Gingerbread House

Getting to this blue light special gingerbread house ornaments took a bit of time for the

Winter challenge #winterdailyart2019 and #christmasdailyart2019 in ProCreate.

Day 19 Gingerbread House

Making these gingerbread houses is a special treat. Each year since the oldest grandkids were about four or five, we’ve all built gingerbread houses together at Christmas time– lots of serious planning with all those candies and icing– four groups of kids in teams, just because– mostly cousins of the same age. The oldest grandkids are now 25 years old, so remembering twenty years of little gingerbread houses brings happy memories of great times.

Love the people, trees, walkways– the snow dripping down from the roof, the wreaths on the door, the roof designs. Clever fun, for sure!

These have so much more character than my artful ornaments.

What holiday traditions do you have?

Techniques

First, I had to practice making the swirls of frosting with the “icing” brush— a smooth flowing brush like the studio pen. So I “iced” three gingerbread ornaments.

So, where are they? How do they hang? That means adding in ribbons — adding stripes to a bright red ribbon background. They probably need a bit of shadow near the connection to the houses.

Remember the pine cone? Saving just the pine branch as a png allowed me to import several images of that pine branch to arrange as the side of the tree on which the ornaments hang, along with the png of my snowflake from this challenge.

My first attempt:

So, play around with the app, create single things like a pinecone or snowflake, and save the image as a png for future scenes.

Lights

But it seemed that something was missing — lights, so I added the glow of an airbrushed yellow circle, with a slight Gaussian blur to place behind each snowflake:

The Text is Next:

Of course, a small poem might add to the image. I duplicated, then erased the icing of the house details on the right ornament so I could insert the poem with text. The text is highlighted from behind with yellow airbrush, and is duplicated. The back layer is very dark green with a Gaussian blur added to round out the text. Gingerbread with Poem

The Poem:

With each decoration set as before

On tree or mantle or on the door

Flash memories of years gone by

Of scenes and scents and lullabies

Of laughter, song, and stories told

Living into what this season holds

Amid the hugs and conversations:

We add more to future recollections.

~ Sheri Edwards

Light Revision and Highlights

As I looked at the yellow glow though, I could see the blues and greens of the pine and snowflakes, so I changed the final image [at top of post] to glow with blue lights that reflect onto the cookie ornament icing.

Very fun– and very much keeps my mind hopeful.

Happy Holidays!  Please share some of your holiday designs and techniques too.

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See Jennifer Nichol’s Skillshare Challenge here.

Art Techniques on my blog for this challenge.

My work for the challenge on Flickr.

Other art at my shop:
sheri42.net/

 

DecDoodle / CLmooc