6 Simple Ways to Make a Calligraphy Christmas Tree

I love punctuating my holiday paper goods with a calligraphy Christmas tree! It’s my motif of choice when I’m making DIY gift tags, mail art, or greeting cards. Flourished holiday trees are easy to make, and they double as an excellent calligraphy drill. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make six calligraphy Christmas trees through a series of short instructional videos. Have fun experimenting with these beauties, and for more holiday calligraphy fun, see TPK’s holiday calligraphy worksheet collection!

Before You Do Anything …

Start by drawing a triangle pencil draft! I’m writing on black cardstock today, which means I used a white mechanical pencil to make my triangle drafts.

Triangle for drawing on — If you opt to make a calligraphy Christmas tree on black paper, a white pencil is a must. A black eraser doesn’t hurt, either!

Flourished trees look best when created using a festive color. I almost always use metallic watercolor — generally gold — to draw my trees! Here’s how to load gold watercolor onto your nib, in a nutshell:

Using Finetec Arabic Gold Watercolor — For a complete tutorial (including a video) over this technique, see this article.

1. Traditional Flourished Calligraphy Christmas Tree

This tree is my go-to … it’s simple, pretty, and full. Watch the video below to see how to make it:

2. Wavelength Calligraphy Christmas Tree

This tree is easy to make because you’re just going up and down, up and down. The video below shows you how to create it:

3. Coil Calligraphy Christmas Tree

This tree is fun because it reminds me of a spring. It looks like if you dropped it, it would cheerfully bounce up and down. Here’s how you make it:

4. Snowy Calligraphy Christmas Tree

The branches on this tree look like they’re weighed down with wet snow. (This tree would be really pretty with some white ink accents!) Here’s how you can make it:

5. Reaching Calligraphy Christmas Tree

This tree’s branches look like they’re reaching toward the star at the top! For extra oomph, you can add a little squiggle for the trunk. Here’s how to make it:

6. Ribbon Tree

This tree reminds me of a tall, proud ribbon — like one you’d find on the top of a holiday gift. To emphasize that it is a tree, you could add a few white ink ornaments. Here’s how you can make it:

And that’s it! You can scale your trees to fit any project, switch up the color scheme, and switch up the motifs to suit your personal style. I especially love to use these trees for gift tags around this time of year!

Calligraphy Tree Gift Tags — These watercolor paper gift tags were created for calligraphy starter kit gifts. I typically use the blue tone from the Pearl Colors palette for the tree, then I use iron gall ink to write the to/from information.

I hope that you enjoyed this video-heavy tutorial! Let me know if you like this format; typically, I use a lot of photos to show you how to do things, but in this case, I think that videos made more sense. If you’d prefer to watch a back-to-back compilation of the videos, you can do that on YouTube (here).

Thanks so much for reading, and happy holidays!

Warmly,