is flowing more freely.
• The fun thing about this design is you can use whatever colours you want and still end up with an amazing design (you don’t even need to stick to watercolour, use, acrylic, gouache, pencils, markers, whatever you like). So have a play with different colours and mediums and see what works for you.
• Most importantly, have fun with it!

If you need help with getting the leaf strokes, download the free printable to work on your strokes.

I’d love to see your recreations or take on this tutorial, and don’t forget to tag myself at @essjay_florals & @archerandolive if you’d like to share.