The Christmas holiday season is the best for crafting in my opinion, maybe it’s because it’s my favorite season to celebrate. One of the simplest crafts to create is painting a Christmas tree. I have attended several paint nights at local restaurants in the past and I have always wanted to create a painting of my own. So this Christmas come let me show you how to paint a Christmas tree on canvas with this step-by-step tutorial.
Art canvas boards are inexpensive and can be bought in bulk, this project would be a great one to do with a group of family or friends to get into the holiday spirit. In addition to art canvas boards you will also need a variety of paint brushes and acrylic paints.
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Supplies Need to Paint a Christmas Tree on Canvas
- art canvas panels
- paint brushes
- acrylic paint
- paper plate
I wanted to create this painting with a background color of a dark blue so I mixed together a tiny bit of black paint with blue and grey and used a large brush to paint the entire background. If you don’t have a large brush you could also use a foam brush to pain the background. It is best to use a paper plate for mixing paint as this is the easiest way to mix up the colors you may want and then it is easy to dispose of the paint when finished. I did not mix the paint completely as I like the look of some of the black showing through and also some of the canvas.
Once this layer dried I painted one more layer over top and then it was time to start with the tree. In order to get the Christmas tree shape I used some dark green paint and did some rough brush strokes to create a layered tree look. Although this doesn’t look great I promise it will get better and you will end up paining over this.
Starting at the bottom I like to use a round brush with a light touch of my hand to create the feathered look of the bottom layer of the tree. The base layer of the tree was done in a very dark green. I continued this up to the top of the tree making each layer smaller than the one before it until I reached the point of the tree.
After this base layer I used a lighter color of green and lightly painted over areas of the layers again to show some difference in colors. I used different shades of green and then combined several of the shades to create a unique green color.
After painting the layers of the tree I decided I wanted to add some Christmas lights using pink, red, purple and yellow. I added these dots with the tip of a small brush with a little bit of paint on it.
If you want to make this a snowy Christmas tree then you can take white paint and add some touches of white randomly to the top of the tree branches to show that there is snow sitting on top of them.
The next step is to paint a tree trunk, I started with a light brown and then mixed a little dark brown with the brown to create a darker brown. I painted the trunk on the bottom to show that it was a tree that was still planted so the bottom of the trunk flares out as if it is still growing out of the ground.
As I was finishing up the tree I realized it was bare at the top so I decided to add a gold star. I wanted it to look like it was shining bright so that is why I painted it as not a perfect star.
To finish off the painting I used brown paint mixed with a tiny bit of blue to ground the bottom half of the painting. I wanted to do this so that the tree didn’t’ look like it was floating on the canvas.
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