Decorated Christmas Envelopes

I spent at least as much time addressing and decorating envelopes this year as I did making cards. It would be much more efficient to pick a style and work with it but I love to experiment with different designs.

I had more fun experimenting with embossing powder on some light blue envelopes. I used the asterisk from a set of alphabet stamps to look like snowflakes and then embossed them. I realized I could also put embossing powder on wet ink so I want to experiment some more with that. The calligraphy was done with walnut ink using a Tachikawa G nib.

I used my white Uni-ball Signo Broad gel pen to draw banners and a modern versal on coloured envelopes.

I had some envelopes I knew wouldn’t work for calligraphy so I had fun making a striped design. I have tried this in the past with a smaller envelope where I used a little tag as the mask and only wrote the name on it with the address written between the lines. I had more space on these ones so I put the whole address on the tag shape.  After making the first one, I put the stripes on a diagonal and added a thin green line with a Zebra Doodler’z glitter gel pen to give it more of a candy cane look. I used an old Mr. Sketch scented watercolor marker (“cherry”) with chisel tip. Mr. Sketch is a favourite of flipchart users and pre-schoolers. They last a long time (I’ve had mine for over 10 years) but you need to be careful because they do smear.

The Christmas decorations were inspired by one of the cards I shared in my last post. They are just painted with watercolour and addressed using a glitter gel pen. 

The tree on the green envelope was painted with Finetec watercolours and the lettering was done with my DecoColor Calligraphy paint marker. Unfortunately, the paint mark started to dry up (the metallic ones never seem to last long) so I highlighted the letters with a glitter gel pen.

On this envelope I did Art Deco style lettering using my Jinhao 992 fountain pen loaded with Pelikan Edelstein Star Ruby ink (this ink is definitely on the pinker side of red).

The triangle tree with writing is a pretty simple concept. I drew it with a pencil and then went over it with Zebra Doodler’z glitter gel pens (I have used them a lot this year).

I found a wax seal with a holly design at the Edmonton ReUse Centre earlier this year so sealed some coloured envelopes with white wax. I never seem to be able to make perfect round seals. I coloured in the holly design with markers afterwards.

If these envelopes were people, they would be a group of carolers who may not always sing in harmony but their message is heartfelt – enjoy your holiday in way that brings you happiness!

Calligraphy based on a Happy Ever Crafter design.

Watercolour Christmas Cards

I used painter’s tape cut lengthwise in slightly wavy lines to block off the trunks of the trees while painting the background.

December is here so I am getting my Christmas cards ready. As I often do, I am sending a mix of commercial and handmade cards this year. Most of the handmade ones were painted with watercolour.

I had seen this style of card before where tape is used to block off the center to leave room for a message, with foliage or flowers peaking behind the edges. I had never tried it myself, so when Kelly Klapstein demonstrated making it in one of her free online classes I was happy to paint along. The foliage was done with watercolour paints. Once it was dry and I removed the washi tape, I used my black Zebra Doodler’z glitter gel pen to add the stripes and my Tombow Fudenosuke pen for the lettering. I later added some Finetec Pearlescent colours as highlights.

Here it is while I was still painting. I later turned the card the other way around before I wrote the message.

After I added the sparkly Finetec highlights.

These Christmas decorations were painted on a sample of Etchr 300 g cold press 100% cotton paper. This was the first time I tried this paper and found it buckled a bit. When I try painting on it next time, I will tape down the paper first. Etchr is an Australian company founded in 2017 through crowdfunding (I guess they didn’t raise enough money to include the second e). I traced the shapes of the decorations with Derwent watercolour pencils and used various paints, including Finetec Pearlescent watercolours, to fill them in. I didn’t attempt to make this realistic as two balls could never hang on such a tiny branch. A Zebra Doodler’z glitter gel pen was used to highlight the caps and draw the strings. The lettering was done with my Tombow Fudenosuke pen. I later splattered a bit more of the Finetec paints to add extra glimmer.

I painted this winter scene a while ago on Arches Cold press watercolour paper and added the word Peace with a Speedball C-2 nib using sumi ink. 

I like to stamp a little penguin on the back of cards I make. I have always loved penguins (my first toy as an infant was a penguin stuffie I later named Bird-Jo). The stamp can be hard to see on dark cardstock so sometimes I use a Versa Mark watermark stamp pad. The Versa Mark pad is made in Japan and the package says “for resist, tone-on-tone, and watermark images”. It doesn’t have a colour itself (the pad looks white) but shows up darker than the cardstock it’s stamped on. It must have some adhesive in it because you can sprinkle it with embossing powder and, using a heat gun to melt the powder, give it a shiny look.

If these cards were people, they would love to send holiday cheer by sharing something homemade.