Five Years of Painting my Christmas Cards

A merry record of my progress

Hello, friends!

Recently, when I was getting Christmas things out of the attic, I stumbled upon an amazing documentation of my development as an artist: All of my past Christmas card paintings, stacked up in their frames amidst the decorations.

This marks the fifth year of making an original painting to use for my Christmas card image. This tradition of mine began by accident.

Back in 2021, I had been painting with watercolors for only a few months, when I painted this folksy nocturne:

I was very far from having my own style when I painted this. Everything I did was an imitation, because I was still just learning how to work with watercolor and I hadn’t get started to get serious about learning to draw. I was having fun, and when I look back at this painting now, I can still feel that happy energy.

And when a friend said it looked like a Christmas card, and I thought, Why not?

I send Christmas cards every year, and I have done so my entire adult life. I love Christmas cards. But as a childless person, I’ve generally not felt inspired to send photo cards. I love how my friend’s Christmas cards, year after year, form a record of their children’s development, but I have never been interested in keeping a yearly document of my own advancing middle age. I think only once my husband and I have sent a photo card and it was a year when there was a massive early snow storm in December and so we had a very current photo of ourselves at the top of a hike in several feet of snow.

So while photo cards haven’t really been my thing, the idea of using my artwork as a card was immediately appealing. I used to send original watercolor cards quite a lot when I was a newbie artist. It was an easy, low-commitment way to send my work to friends. Having my artwork printed on cards, was a logical next step. I didn’t know then that I’d be setting myself up for a yearly Christmas painting, but that’s what happened.

The next winter, I was playing around with making watercolor backgrounds and painting on top of them with gouache. They were just little experiments. One such piece was this painting of my friend’s geese:

While I didn’t paint it specifically to be my Christmas card, when I had finished it, it seemed like the perfect season’s greeting, so I decided to do another art card.

And once you do something twice, you basically have created a permanent tradition, right?

So in 2023, I was more intentional. Having done two art cards, I had to keep the tradition alive. I stumbled upon a photo of a London florist shop called The Creaky Shed all decked out for Christmas, and I decided to paint it in a urban sketching style.

I had traveled to the UK for the first time that summer, and had even attended the Annual UK Urban Sketchers Symposium, so this felt like the perfect scene for my card.

For 2024, I decided to be really ambitious and do a big winter landscape. In the spring of 2024, My husband had brought me a magazine from a ski trip he was on because there was an article in it about this watercolor artists from the mid 1900s who painted gorgeous winter landscapes, include ski scenes. My husband wanted me to do some because he loves skiing almost as much as he loves me (lol, he totally loves skiing more). I did a few copies of the style in the magazine (which I have sadly since lost, and I cannot for the life of me remember the artist’s name). Once I felt like I had a sense of the right palette, I painted this one:

As is so often the case, the finished painting didn’t quite have the magic of some of my earlier sketchbook studies, but I still thought it made a nice card.

This year’s card painting is the only one missing from the stack in my attic, and that’s because it’s currently at Beveled Birch Custom Framing in Fiskdale, MA, as part of their holiday show.

What leaps out at me when I look at it next to my previous efforts is the massive leap my artistic style has taken in the past year.

I’ve gotten looser and more expressive, and this painting shows that. It still looks like a Diane painting, but with more finesse.

The secret behind this big leap forward: Teaching.

By teaching other artists, which I began doing last January, I have learned so much. My skills have deepened, my sense of what I like and dislike has solidified, and my overall confidence has increased so much.

Don’t get me wrong. I still make loads of bad paintings. I still slip into being tighter than I’d like or try too hard to control my paints, but the old maxim is nonetheless true: The best way to learn to something is to teach someone else.

And the best way to see clear proof of one’s progress is to look back at where you were a year ago, two, three, four, five years ago.

On days when I make those bad paintings and I need proof that I’m on the right path, all I have to do is thumb through my archives and there it is, in full color. Look how my paintings are growing up!

I’m so glad to have keep my art-card tradition going for the past five years. I can’t wait to see where the next five take me.

And if you want to learn watercolor with me this winter, there’s still time to sign up for my class via Two Bridges Art Academy. All classes are taught via Microsoft Teams so you can join from anywhere in the world. The first session will be on January 8.

Merry Christmas, friends, and Happy New Year!

Cheers,

Diane