Deck out a realistic, modern, or cartoon Christmas tree to illustrate a newsletter, to use as part of a holiday card, or to turn into a graphic for your Web site. These tutorials show you step-by-step how to create all kinds of Christmas trees.
- Draw a Christmas Tree Step-by-Step - About,com Drawing and Sketching Guide Helen South shows you how to draw a simple tree that starts with a triangle. These simple steps can easily be adapted to draw the same tree in your graphics software.
- Draw a Christmas Tree With a Paint Program - I used Windows Paint to draw a Christmas tree following Helen's About.com tutorial. You can use these same basic steps with Photoshop and other paint programs.
- Design a Christmas Tree with Adobe Photoshop - In this tutorial you start with a triangle, apply brush strokes, then finish with ribbons and some presents under the tree.
- Draw a Christmas Tree with Lights Using Adobe Photoshop - This is very realistic looking tree that uses lots of layers and even a scan of some real tree branches.
- Create a Christmas Tree Design in Adobe Photoshop - This snowy scene features a stylized tree with a bit of a glow to it.
- How to Draw a Simple Christmas Tree - This could be done easily in a drawing program. Click on the graphics to see larger images.
- Draw a Christmas Tree with Adobe Illustrator - This 3 page tutorial includes screenshots and walks you through drawing a tree and adding decorations.
- Draw a Christmas Tree in Adobe Illustrator CS3 with the Pen and Blend Tools - You'll have to click on the links to open each image in this tutorial which ends with a very sleek, modern representation of a Christmas tree.
- Painting a Holiday Christmas Tree with Corel Painter - At the end of this guest article by Karen Bonaker at About.com Graphics Software you'll have a nice realistic, decorated tree.
Christmas Tree
© J. Bear
Want to create a Christmas Tree similar to the one shown above? I drew the basic tree in Windows Paint 7 (Yes, really). The tree was drawn/painted in several shades of green using primarily the Airbrush and Crayon brushes plus a bunch of pencil lines. The garland was drawn first with the curved line tool and then embellished a bit with the Calligraphy brushes. Then I drew on some round ornaments with the circle shape tool and used the 4-point star shape tool to add the star on top and to add tiny little red, yellow, and blue lights. The resulting Christmas tree was decent enough but crude.
I then opened the Paint image in the free PhotoScape software. Although I tweaked it with a few random adjustments (very few), the main look was achieved with the filter "Pictorialization > Cartoon". Not bad for a quicky job using free software. For an even faster, easier tree drawing, see my tutorial on drawing a Christmas tree in a Paint program (also linked above).
Happy Xmas Jacci – in the spirit of giving i am going to offer the comment that your tree looks more like a greengage gelly with very meanly applied cream – and lots of nice English words to add to your collection as well. Go well, and keep up the good work, you are appreciated, Bob
Hi Bob. I can honestly say that prior to your comment I’d never heard of a greengage and certainly didn’t think it was term used here in Texas. Definitely had to google that one. Oddly, I found page here on About.com with an O. Henry story that mentions greengages. The Higher Abdication.
What makes it kinda weird is that last night I was helping my daughter find some of her archived writing samples (for a school project) and one of them was about O. Henry — who used to live here in Austin — and the story with the greengage mention was set here in Texas. Struck me as funny.
OK, now you’ve gone and made me think of food!
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