Painted Sugar Cookies

Adding a painted watercolor effect to cookies is a great way to make beautiful, decorated cookies without using more royal icing! These Painted Sugar Cookies are a unique and fun cookie decorating idea that is easy for beginners and everyone in between. Great as holiday cookies!

If you’re thinking that this cookie looks hard to make, let me assure you…this is a result of my FIRST attempt at creating watercolor art on cookies! 

I had a blast making these and couldn’t believe how quickly I got the hang of it. I had seen other cookie decorators use this effect and thought it was such a great idea. Starting out with a simple design, like these trees, will give you good practice, and it’s such a pretty cookie for the holidays or Christmas!

If you are hesitant about creating elaborate cookie designs with Royal Icing, then watercolor paining is a great alternative to that.

Painted Sugar Cookies are so easy

I am not an artist by any means.

For this tree design, I simply allowed the brush to form the branches and I think it came out pretty neat!

I like to joke that I channeled my “inner Bob Ross” making these happy little trees. 

The only part that you need royal icing for is the base layer. You will need a surface to paint on; you cannot paint directly onto the cookie.

Once you make your cookies (I definitely recommend my Perfect Sugar Cookie Cut Out recipe), use Royal icing to flood the cookie. I like to keep the icing pure white so that all of my colors stand out. 

Once the cookies are flooded, let them dry overnight. You need the icing to be completely dry and hard in order to proceed with painting.

Now, you’re ready to paint!

To make painted cookies, you will need:

• Cookies that have been flooded with white royal icing (completely dried and hard)
• Small bowls or a ceramic egg holder to hold the paint colors in. I like the egg holder because it’s so easy to move about and switch colors.
• Assorted paint brushes; the tree branches look best using a squared tip brush
• Clear grain alcohol (I use vodka, everclear is also recommended)
• An eye dropper; this is the best tool to control the consistency of the color
• Food coloring
  • For this design I used Americolor’s ‘Moss‘ & ‘Silver Spruce‘
• Paper towels to blot off excess paint
• A paint proof surface to work on. I laid a sheet of plastic wrap down on the surface to ensure my counter didn’t get stained. 

How to make these watercolor tree cookies

Start by adding a few drops of the Moss Green food coloring into the dish and dilute it slightly with a few drops of vodka. 

Using a flat/wide brush, create several tree trunks. You want to try and make the color a bit deeper for the trunks to give the trees a sturdy center.

Using the corners of the brush, lightly dab branches on either side of the center. If you repeat some dabs on top of the branches you already made, it gives the tree more depth. 

With the darkest trees made, dilute the food coloring with a few more drops of vodka to lighten the color. Make a few more trees at different heights behind the darker ones. 

If you have other shades of green (the Silver Spruce color is gorgeous and works wonderfully for this design), add a drop to the green color you’ve already made or into a new bowl/cavity. It helps to mix up the shades/tones of greens to give the trees a more of a woodsy, forest look. 

Lastly, add a little dab of color to the bottom of the cookie and thin it out with a bit of pure vodka on your brush. Add a different shade of green and swirl it on top for contrast to make the ground that the trees stand on.

This cookie is a very simple design, but it’s easy to see that you can paint cookies with any design you come up with!!

In this version, I added some snow using AmeriColor’s ‘Fog’ color. So pretty!!

 

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