Using the art skills learned throughout our course, The Practice of Botanical Drawing, create a finished composition suitable for printing on holiday or harvest greeting cards to send to your friends and family. To create a finished seasonal drawing, focus on complex compositions and seasonal color combinations.

If you want guidance through every step in the process of making personalized greeting cards with love, join our Winter Cards Zoom Workshop!

In this fun, hands-on workshop, we’ll start by drawing some wintery botanical subjects and then dive into decorative card design. Here’s what you’ll take away:

✏️ Botanical Illustration: Use colored pencil and watercolor to create realistic paintings of your favorite winter plants, from holly berries to pine branches and more.

🎨 Decorative Design: Learn creative ideas for borders, elegant lettering, and festive accents that will make your cards truly special.

💝Heartfelt Gift: An incredible handmade card to share with someone you love – just imagine the warm smiles on your friends’ and family’s faces when they open an envelope and see a custom holiday card, featuring your original botanical illustrations!

Learn More & Register for Winter Cards Workshop

 

Complex does NOT mean too complicated!

 

Don’t let the word “complex” scare you; your composition can be simple! A complex composition of a plant should show at least three of these components:

• Reproductive Parts, Flowers, Petals
• Stems
• Leaves
• Fruit, Berries, Seedpods
• Roots, Bulbs
• Habit Drawings

 

 

Use various pieces of tracing paper to roughly draw the various elements in your composition so that you can rearrange them on the page to achieve a pleasing composition.

You can also try moving the physical components of your subject around your page to get an idea of what might look best.

Don’t fear the center of the paper!

Though students tend to shy away from it, the center is crucial and can be a great location for a subject.

 

 

What do you want to stare at?

Choose a subject that you find compelling. What aspects attracted you first? What do you find most interesting? Choose the most compelling part (often identifying characteristics, such as flowers, unusual seed pods or leaf arrangements) to be your focal point.

Enhance the three-dimensional quality of your focal point using a full range of tones and saturation. Define overlaps and use contrast to draw the viewer’s eye to your focal point.

 

 

When choosing a focal point, consider the following:

• Always begin a rendering with your focal point.
• Render more detail in the foreground.
• Render less detail in supporting elements and those further back in space.
• Use more contrast and saturation of color in front, with less finishing details in back.
• Use warmer and brighter colors in front.
• Use cooler and grayer colors behind.

 

For more free tips on focal point and composition, check out our Composition Quick Guide and 4 Tips to Elevate Your Composition.

 

 

Color is Crucial

Color composition can be crucial to consider when crafting celebratory cards. For inspiration, look to colors occurring in nature at this time of year and other traditional holiday combinations.

Holly is often associated with the winter season and is a great combination of traditional red and green Christmas colors, which makes it a perfect subject for a winter holiday card. 

For a more generic winter card, try white flowers on kraft paper!

Nutmeg is a spice associated with holiday meals and contains a great combination of colors found outside in fall, including deep gold, burgundy, and brown.

 

 

This composition is simple, but still has impact enough to stand on its own and would make a nice greeting card for any occasion. Even though the composition is simple, notice that it is still complex, as it contains 3 elements: stem, leaf, and fruit.

 

 

If you are planning on printing a botanical as a card, it is a good opportunity to give some information about the plant. Botanical Art informs by the artwork itself, but accompanying text and title can often give important and useful information. Consider listing the scientific and common name, the family name and other pertinent information, such as where the plant was collected.

Create personal cards for your family and friends, or commercial cards to sell. Learn how to monetize your botanical art with this blog post.

 

In this fun, hands-on workshop, we’ll start by drawing some wintery botanical subjects and then dive into decorative card design. Here’s what you’ll take away:

✏️ Botanical Illustration: Use colored pencil and watercolor to create realistic paintings of your favorite winter plants, from holly berries to pine branches and more.

🎨 Decorative Design: Learn creative ideas for borders, elegant lettering, and festive accents that will make your cards truly special.

💝Heartfelt Gift: An incredible handmade card to share with someone you love – just imagine the warm smiles on your friends’ and family’s faces when they open an envelope and see a custom holiday card, featuring your original botanical illustrations!

Learn More & Register for Winter Cards Workshop

 

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