Happy holidays! Christmas is my favorite holiday and this year, I wanted to start a new tradition. I know many people have a fun little advent calendar to help build excitement for Christmas day, but my family never had one and I thought that it would be a festive art project for the holidays.
I found this blank wooden tree-shaped advent calendar on Amazon. The wood was unfinished and pretty rough, so I had to sand everything down to make the surfaces smooth. Then I primed it with two coats of gesso and started painting!
Here is the advent calendar after sanding and priming. I meant to take a photo without any paint on it but forgot…hence the green stripe in the middle. Oops. You can also see a big painting that I’m working on in the background =)
The little drawers are less than 2 inches square, so you can only fit tiny things in there.
It took 2-3 coats of paint to completely cover the wood. I used acrylic paint for the green and red, and brush-on gold leaf for the knobs and numbers.
I put a little note in each one and a couple of holiday Hershey’s kisses.
Of course, Christmas is not over until you have had one tin of butter cookies. And if you are Taiwanese, pineapple cake!
