Paint a Gnome with Christie from The Social Easel

Hey guys, it's Christie with The Social Easel, and I teach women how to paint with acrylics. I'm obsessed with gnomes. I think they're adorable. Every time I see one in the store, I want to buy it. So I'm kind of in a painting frenzy of wanting to continue to paint them. I did my small ones yesterday, but I wanted to do a really big one. And I went and found this, this piece of barn wood out in the garage with Corey's stuff, and I've sketched myself a little gnome on there. Okay, so this is old barn wood, so I'm gonna need a lot of thick paint because this wood soaks up the paint a lot. So I've even watered down my paint just a little, just because I know it's going to soak in. And actually, this will be similar— this is a lot rougher than palette board that we're going to work on, but same thing with, um, like doing the background on the palette board. You're gonna want to not be afraid of your paint when you're painting on wood because it kind of soaks it in. And that will be one of the first things that I teach you if you're new to painting is don't be afraid of your paint. So can you guys see how much I have on there? Quite a bit, right? One of the number one mistakes that people make when they start painting is they dab in their paint and they get just a little bit on there and they're just trying to make that little dab of paint go as far as it can. And it's actually making the process harder for them. So if you have the right amount of paint on your brush, you're going to be able to one, fill in a lot faster and do what you need to do. but you're also going to be able to get the brushstrokes that you need. So my goal over the next few months with you guys on this page, if you're new and you've just started following me, make sure you hit the like button at the top of the page or you hit follow because I will be going live twice a week and just teaching you guys or painting with you, um, 2 times a week. So originally when I said I was gonna do this, I was like Tuesdays and Thursdays. I am not a very— hard to keep me in a box. I'm not very good at schedules, or I'm terrible at being on time. And in my head, Tuesdays and Thursdays were gonna be the perfect day to teach with you guys because my husband is gone to his other office, which means no interruptions. For me from morning until the kids get home. So in my head I was like, that's the perfect day, I'll just go live every Tuesday and Thursday. And ever since I said that, I've either been out of town or a kid's been sick or I've had an appointment. It's like one thing after another. So I'm mixing the Tuesday Thursday thing. I can tell you I'll be live twice a week. I can't always guarantee what day it's gonna be. So just keep your notifications on would be my recommendation. And if you miss me live, you can always go back and watch them again through Facebook videos or my YouTube channel. So I think I'm gonna leave the hat like that. We may come back and tweak this a little. I'm not sure. So all this is right now is red. It kind of looks like I have a little bit of shading here, but that's actually just where the paint has already dried a little bit. I want a little bit of black for shading though. Anybody else out there love gnomes like me? I just think they're so cute. So I'm going to grab a little bit of black with my red. I'm not putting straight black on here. I'm just going around my edges a little bit, just gives it a little bit of shading, maybe a little bit more where that crease is folding over. And I know black can be a really intimidating color to work with, but just keep it— keep in mind, a little bit goes a long way. When I say I'm blending a little bit of this, let me show you what my palette looks like. So see, I've got this big blob of black over here. All I did was take a tiny little touch of it and mix it with my red over here off to the side, so I get this new shade of red. And the other thing I want you to remember is, let's say I do something on here that I'm not happy with at all. Nothing you do with acrylic paint is permanent. So if you make a mistake or you do something you're not happy with, don't freak out. Don't get mad at yourself. Don't throw your canvas across the room. Don't burn it. Walk away, let it dry, and come back, and you can paint right over top of it. And it's like it never happened. So tell yourself that. It's an important thing to remember when you are painting. If you guys saw all the messed up paintings I have, they don't all come out exactly the way I want them the first time I do them. So I'm gonna load up my white here, start adding in the little fluffy brim around here. Have you guys seen me use the SnowTex yet? Does anyone know what SnowTex is? I think I'm going to add some on here. If you don't know what it is, you're probably going to want some after I show you, because it's this really cool additive that you can put with your paints or use it separately. It doesn't have to be with paint, but it gives you this 3D texture. See all that texture that I put on the gingerbread house? So I'm thinking maybe I want to add some of that on my gnome's hat for the fur collar. What do you think? Should we try it? I added some to my gnomes yesterday too. This is the one I taught in my class yesterday, and I added a little bit on there. So I'll show you what the bottle looks like here in just a second. And I've got chalk drawn on here. I as my base outline. But again, that's something I can just wipe off if I don't, don't like those original lines that I did. It's kind of just like a sketch. It's just an idea of where I'm going with this. I got a little, little bit of pink in there. I didn't rinse my brush enough. So I want to give a little bit of more of like a folk art kind of aged look to this. So I'm really liking the way this looks with the shading up here. I don't want my white to just be plain white, so I usually grab something like— this is a yellow ochre— or, you know, like any kind of like mustardy color. You could even use like a tan. but I get just a little bit of it. Or, or you can use a metallic like a gold, and that does the same thing. All right, so I'm loading up with my white again, and I'm gonna pick up a little bit of that yellow. See, I have both colors on there, lots of paint, and it's just gonna tone this down a little bit. Give it a little bit of that more antique look. I'll go a little darker around my edges, and this is kind of what I did in Santa's beard behind here. I don't know if you guys can see that. I did some gold in his beard, and I did some of this color. But it just gives a little bit of that more antique look. And I'm not blending it to where it's all one color. Have some areas where it's lighter, somewhere it's darker. Can you guys see the difference in that? Okay, so I'm going to grab my SnowTex. Where did I put it? So SnowTex comes in this little itty-bitty bottle. I think you can get bigger bottles, but I just have the small ones. I'm just going to grab another brush here that's not wet, and it's this thick, like, cloudy-looking texture, and I'm going to put it down on my palette and pick up a little bit of paint with it while I do it, even a little bit of water, because it helps it spread. So I've got a decent chunk on here. All right, so this is what it looks like on my palette. See that? And we're gonna get a little bit of water with it. And I still have a little bit white and some of that yellow color in there, and we're just going to start kind of brushing this on here. And I'll hold it up in just a minute so you guys can see. This may be even cooler. I may come back So this is all an experiment. You can just watch me kind of play and figure out what I like. But I haven't done the SnowTex with the shading before, so I may put the SnowTex on here and come back and even add a little bit of that yellowish color in there, and it's really gonna pick up some of that color and make that gold, that antique part, a show up a little bit more. And you can decide how thick you want this. You may want yours like super fluffy. I'm grabbing a little bit of paint and my SnowTex together, and I'm just kind of pushing it around. This is just like an old flat brush. There's no special brush or anything I'm using, but I definitely think mixing it with a little bit of paint helps spread it. And then I'm gonna come back, we're gonna grab a little bit, a little bit of our gold that we had earlier, kind of work some of this in almost like I'm stippling around the edges here. All right, what do you guys think? You want to see it up a little bit closer? I love the way it looks in the camera. All right, let's pull it in a little bit, trying to get past that glare. See how it has that texture on it though? It's easier to see a little further back. I get that glare from the light on there, but I'm really liking the way that that looks so far. And we could even add it in the beard if we wanted to. Tonight we are going to finish up my gnome. This was just an old piece of wood. I went out, like, in the garage scrounging around, seeing what I could find to paint on, because this is like a big, thick, heavy piece of wood, and I thought it was a perfect size. I just wanted to do one big gnome on it. This is a 50-year-old piece of— oh shoot, I already forgot— sycamore. Yes, this is a 50-year-old piece of sycamore that was taken off of a hotel in Rockaway Beach that one of his patients goes and gets all this scrap wood and knew that Corey would want it for a project or something and gave it to us. So that's the history of this piece of wood, and now I'm turning it in to a little painting. All right, so here's what I am grabbing. We've got— I am using all DecoArt paint on this tonight. So a cool thing that I also get to be a part of because I paint with you guys is DecoArt has this program for artists who are teachers, and we get to share their products with you. And then because of that, they give us a little bit of kickback and send us products that we can use and show you. Um, so that's part of what some of my lives are going to be coming up is showing you some of my new favorite stuff from DecoArt. Um, I've already shown you the Snow-Tex. Um, tonight we're going to use this Craft Twinkles, maybe if I decide to add glitter. SnowTex is already used in here, and that is like a fluffy— here's my little jar of it. I hate it when I'm backwards on the camera. This is like a fluffy snow-like texture, and it leaves it like a 3D effect. So if you were here in person and you felt this, this would be all rough and kind of has like a 3D snowy effect. These are all acrylic paints. That's all I teach with. And then I've got some Silver Dazzling Metallics. I might use that. I'll let you know the colors as I use them. Now I couldn't find— because you know our art— us artists are so organized, right? I couldn't find the peachy skin tone color that I wanted for the nose, so I'm using Coral Blush from DecoArt, and then I'm just gonna mix it with white to get the color of nose. That I want. All right, so we're gonna start with the nose and try to get kind of our placement of that first. So right now I am just— I do a lot of color mixing too, and I teach my girls to do that. I'm just taking some of that coral and I'm mixing some white with it just so it's more of like a skin tone color and not bright, bright, bright peach. Now, like I said, this is really old wood. If you joined late, this is 50-year-old sycamore that came off of a hotel, um, in Rockaway Beach, Missouri, which is close to where I live. And my husband collects scrap wood, and one of his patients knew that and thought he would love to have some of these pieces and didn't know what project we would do with it. —and this is what it's turning into. So a 50-year-old piece of wood turning into a piece of art that is now going to be a part of my Christmas display. Now because it's old and porous, it's really, really soaking up the paint, so that means I'm really putting a lot on my brush. So you can kind of see Try to get so you can see how much I put on there. And I was just talking with one of the Tribe Sisters today. She was saying, what, what am I doing that I can't get my paintings to look like yours? And she's struggling with, you know, she's trying to paint faster and be more loose. She likes my loose, messy style. And after a couple, you know, comments back and forth in the thread, we realized that she's not putting near enough paint on her brush, and that was the problem, because I really, really load my brush up. I end up tweaking this nose a little bit. I put a ton of paint in there when I'm painting, and What I'm learning as I'm teaching people online, because I can tell people in person, you know, when I'm teaching them, you need to get more paint on your brush to get that brushstroke. When you don't have enough paint, you can't get the same effect. So you run out of paint and your brush can't make that brushstroke that you need it to do. So you want to make sure you have enough paint on there. So we're putting a nice big old nose there. All right, I am— I already painted today, so doing what you're not supposed to and leaving all my brushes in my paint water. If you're new to painting, that's a no-no. I do it all the time. I mean, it's not like it's going to absolutely ruin your brushes, but it's not going to keep them like in pristine condition. Now Granted, I probably have over 1,000 paintbrushes, which is probably why I don't worry about it as much. But I'm gonna go live. I've talked about it. I've showed you a post, but I just— this is just another little honest moment for you. I taught my last paint night teaching the ceramic trucks several weeks ago. It was not in December, I could tell you that. And I really, really thought that I had gotten my paint bucket out of my supply bag that had all my brushes in it. So at the end of my paint night, I gather up all my brushes and I throw them in, um, a big water pitcher with about yay much water in it to soak the brushes until I get them home to wash them. Forgot all about it. So that's been several weeks. I just found those in the garage when I was grabbing some paint. So what I thought is tomorrow, after I wash them— and I'll show you, they'll be all bent because I've left them in a container and then they get that little like swoop to them. But I have this trick where you can boil the tips, the bristles of the paintbrushes, and it makes them straight again. So for people like me, that's awesome because that just saves hundreds of paintbrushes that I've nearly ruined over the past 6 years teaching people how to paint. So you guys want to see that little tip? I'll show you how to do it, and it is super fast, like that, and they're like back to almost brand new. All right, I'll quit rambling. You guys are like, just get to painting, get to painting. Okay, so I'm gonna do gray and white in the beard. I'm gonna go a little darker gray, and I am literally just mixing black and white. So I don't— I personally do not prefer gray straight out of the bottle. You may be lucky and find one that you're happy with. I've bought several from several different brands and and I really just don't like them as much as just mixing my own gray. Now, if you were doing some kind of craft project instead of painting where it's— you want to have one exact solid color across your surface, whatever you're doing, and you don't want variation— I usually like variation in everything that I do, which is also why I like to mix my colors. You would, you you would probably like to do and prefer to have a paint straight out of the bottle that's one color, but I just like the tone. Some grays out of the bottle almost have like a yellowish tone to them that I do not care for at all, and I really like just this regular black paint mixed with white, and then I can have varying shades. Of gray. All right, so I wanted it a little darker up at the top, and then we'll add a little more white. But again, I'm gonna try to hold this up so you guys can see. That's a ton of paint on there, but it's gonna soak it right in, so we're gonna need a lot of it. And I'm just trying to— if you can see, there's just a bunch of black and white on there, and then I'm letting it mix as I put it on my board. Now I had a basic sketch on here just with like a chalk outline of my gnome, but I think I'm just gonna have them fill the whole board up. I think I'm just gonna have a little bit of his feet showing down at the bottom. So what do you guys think so far? Do you like the mixture where it's not just one solid color? And keep in mind, we are working with acrylic paint, so anything you do and you don't like it— I'm gonna lift this up a little so I can get to that bottom edge. Anything you do and you don't like it, all you have to do is let it dry and then you can paint right over top of it again. So it's really hard to make a permanent mistake on your painting. So this— I talk about this a lot in my group, to try to leave that perfectionist personality behind when you're painting and just have fun and enjoy the process, enjoy that me time. That you're giving yourself. Maybe that's why, why you want to paint or why you enjoy painting. I know for myself, so I just got back, for those of you that don't know, we took our kids, our 3 girls, to Mexico for a week over Thanksgiving. I don't think I realized how bad I needed a vacation. Just the 5 of us. We haven't had won Just the Five of Us Like That in 2 years. And it was so good for us, and it was so good for me to honestly not work. So my business has grown a lot over the last year, and it's really easy for me to feel like I have to work 24/7, or that I have to answer a message that one of you may send me at 10:30 at night, and I don't. And, um, like it's okay for me to turn off, right? Does anyone else— is anyone else a little bit of a workaholic? Or maybe it's not even that. Maybe you're just going, going, going all the time and you're a busy mom. Whatever it may be, we're busy, right? And very rarely do we take time for ourselves. So that was my goal on this vacation, was to really take time for myself and to turn the noise off. And so on— I was getting email notifications on my phone, and while I was laying there supposedly relaxing, right, and then I'd get distracted by something, and the next thing I knew I'd be working again. So day 2, I said, okay, that's it, I'm turning off all notifications on my phone. And First of all, if you haven't done that before, I highly recommend it. Do you really have to know when you're getting an email? I was talking to my therapist about this and how psychologically, even if we hear our phone vibrate off to the side, you have it on silent, or you see it light up, you can't focus on that moment in time anymore because you're more concerned about what might be on your phone and you're distracted by it. Am I the only one? Shoot me up some thumbs up or hearts if you can relate to me at all. But I usually have my phone near me, and even if I'm trying to pay attention to the person in front of me, I'll see something light up on here and I'm like, oh, I need to get that. Oh, I need to focus on that right now. And I don't. So back to my story. Day 2, turned off my notifications. My mood completely changed. My investment in the moment completely changed. I was fully invested, fully loving every minute of my vacation, thankful that God gave it to us, gave us this time to have together to reset and reconnect as a family. That was the best thing I could have done for myself. And guess what? I haven't turned them back on since I've been home because I don't have to know that that email was sent at 3:05 PM and I don't have to answer it at 3:05 PM. You know what I'm saying? Like, I have business hours. If I get emails after those business hours when my kids are home and it's time for me to switch to mom mode, I'm not going to answer that email. And that is a commitment I've made to my family and to myself and to my team. And the same for my team. They don't have to answer those emails either because they have families, but we have business hours. Just like every business, right? And we have customer service hours, and every email will get responded to within a 24-hour span of time. And it took me literally having a vacation to like tell myself that's okay. How sad is that? But you know what, I'm just glad I had the realization, and I'm pretty sure my team is too. Um, But all of that to say— see, I'm rambling, but there's a long-winded point of this story. It's okay for you to take time for yourself. That for me was a huge thing. I turned off my notifications. I got up every morning we were in Mexico and I sat outside on our porch and I did my devotional and I spent time with God. Another thing I told myself I needed to put off because I needed to get up and answer emails and look at the messages and see who needed help. He wanted me to spend time with him. He's gonna take care of the rest of that when the time is right, but he's more concerned about me relying on him and spending time with him in the morning than he is about me getting to my emails and getting to my business. And again, a habit I built on my vacation, I took home, and I've stuck with since I've been home. And just, I'm just gonna spill my guts to you guys tonight. I have gained about 15 pounds over the last year because again, I'm a little bit of a workaholic and I have made excuses for myself and I've said that I don't have time to work out anymore and that's a big fat lie and it's all about priorities and And it was about allowing myself time to do something for me. And so we came home and I started committing to working out again. And the first day I put on my workout clothes and I looked at myself in the mirror, I almost started crying because I remembered how much I loved the girl that did this all the time. All the time. I liked how I felt. I liked how I looked. I felt better about myself. I had more energy. I've struggled with depression my entire life and anxiety, and exercising helps me with those things, but I had completely cut it out of my life because I said I didn't have time for it. And so I'm making a commitment to myself to put that back into my life because I know it's good for me and I know it's okay for me to spend time on me. and that's gonna make me a better mom and a better wife and a better businesswoman and a better tribe leader for my tribe. All the things. Gotta get our priorities straight, and mine were completely out of whack, and it was starting to take a toll on me, especially this time of year. I know I'm not the only one who struggles with, you know, seasonal depression and depression around this time of year because we get so anxious about everything. And for probably the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm in control again and I can make the decisions of what is important to me and what priorities I need to set forth. And guess what the other thing is that I'm gonna do? Another priority I set for myself is doing some art just for me, not to teach, not to get on and go live. I know you guys like me to, and I still will, but you know what? I have some amazing artist friends. Cindy Manley from Art Shattered, who I adore, and she teaches glass art. I have bought the resin from her. I just ordered $30 in glass, and I told her, I said, you are one of my goals. You are one of my goals over my Christmas break is to sit down and do glass art and finally teach myself how to do it. Because one, I haven't had time. Two, I've been scared. I'm scared I'm gonna mess it up, and heaven forbid I mess something up. So I'm gonna jump in and do that. And Casey Hope, who has the Whatever Letter Club and she teaches hand lettering, she has— I'm in her membership— she has so many fun projects, so many fun projects, and I put them off and I put them off because I'm working on my stuff. You know, but I need to do those things for me too. And they're so fun, and it's learning, and it's making me a better artist, which in turn is gonna help me serve you better. It's all a win-win, right? But we get in our heads. We get in our heads about this stuff, and we convince ourselves otherwise. So how about that for a little random therapy session for you guys tonight. Let you know what's going on in my head lately. Amazing when you give yourself the time to actually sit and think and talk to God a little bit. Things kind of start falling into place, and I am the queen of trying to handle it on my own. Do I have anybody else out there? Me and God have this tug of war where I'll ask him for something and then he gives it to me. He gave it to me. He gave me y'all and this entire business, and I trusted him every step of the way. And then I'm like, okay, good, okay, now I got it, and now I'm gonna try, and now I'm gonna do this and this and this and this, and then I forget to go to him first. And then guess what? Everything unravels and it falls apart again because it wasn't meant to do it by myself. I was meant to do it with him and with him and me. And when that is my focus and that's what I'm focusing on each day, everything has a little more peace. I can feel his presence. I can feel what he's doing in my business. I can feel the love that art is giving to me, and then I get to share with you guys, and that can be healing for so many people for so many different reasons. So yeah, that's my, that's my little piece for you guys tonight while we're painting our gnome. All right, so I added his little shoes on, and I wanted to share— it all came together to one point, and I wanted to share it with you guys. All right, so I'm just gonna start streaking in some white. And you could do this however— there is no certain way to do this. And then I'm gonna pull this over top of his shoes so the shoes go behind his beard. We'll just have his beard going right off the bottom. What do you guys think so far? Do we like him? I think I want to go in with a little bit of darker gray kind of around here and streak it in and kind of put like a little bit more of a shadow underneath his nose. Alright, so I am switching to an angled brush. I was using a big flat. I'm switching to a smaller angled brush just so I can get in just a little more detail underneath here. and I want you to notice just by me adding, can you already see how quickly that gave it depth just by adding a little bit of black underneath that nose? And then I'm just going to blend it in. Let's put a little black under his hat here too. So hopefully you can see that that creates that depth as soon as I add that in. But I think my main, main point for you guys, or hope for you guys, is that you remember that you're important and that you deserve time. For yourself. And for a lot of you following me, that may be painting for you, it may be reading, it may be prayer time, it may be working out. Whatever it is, don't, don't short yourself. We give to everybody else all day long, and you deserve just as much, if not more than them, because it's going to help you be better to all those people in your life. All right, what do we think? I think I need to blend this a little bit more over here. I don't want to go up too high, but I don't want it to look like a solid line. Over there either. All right guys, what do you think? Do I need to do anything? I think I need to fix— I am gonna go back and pull this hat over just a little bit, and I'm just gonna grab a little bit of the yellow ochre. And I do that just because it kind of gives him like a more aged look, and I'm just going to mix it with a little bit of white. All right, I think I'm going to— this will be the last thing that I do. Let's see, what do I want to grab? We're going to try this one. This is called Mississippi Mud, and it's kind of like a mocha color. Oh, and only oil is coming out. Not oil, but like when it separates. So I'm just gonna go— I just want a little bit darker, more on like the skin tone. I've already got my shadowing on the beard, but I don't have any shadowing. This is really watery. I don't have any shadowing on his nose. We're gonna try this. If I don't like it— and I don't like it— I'm gonna repaint it. Yes, I could put a little highlight on his foot too, Katie suggested. I'm gonna go a little of the darker peachy color underneath here for my shading. I think I'm gonna like that better. Then maybe a little highlight on his nose. I need to do a little bit of black outlining up here on his hat too. A little white on a shoe. I'm gonna grab a little black here. Okay, I think I'm gonna call him done. You guys want to see closer? And I think his new home— I can't decide. His new home is either gonna be my front porch or on my fireplace, but I've been dying to do a big fat gnome. So you guys join the free Facebook group and work on your version. It can be in a mixed media pad. If you don't know what that is, you can get these DecoArt paints, a mixed media pad, my favorite paintbrushes. All that stuff is in my Amazon affiliate store. So I just get basically a small percentage, very small percentage of your sales when you visit my Amazon store, but it's a great place for me to put all of my favorite stuff, and I have different categories for you. So get a mixed media pad, grab yourself some paints and some brushes, or put it on your Christmas list and give your spouse that list. Because guess what? Guys love lists. And if he can go and just click, click, click, click, click, add everything that you want from my Amazon store to a cart and be done, he's going to be pretty excited, especially because he can probably have it in 2 days. So I hope you guys had fun. Sorry it took me a few weeks to get back to finishing this. If you missed the first part of me painting the hat. You can go back to my videos on my Facebook page and get that. We will also be— actually, I'm gonna combine these two videos, that one and the one that I'm doing right now, and we'll put them into one and it will go up on my YouTube channel over the next week or so. So you can also follow me on YouTube if you haven't been over there yet, and there's all kinds of videos for you to follow. So hope you guys had fun. I may jump on quickly tomorrow and I'll show you guys my little brush for taking care of your brushes and getting them straight again after you've left them in water for too long and they started bending. I'm going to show you how to fix that. So it'll be a quick one. All right, I'll talk to you guys later. Bye.