Drawing Christmas lights is a fun exercise to try your hand at drawing. The shapes are not too complicated and the repetitive motion of drawing the same lights can be almost meditative.
The most important thing when you want to start drawing is just to start somewhere. I believe anyone can draw, but people are just too afraid to start because they see all those beautiful drawings online and compare their own work to work by experienced artists. That’s not a fair comparison. If you want to read more about this, I wrote a blog about this.
Moreover, I believe that creating art is mostly for yourself and can help you relieve stress and take your mind off things. So use this exercise also as a moment of creative me-time. In our busy lives, it’s important to reserve some time for you in which you can relax and reload for the rest of the day.
Now back to the exercise. My favorite Christmas lights are the yellow ones, but the colored ones can be very festive as well. In this exercise, I decided to draw both kinds.
Of course, you can choose to draw different Christmas lights as well. This is just an example of the kind of lights you can draw.
To give the impression that the lights are glowing, we use a simple coloring technique. Anyone can do it.
Are you up for the challenge? Then, let’s start with this mindful drawing Christmas lights exercise.
Please let me know if this exercise helped you relax, I’d love to know.
You can find a small video of this exercise on my Instagram @thecreativecooldown
Supplies used:
Bristol paper (Hahnemühle), alcohol markers (Winsor & Newton), fineliner no. 0.05, 0.3, 1.0 (Copic), white acrylic marker (Posca).
Alternative supply suggestions:
For this exercise, you can use a regular pen or a pencil to draw the lights. If you want to add color, use whatever you have, such as crayons, markers, watercolor. You can even use a pencil to color your lights and just add various shades of grey.
Instructions
Drawing your lights
1. Draw a horizontal line across the paper. It doesn’t have to be perfectly straight. Then, you can draw your lights. For the first one, I used simple lightbulbs. Draw a small rectangle and add a small circle on top to draw your lightbulb. In the end, add some small horizontal lines to your rectangle to simulate the metal of the lightbulb.
2. For the next Christmas lights, we start drawing a wavy line with a few loops across the page. Add some rectangles to the bottom of the line and follow the direction of your loops. Then, add the shape of the lightbulb. It looks like a cross between a triangle and a circle. Start at one corner of the rectangle and start drawing a semi-circle then curve up in the middle. Do the same on the other side of the rectangle and make sure they meet in the middle.
3. Now, we are going to draw some string lights. We’ll first draw two thin, intertwining lines horizontally across the page. Then, you grab a bigger pen and add short lines at the top and bottom of the lines. These are the basis of the lights. Add these lines add different angles to make it more playful. Afterward, draw small circles on top of your lines and you have drawn string lights.
4. For the last string of lights, we’ll draw some paper lanterns. Again, draw a horizontal line across your page. Add some circles under your line. At the bottom of your circle, draw a small circle to simulate the hole at the bottom. It doesn’t have to be in the middle you can also move it a bit to the side to make it look like the wind is blowing it sideways. Then, add a few curved, horizontal lines above this small circle, make sure the curve/angle is the same. Also, add two curved vertical lines. In the end, add some hatches (small horizontal lines that are close together) to the small circle at the bottom to make it a bit darker and make the hole clearer.
Coloring your lights
5. Now, it’s time to color our lights. To simulate the glow of the lights, we need a darker and a lighter shade of the same color. For the first string of lights, I colored the lightbulbs yellow, and I added a kind of halo around the lightbulb with ivory. I did the same for the string lights. For the second string, I colored the lights green, purple, red, and blue. Then I added a halo in light green, light purple, light blue, and orange. To make the glowing effect even greater, I used a white posca marker to draw a small white line on the outside of the lightbulb (so between the two colors). For the last string, I colored the middle of the lanterns in a darker color and used the lighter color for the rest of the lantern.
Now you’re finished with this mindful drawing Christmas lights exercise. Well done!
If you liked this exercise, you might like my Mindful umbrella pattern exercise as well.
