It is hard to believe a whole year has passed since my last holiday tutorial on creating a stylized and shiny Christmas Tree in Photoshop. For this year, I have had some with a Santa Claus carrying his magical bag of toys.

Before starting to paint Santa, I did a little research on how artists have been portraying Santa. Unsurprisingly his appearance has evolved over the years, becoming ever more contemporary looking. Attracted to the Santa persona of years passed, I decided to make this one more of a vintage Santa Claus. I roughed in a sketch, creating a shorter, rounder Claus holding a very, very large bag of toys. To fill the color palette, I decided to use the colors of vintage Santa artwork circa 1900 to 1930. The reds and greens from that time period are very distinctive. The beard and fur colors have a definite yellowish tint, which not only “age” the vintage Santa, but adds a little warmth. The environment seems to be lit by the warm glow of a late night fire. Hope this gives you some ideas if you want to have some fun with holiday artwork of your own. Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Santa is available in my shops on Etsy and Artfire.

When painting your own plants, it can sometimes be difficult finding the right color of green. I use several methods for selecting colors. One is to use the mixer palette in Painter. The palette shown below exhibits a whole array of great natural greens, and I never used green in the mix. Most of the greens were established by mixing black and yellow. Then around the edges, I mixed in some cyan and blue. To get some red for flowers, I then mixed in a little red and orange. The additive colors were all chosen from the basic colors shown at the top of the mixer.

Here is a bush I painted in Photoshop using only the colors from the mixer palette. As you can see, I will often place some background colors behind the plant as I paint just to see how it will display against various background colors in the final painting.

The final test is placing it in a few renderings to see if it blends well. If needed, I will make some highlight /shadow adjustments to finish of the plant before placing it in my library.