I want to become better at art, specifically watercolor, so I’m working on it. How, you might ask? By watching how-to videos on YouTube and practicing. I’ve been trying different watercolor techniques, and below you can see the step-by-step results of my latest efforts.

Recently I’ve seen the Bokeh effect in some of the how-to videos for holiday cards that come up on my feed. This effect, also seen in photos, is when lights in the background are enlarged, softened & blurred. The photo below, found on Wikimedia Commons, shows Bokeh:

I wanted to give it a try, so today I decided to practice with a small watercolor painting of part of a Christmas tree. The Bokeh effect would suggest the blurred lights on the tree.

You can see in the following photos that the Bokeh effect technique I used worked but did NOT create the appearance of Christmas tree lights. However, I’ll explain the other techniques that I used to create the finished painting that you’ll see at the end.

This was step one: an attempt at creating a soft, blurred background of tree foliage. I used two shades of green and one of blue.

On no–blurry or not, this doesn’t look like a tree at all! I was already discouraged but decided to keep going. I dried the painting with a hair dryer, then used round stencils and a clean, damp stencil brush to lift off and blot random circles of the paint, like I’d seen YouTube artists do. It actually worked well:

OK, I had the Bokeh circles, now what? I remembered watching an artist paint color into some of her circles to suggest the Christmas lights, so I decided to do that too. But after I did, I saw that they looked more like ball ornaments and not Bokeh at all. Nothing looked right. To fill in the background space, I painted in some pine branches.

Then I realized that the balls looked too flat to be Christmas tree ornaments, so I used a slightly damp brush to lift some of the paint to create soft highlights on them:

That didn’t help a whole lot, so I decided to use my new go-to for winter-themed paintings–splattering white acrylic paint with an old toothbrush to suggest snow:

I know, snow on a Christmas tree? It’s now become an outdoor tree. I like the effect of the snow, but it still didn’t look finished. So, I got out a waterproof pen and lightly outlined the balls and drew lines above them to suggest hangers. To finish it off, I used a white gel pen to create brighter highlights on the color balls:

There! It’s not perfect, but that’s all I can think of to do.

Conclusion: my attempt at the Bokeh effect worked and didn’t work–I was able to lift the paint off to create the Bokeh circles but clearly I didn’t do it right–more practice (and maybe rewatching a video or two) is needed. At the very least, I think I should have made more and smaller circles.

I wouldn’t send this out as a Christmas card, but I’m really glad I made it. It forced me to problem solve and to use a variety of techniques to create something that wasn’t what I’d planned, but ended up being better than I thought it would be.