While I absolutely adore the look of carefully wrapped holiday packages with bows and elaborate decorations, that is just not happening in my house, my cats will pull off any kind of decoration so I’m forced to improvise. I also wanted to create reusable gift tags so that I didn’t have to throw them away and buy new each year. Because I took an art journaling class over the summer, I wanted to try and incorporate some of the fun acrylic paints that I bought.

The first step was opening up Silhouette Studio and finding a nice blocky font to use for their initials. I knew that I wanted the letters to be about 3 inches tall so I sized my canvas for 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper and created several letters at that size for each family member. I use my Silhouette to cut out the letters and put them aside.

Then I opened up the patterned cards from Traci’s #StayHome for the Holidays collection and selected several to use as backgrounds for my tags.

Because I wanted to use a color scheme of black, white, kraft, red and green, I used the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to sample those colors from the patterned cards and using the magic wand tool I isolated individual colors from the cards and changed them so that I had a mixture of cards using the colors I wanted.

Then I arranged several pages of patterned cards in various color schemes and cut them out.

Knowing I would need some decorations, I selected several of the stickers from the #StayHome collection and placed them on a Photoshop canvas, changing colors again when desired. Once I had the page filled up, I saved it as a PNG and imported it into my Silhouette and cut them out.

Now it’s on to the messy part! I pulled out four or five acrylic paint colors and some bubble wrap. I used an empty cardboard box, stuck the individual letters down gently with some washi tape so they could be moved later and “painted” the individual letters using the acrylic paints being careful to let them dry between colors.

After they were thoroughly dry, it was time to decorate them. I used a batch process to lay out the patterned cards that I had printed, some solid coordinating cardstock, the stickers and miscellaneous other bits from my stash. Then, I started assembling my tags.

I ended up doing a few for friends and grandparents and four sets of tags for my kids and their spouse/significant other making all of them slightly different. For one of them I added stitching, for another I added ribbon bits, for another I added some bling. Here’s how they all turned out when I was finished. It was fun to get a little paint on my hands and I know I will be able to “recycle” and use them again in the future.

December of Memories 2021: Hybrid Painted Gift Tag Tutorial