Every holiday season I get the urge to create, most recently with watercolors. And I always get frustrated, because I don’t paint often enough to be very good at it.

One of the things I have to relearn every year is to keep going when I’m convinced that what I’ve painted is a mess, something only worthy of the trashcan. A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog about how I kept going with a painting I’d given up on and was pleasantly surprised with how it turned out.

I’m again feeling that urge to create holiday-themed art. And as usual, I haven’t done a lot of painting recently. But in the last couple of days, I’ve created two postcard-sized paintings and am glad that I fought the urge to give up on them.

Below are the first and final versions of a painting of Christmas bulbs. My biggest focus was trying to achieve shine on the bulbs. They came out ok, but in the first version the background, which I intended to be kind of loose, didn’t really turn out. The green area in the lower right looks blotchy. And anybody who uses watercolor can tell you that trying to fix something you’ve painted with more watercolor often ends up with it looking even worse.

I pondered what to do about it (besides tossing it out) and then remembered the Bokeh technique, which I tried (unsuccessfully) in a previous holiday painting (see blog link above). I decided to try it again anyway, because I hoped that it might look like Christmas lights AND camouflage the messy background.

There are different ways to achieve the Bokeh look. The one I used involves round stencils and a stiff brush–you basically gently lift the paint with a clean, damp brush and soak it up with a paper towel. On the right you can see the finished version. I’m pretty happy with it–I think the Bokeh effect does look like blurry Christmas lights in the background, and the blotchy area is no longer a problem.

Today I worked on my second Christmas art idea. It’s based on watercolor snowmen I’ve been seeing on Youtube and Instagram. I also wanted to try a different technique for the background that I’ve seen–dropping salt into wet watercolor paint and letting it dry. The salt soaks up the paint, and what is left behind depends on a lot of factors, like how wet the paint was, how much salt was used, what kind of salt (fine or coarse), etc. I was hoping to achieve a snowy sky look.

So I quickly sketched a simple snowman silhouette, painted a blue background around him, and dropped coarse salt all over the paint. I immediately worried that I’d already messed up the painting and would have to start over–I think I should have used regular table salt and sprinkled it a little more evenly. You can see below, right what it looked like after the paint dried and I brushed off the salt:

Not exactly what I was going for, but I made myself keep going anyway. I drew and painted the snowman, which you can see below on the left. Once I finished him, I stepped back to look at my little painting critically. I thought it looked amateurish and messy, not like the sketchy casual look that real artists pull off.

Frustrated, I once again had to fight the urge to give up. Instead, I touched up colors, reinforced lines and added others, made his eyes bigger, and added fringe to his scarf. The final version is below on the right.

Overall, given all the flaws in the first version, I’m satisfied with how this little painting turned out.

I’m glad that I’m putting myself through my annual ritual of frustrated holiday painting–it’s reminded me about what I’ve learned before.

And because I have, I feel that I can offer a useful suggestion to anybody who gets frustrated with their artistic efforts like I do. Don’t give up! You might just surprise yourself.