‘Tis the season to adorn your paper goods with festive motifs! In today’s tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to make a simple calligraphy Christmas tree in six different ways. Pick the motif(s) you like the best, then watch the video that shows you how to make it!
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!
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.
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:
This tree is my go-to … it’s simple, pretty, and full. Watch the video below to see how to make it:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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!
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,
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