 Hello there. I'm Sandy Alnok. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm an artist and I use a lot of different mediums and a lot of different surfaces to make a lot of different things. And today I'm going to be making a greeting card and on that greeting card I am going to use or attempt to use. I will let you decide if I was successful or not seven stamp sets because there's a new release out by Colorado Craft Company. I wanted to see if I could get seven out of eight of them onto one single card. At the end of the video, I'm going to show you two previews though. One is specifically for card makers, a new thing that I'm going to be doing coming up soon, that you might want to get signed up for ahead of time. And secondly, a new class series that I just launched this week and I want to make sure that you know about it. So stay tuned at the end for those and let's get started. Let's begin by looking at the stamps and there are eight stamp sets in this release. Seven of them have animal images that I decided to use. I've been having so much fun doing animals lately. If you haven't noticed on my channel and I've used a couple of the little vegetables that are in there with them. But I use the first seven sets on my card, including this one that has little grasses, there's all different kinds in there. And the background stamp has all the images, except for a few. There's a couple missing and they're also smaller than they are in the stamp set. So they're not the exact same ones. Now you stamp with a light ink on this desert storm cardstock that I'm going to be using and it's not craft paper, it's Nina Desert Storm. So it's going to blend like Nina does, except it's got this color already on it, which means it's going to change the tone of everything. And we're going to use pencil on top of it to brighten it up. But first I'm going to open all the stamp sets and lay out my stamps and try to get my arrangement. You could alternatively stamp all the images and put them on either sticky notes or on masking paper or something. I'll link some masking paper in the supply list for you. In case you decide to do that, you could do that and then just kind of move those sticky notes around and get your arrangement right and then follow that for your stamping. I thought this was going to be just much faster, so that's why I did it this way. Basically arranging my stamps, trying to figure out in my head which one should be in front of which one. I made sure all the ones on the left faced to the right and all the ones on the right faced to the left. They're all kind of walking toward the middle. Nobody's walking off the page. And there's a few in the middle that are kind of walking straight forward. And that kind of seemed like a decent arrangement. I kind of moved them around, tried to align their feet so they were on the same plane. And everybody was in the same general garden and there would be nobody floating above the ground. So once I was happy with that, cleared off the excess vegetables that I wasn't going to stamp quite yet and just closed the misty on it. And that picked up the stamps that were closest to it, of course. And then I just peeled off the extra ones. And then I could just stamp a couple of them all at once. I made it a little easier, a little faster to just do all of those. And then I'm stamping in a light ink. And when you stamp in a light ink, you can use a light gray or a light tan. The color that I have is from MFT from like, I don't know, years and years and years ago. They don't even make it anymore, but just use a light color. And a neutral is going to be better if it's animals. But if you're doing this with flowers, you're going to want to do it in whatever color the flower is. So if it's a pink flower, stamp in a light pink ink. So I moved the excess stamps that I had taken off. I moved them in between, continued the arrangement. But notice I'm not masking anything, nothing. I'm just stamping them all right on top of each other. See? It looks like a mess, but there's a reason I'm doing it this way, and it's going to work out. I promise you. I'm adding in some of the extra vegetables and then the grasses along the ground, so that I have one continuous scene with all of these lovely critters walking through the garden. For something like this, I find that coloring the frontmost images first works best, especially when there's all this cacophony in the background, trying to figure out where one image starts and another ends. Et cetera. This just helps to focus on one thing. Just say I'm going to do the grasses and the cabbage. And I'm going to focus my brain there. I'm not going to put in a ton of detail in the alcohol marker coloring. One reason is because it's going to be a card that's going to be one layer, and I don't want a ton of the color bleeding through the back because this is Nina and Nina will do that because that's where the blending happens. But I also did have a little bit go through, and I put just one panel of the same cardstock behind this front panel, and that covered up the little tiny bit of bleeding that there was. But I'm not using a ton of color to push into the blending. Like I will on many occasions. I like to use a lot of marker. And here I'm just going to do light blending, and then I'm going to do more of it with the colored pencils later. Because as you can see, color kind of gets dead on this paper. And you can even tell that there's some colors on my Olo marker hex chart that you can't see anything at all. So I was going to have to pick from the colors that are ones that will show up. Like I needed something that was going to stay visible. And turning to my hex chart printed on this paper was really helpful in choosing colors. So I recommend you do that if you're going to color on any other papers. Each of the animals is google-able if you look for the animal and just say, I want a striped guinea pig. What would that look like? You can come up with a picture of what a striped guinea pig, a particular one might look like, and give yourself an idea for some creative striping you can put on the animals, that sort of thing. So I decided the three guinea pigs would look a little bit different from each other. But all the rabbits would be Dutch bunnies, Dutch rabbits. And if you look up Dutch rabbits, you'll see how cute they are. They're black and white. The only place where the stamping ended up being a problem was on this guy and the one right next to him. Because the place where the arm is for the bunny I'm coloring right now is in just about the same place as the ear for the next bunny. So they did end up looking a little weird, but the rest of them worked out great. But I'm just going to jump around to different ones of these rabbits to color in the dark areas. Because the rabbits are clear, they're right there in front of me and I can follow along with what I can see. And what each step does is start to clarify where's the areas you haven't colored yet and which one is going to be in front of which one. So I had to decide as I went if one of the rabbits was going to be in front of something then the color needed to be stronger. If it was going to be behind something I needed to color the thing that's in front of it first. So when I wanted to color the second bunny from the left I needed to color that carrot first from the very first bunny on the left so that I would at least know where that started and stopped. So when I got to the second rabbit I was going to be okay. And you know just fill in one spot at a time, one animal at a time, one piece of fruit or vegetable at a time and then eventually it'll all get filled in. Notice that I'm not doing a lot of blending. I'm not getting into any of the color and trying to blend a whole lot as of yet. I'll put a little bit more in but I was going to save a lot of that to do with the pencils because the pencils can come in and lighten up one color. It can darken up another and separate things like a leaf that's in front of another leaf. I could just change the tone on one of them so that they visually separate some. And each of the animals then will hang together because they've got some stronger color around them and I'm going to add some white bellies and white heads and that sort of thing. So each animal will look like a full animal, not just you know an animal with an empty space. I also tried to repeat colors throughout this to get some color harmony across everything. So when I got some purple vegetables in there I also added a purple scarf to the one rabbit that has a scarf on. And you know use the same pink, the same oranges across the whole thing just to kind of pull everything together. I did decide to try to do a little bit of blending, not a ton but I wanted the rabbits to feel like good black and white rabbits. So I used the black marker and a couple of grays to try to get a little bit of transition going but most of that disappeared into this paper because basically the paper adds a layer of color to everything. It's almost like having gray colored over all of the colors that you're using. I did end up using some gray, gray number three in order to make the shadows in the white areas. And the reason I did that was because I wanted the white pencil that I put down to have something that it was fighting against. I you know you need to have a light next to a dark in order for the light to appear. And that was going to help to do that. But you can see how light that number three dried. Alcohol marker goes on this paper and it's wet and it takes a minute for it to just kind of evaporate and become just the dry pigment color. So make sure that you don't judge it too quickly and look at your chart. Look at your hex chart that you've printed out on this paper. Follow that and know that that's what the color is going to become. So then is the fun part adding all the pencil details. And I'm using Prisma color here, but you can use other brands easily as well. And for the most part, you can do a lot of heavy lifting with a black pencil and a white pencil. This rabbit was the one problem because it had the ear from the other rabbit just kind of right across its chest. So I had to make sure that I filled it with enough color that it covered that. And when you're using a really light ink, that's not really all that hard to do. So you can see that the second rabbit here looks like the arm of the first rabbit is his ear. So yeah, that was a little odd in my placement. But other than that, I did pretty well in just guessing the placement of these when I was arranging the stamps themselves in the Misti. So I felt pretty good about that. But I wanted to let you know while I'm finishing this coloring that it's a Colorado Craft Company new release day. And you know what that means, there's a party. And I'll put the party details over on my blog. There's always some kind of giveaways and that sort of thing and special deals and all that. So if you're watching this during the first few days that the video is up, look at the date on the video, then you'll know to go over to the blog to find that stuff. And I also have two class previews coming up as soon as this card is done. One of them is an alcohol marker and pencil class for people who are at like a level four. And you know, that's people who have had some experience in coloring animals and want to draw realistic animals. So I've picked out a whole bunch of baby animals. I'll show you in a minute. The other one is going to be kind of a color your own image kind of thing. You can color whatever stamps you have or you can use the stamps that I'll have in the class. And we're going to add some gouache details to it. So you only need one tube of white gouache for those. And it's not going to be on my main teaching site because I also have some classes over at Art Venture. And they're inexpensive classes. They're just little classes and they're quick ones. They're not like heavy in-depth anything. It's just some fun classes to have there. And it's helping to pay for the platform. So that's going to launch hopefully by my birthday, crossing my fingers that it'll be my birthday present to everybody to have something new and fun to learn about gouache. And that one is going to be making cards. And we'll be using some Colorado Craft Company stamps, some Lawn Fawn and a little bit of Purple Onion as well. But you can use your own stamps for that. And the only thing you need to do is color your stamps like I'm doing here and then we'll add, you know, tiaras and tutus and other fun things in gouache. Because I know a lot of people saw me using gouache recently and wanted me to do a class in it. And I don't feel quite capable of teaching a class because I don't know what I'm doing. But I know enough to help you with a little bit of gouache. So we'll do that hopefully within the next couple of weeks. All right, here is my finished card. I think it came out pretty adorable. I kind of liked it. I don't know about you. Having that many images? Is that too many on a card? They look like they're just having a big old party. The class that's coming over on Art Venture, these are the samples from that one where you just color an image and we're going to add some white gouache to it. So I'll teach you how to do some techniques with some of this so that you can get an idea what gouache is if you want to get into it more later. But by just trying one color, the supply list will be over at Art Venture. So if you want to get supplies ahead of time while we wait for Apple's approval on the class, you can do that. Then we have the other class. This is on the big site and these are on the drawing on nature page. And I'm going to be teaching how to do these. They're a level four class teaching alcohol markers plus pencils. And you can take all of the animals together or you can just take one animal. And if there's something like you color foxes all the time and you want to learn how to color a real fox so that you can translate that to your stamps, you're welcome to do that and take just that one course. You don't have to have the whole thing. That little mouse looks like he could totally be a stamp, doesn't he? So this one just launched a few days ago, all these classes. And I'm super excited to watch what everybody ends up creating because it's going to be a lot of fun watching people grow with their alcohol markers pencils. And yeah, who doesn't love cute baby animals, right? Links in the doobly-doo to all this stuff. If you learned something from this video, please do give it a big thumbs up because YouTube responds when you give a like to something or when you leave comments. They love to see engagement. And if you have a friend who likes to color in this kind of a way, please share that video with them. Over on my blog, there's information about the giveaway so you want to check the links in the doobly-doo for everything. And don't forget to join ArtVenture because we're going to have some fun over there. I hope to see you very soon, maybe on my birthday. Ta ta for now. Go create something every day.