‘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!
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.
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:
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!
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).
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
TPK’s innovative newsletters are an artistic treat. Join the 125K+ subscribers who have already discovered The Postman’s Knock, and receive 10% off your first Digital Catalog order.