We wanted to wish you all peace and love this festive season. To say thank you for following along with our work, newsletters, social media and of course our online classes this year, we would like to share with you this painting by Linda.

This is an original and new painting by Linda done in watercolour, with the addition of some festive text by me which I added digitally.

You are welcome to download the image and use it for your greetings cards, gift tags or maybe just to pop into your sketchbook or art journal. Please note the image is made available for personal, non-commercial use only. For a full size printable quality version, please click HERE!

I’ve been using the image to make some cards and tags, here’s what I’ve done…

First up, I’ve printed the image onto some nice paper.

I’m using a laser printer so just some decent quality copy paper is going to be fine. The laser print gives the image a nice soft sheen that looks quite smart.

I’ve used the settings on the print screen to tell it to print 4 copies per page. That’ll automatically scale it down to the size I want for my cards. You can of course adjust the size to suit your project.

We just need a few basic supplies to make the cards:

• Printouts of the painting
• some card, I’m using some blue and green sheets that we had in the stash
• Craft knife, ruler and mat
• paper glue

I begin by trimming the printed images. I keep an old rotary cutter just for using with paper, so that makes quite quick work of it. If you have a guillotine that would be even faster!

Next I cut the card to size. The sheets I’m using are A4 (8.5″ x 11″) so I’m cutting them in half. Then I’m folding them in half so I’m getting two cards per sheet.

Next I’m using some paper glue to cover the entire back of the printed painting.

Carefully position the image onto the front of the card and smooth down.

Then I trim the bottom edge of the card to suit the image, leaving a little margin.

And it’s done!

Easy and quick.

You’ll notice I had a little trimmed offcut from my green card. Couldn’t stand to throw that in the bin so I made tags…

To suit the size of the green card off cuts I needed to scale down the image. I printed another sheet of them, this time asking the printer to print 16 copies per page with the image scaled to 20%. That worked for me, please experiment to get a size that works for you.

You can see that this size of printed image is going to sit nicely on those offcuts of card.

I’ve cut the offcuts so that they are a single layer of card, but you could leave them folded if you like.

I’ve trimmed the tiny printed images and then it’s just a case of glueing them on as with the cards.

Using a hole punch make a hole at one end.

And loop through a short length of ribbon, cord or string. Throughout the year I save little bits of ribbon on packaging and it’s just perfect for using up on projects like this!

Hand write your message, or if you happen to have one, you could use an ink pad and a festive stamp. That would be great if you were making lots of tags.

And there you have it, a lovely set of greetings cards and gift tags.

Thanks again for all your support this year, we really do appreciate it. Merry Christmas!

Laura and Linda
x