Today I decided to start the morning session in the studio with a loose warm-up exploring my Kuretake Gansai Tambi paints, before going on to the main painting of the day.

So using my medium sized Isabey quill brush I simply picked up color at random from the set and made circles on a piece of watercolor paper.

The beauty of the Kuretake set is that all the pans are big enough to easily fit the largest brushes, unlike most sets with the itty-bitty half pan sized paints. This is particularly noticeable with the Chinese sets. Ironically, when you consider how often the Chinese use super-large brushes for their traditional art style, that they have opted to provide the West with small pans. My preference for tubes remains unchanged.

Having created my blurry circles, I put that aside to dry, and later I will spend a relaxing half hour embellishing it to see where that leads.

And moving on, I began on the baby birds.

Materials

I used the same Kuretake set, and chose Gray No. 21 and Cherry Pink No. 14 for the birds, and a little Sap Green No. 58 for the holly.

My paper was a sheet of Etchr Cold Pressed 140lb watercolor paper, 100% cellulose, which is a reasonable paper for beginners and experts alike.

I used a Pigma Micron 0.5mm waterproof black fineliner, and I used a size 5 round nylon brush with a good point for the painting.

Let’s Sketch and Paint ourselves into a Christmas Mood!

The whole process of sketching and painting the birds, branches, baubles, leaves and berries is included in this tutorial, along with the warmup exercise. And as usual you can also download a free copy of the traceable sketch download.