Hand painted holiday post cards

A walk through my Nov/Dec 2024 painting series

This whole project began with the desire to hand-paint holiday greeting cards.

I wanted to paint wintry landscapes, but painting snow is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not easy… Unless you’re using chalk, in which case everything naturally looks wintry.

I opted for blue watercolor thinking it would at least give everything a “cold” feel. The three paintings below are in displayed in the order that I painted them. I probably like the middle one best. I learned some good lessons from the first attempt and made small adjustments, but by the third painting I was going a bit off the rails and used much too much blue.

It was time for a change of scenery.

I went back to a minimal amount of blue and I went forward to a totally new composition.

The results were largely positive. I call this composition “Foothills Parkway” and I’ve done another iteration of it since, as well as some broad variations on the theme. In the next month or two, I plan to do a full size 8.5x11(ish) iteration.

Despite the success, I decided that I was done with the blue for a while.

My next thought was foggy, as opposed to snowy. Here in East Tennessee, fog is as much, or more, a part of winter than snow.

Funny story about the first of these two paintings (the one with the large cedar tree in the foreground taking up almost half of the painting). That cedar was originally a willow but it did not look the part. I kept trying to find a shape that would work until I ended up with way too much ink. In the end, a wet towel pulled a bunch of that ink back out, creating a textured appearance that I could work with. I really thought I was going to have to scrap the painting. It was touch-and-go for a hot minute, but I was surprisingly happy with the end result.

The next two are variations on the theme that was begun with “Foothills Parkway” but exploring different tree shapes, settings, and color palettes.

This farm scene was the last post card in the series. I’m glad to see the pathing of my roads growing to be much more coherent.

Now for the sad part of the story.

I figured the paintings would be inadvertently exposed to water and other stuff that might cause them to bleed in transit. So I decided to apply a fixative since.

It didn’t work the way I’d hoped.

I’ll take the blame. I got close to crunch time for mailing them out and so one day, not quite a week before Christmas, I took them outside and fixed all nine at once without testing my method on a scratch painting.

“They’re ruined!” I thought.

I’ve been encouraged to think otherwise. Some people have suggested it makes them look “even more wintry”

. . . And I’m still not as fond of any of them as I was before. Oh well, I’ll figure out what went wrong and do better next time.

Easy come. Easy go.

-PF