There is something very special in receiving a hand-drawn card at Christmas. Creating handmade greetings with uni-ball pen is also a great in-door activity for the family in this cold weather. We have some tip top ideas for unique handmade greetings with uni-ball pens that will warm the hearts of friends and family this Christmas.
Mix it up
We love mixing things up with our Christmas card designs. You can create the classiest of festive greetings by combining uni-PIN pens and watercolour.
uni-PIN pens are water-proof which means you can work up some beautiful mixed-media creations with ease. Simply apply your watercolour, leave to absorb into the paper and work your PIN over the painted design. Or work up a PIN illustration and apply washes of dreamy watercolour over your pen marks. Whichever way you do it, it produces super effective results as the fern illustration above illustrates.
Teaming uni-PIN fine line pens over watercolour paint gives your cards that element of Yuletide colour with the characteristic refinement and elegance a uni-PIN line will give you. This is one of our favourite ways to make handmade greetings with uni-ball pens.
For these foliage themed cards below you will need…
- Black, Sepia, light and dark grey uni-PIN Pens in nib sizes 0.1, 0.5, brush and 0.8 (the latter two sizes in black only)
- SIGNO gel pens in white and gold
- A pencil, we use the Kuru Toga mechanical pencil
- A set of watercolours
- Fine paintbrush
- A6 card blanks
Watercolour wreath greeting
It’s surprisingly simple to create this pretty wreath style card design. Use your pencil to draw a rough circle in the top right-hand corner of the card. Then make very light, loose, expressive pencil strokes around the circle into the card. Now use your pencil to draw in branches from these lines. Go over your pencil design with a 0.5 sepia pen, adding more branches if you think it needs them.
Take your fine paintbrush and apply very light washes of green watercolour leaves on your branches. Then make little dots of red watercolour around your leaves. Once dry, outline the berries and leaves with the 0.1 black pen.
Now you can write a mini message or sentiment in the centre of your wreath. Use a pencil to outline your letters. Go over the fine lines with the 0.1 black pen and the larger areas with the 0.5 pen.
Classic Christmas Tree card
To create a watercolour fir tree shape, make three stacking tiers of crosshatched watery green paint strokes. You should make a watercolour triangle shape at the top and two large fringe shapes at the bottom. Use the 0.5 sepia pen to create the trunk and red watercolour for a tree container.
Grab your 0.1 light and dark grey PIN pens make very light pen strokes over the watercolour tree shape. Add shape to your tree pot but crosshatching circular strokes around the red tree pot shape using a 0.5 black pen.
Outline a rough skeleton of your chosen lettering in pencil, adding finials and spurs on your text for an extra flourish. Soften the lower-case letters with curved lines and rounded edges. Create further depth by drawing curved lines inside the bowl of the text and outside the stem of your script.
Fill-in in the pencil text with a black brush PIN or a 0.1 and 0.8 uni-PIN. Use the 0.1 tip for the fine areas, and the 0.8 nib for the fuller parts. Add white highlights and gold dots using your SIGNO gel pens.
Signature SIGNOs
When we were thinking of ideas for handmade greetings with uni-ball pens we knew we had to use SIGNO gel pens. SIGNO pens are excellent on both light and dark coloured card which makes them ideal for Christmas cards.
We really love using our SIGNO metallic pens for the our hand-drawn festive greetings. Look at the way these green, red and bronze gel pens pop on the white background on this simple wreath card.
Also they are amazing on dark backgrounds. We used simple lines and zigzags to create tree designs. The white SIGNO broad gel pen looks stunning on black card. We’ve also coordinated the greetings with tag designs.
Our SIGNO gel pens also look lovely on dark green card for a super festive look. We’ve gone to town on hand-lettering in this design. You can see how we created it in the video below.
