DIY Rustic Christmas Tree Farm Sign Painting Tutorial

Learn to paint this simple, farmhouse-style Christmas Tree Farm Sign and add it to your seasonal home decor.

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It’s time! It’s finally time to decorate for Christmas. I LOVE creating a cozy, magical, beautiful, Christmas-filled space for my family to enjoy every year. And I love using pieces I’ve painted to make our space not just beautiful and seasonal, but personal, too. 

Today I am going to teach you how to paint one of my new favorite Christmas decor pieces. This Christmas Tree Farm Sign is perfect for placing on your mantle, a shelf, your kitchen counter, or anywhere else you want to create a little Christmas vignette. 

The farmhouse style of this sign and the faux wood slats I created with paint add to its charm. The best part? This simple project can be made even easier by transferring typed lettering instead of hand lettering the words yourself! 

How to Paint this DIY Christmas Tree Farm Sign

Choose your lettering.

You can choose to hand letter the words on our Christmas Tree Farm Sign. If you do, you can skip this step! 

If, however, you are not confident in your hand lettering or just like the look of certain fonts, we’re going to use a transfer technique later to get the words onto your sign just the way you want them. 

To start, play around with different fonts inside a word processing program to get a combination you like. I chose to type “Farm Fresh” in a more rustic-looking font and “Christmas Trees” in cursive or script-style font. I liked each of the fonts individually and really liked the contrast between the two.  

When you’re happy with your fonts, print the page out and set it aside for later — after you’ve checked the size to make sure your letters will fit well inside the wooden box. 

Create wooden “slats” with paint.   

My husband Corey built me this cute wooden box. I had painted it plain white with black sides and it had sat on a shelf for a long time waiting for the perfect inspiration. 

If you don’t have a handy husband or the skill and desire to build your own wooden box, you can find something very similar at any craft store or even on Amazon. The inside of my wooden box measures 12×12, so try to find something of a similar size. 

To achieve the farmhouse feel I’m looking for, I wanted to create the look of wood slats on my sign. This was easy to do and only required the use of two paint colors – black and white!

First, I took a chip brush and applied a rough coat of white craft paint. 

Then I used a skinny liner brush and mixed a little bit of burnt umber paint in with black craft paint. I painted thin lines across, not worrying about making my lines perfect. Remember, we want to give the illusion of wood slats, and real wood is not perfect. 

I then grabbed a little white paint with an angled brush and went back to soften the edges of the black lines. 

I played around with the lines until I was happy with the effect and knew it would make the perfect background for my trees and lettering. 

Mix the perfect color and paint the frame.  

If you’ve spent any time painting with me, you know how much I love mixing colors. Understanding colors and how they work together allows you to play and have fun creating the perfect shade for your painting! Learn more about color mixing in this blog post

For the frame of our wooden box, I mixed black, burnt umber, and white all together to get a brownish-grayish shade I call Driftwood. 

I used my chip brush to go over the sides of the box. This is almost like a dry brush technique as I use very little paint and just work it back and forth with a light touch. The paint grabs the rough pieces of wood which helps me achieve the rustic look I’m going for. 

You could choose to use a stain for this part, but I prefer to use paint. It’s much less messy and gives me the effect I want.  

Transfer your lettering onto the slats. 

If you have time, wait until your paint is completely dry. If you’re in a hurry like I was, use a blow dryer to speed up the drying process. 

Tear off a piece of graphite paper and place it at the top of your background, shiny side down. Then take your typed lettering of “Farm Fresh, ” place it on top of the graphite paper, and trace around each letter with a pencil. If you carefully trace the shape of each letter, you’ll be able to easily recreate the font style with a paint pen in the last step. 

Repeat this process at the bottom of the background with the “Christmas Trees” lettering. 

Again, if you are confident in your ability to hand letter, you can simply paint the words with paint pens. 

Let’s paint some trees. 

Before you paint trees onto your background, get out your mixed media pad and practice. 

I tried two different techniques to paint my Christmas trees, one with an angled brush and one with a fan brush. I ended up liking the results I got with my angled brush better. Spend some time playing around on your mixed media pad and you’ll discover the perfect Christmas trees for your Christmas Tree Farm Sign. 

Using dark green paint, I started with a vertical line as a base and then just used my angled brush in a flicking-type motion to create the pine boughs. I curved my brush up as I reached the end of the boughs to create the shape I wanted. 

I painted a grouping of three trees — they fill the space just perfectly. 

Then, I went back with a lighter green paint and added wispy strokes of color on top of the dark green to add light and depth. I LOVE how they turned out. 

Finish the lettering and the project.  

Now it’s time to go back and fill in the lettering. I used my black Posca pen and just carefully followed the lines that had been transferred onto the background. 

Once I finished the lettering, I sat back to see if my sign needed anything else. I decided it was perfect the way it was, full of farmhouse charm!  

I hope you have fun painting this Christmas sign and finding the perfect spot to display it! 

Watch the full DIY Christmas Tree Farm Sign painting tutorial. 

Post a picture and share what you learned on The Social Easel Facebook Page!

Stay creative and happy painting!

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