 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to watercolor a snow spray, you know, the spray that happens when somebody's shushing through the snow. I'm going to be using the Skeetons Greetings stamp set from MFT. It's got these cute little skiing bears, but it's only got one that's a Christmas sentiment. The rest of them are regular all year round types of sentiments, so you can use this stamp for much longer than just the Christmas season. And there's three of these little guys, so I have them arranged with the biggest one in the front and the littlest one in the back, so I get a little depth going. And I do have them in my MISTI so I can do some over stamping in order to create the effect of the snow spray. So I've stamped them with VersaFine Onyx Black ink, which is waterproof. And I have some watercolor paper in the MISTI and I'm dabbing off a few areas, mostly right around the skis. And I'm going to press, but not super hard this time because I want to be able to see what I'm doing. And I'll show you what I mean by that. So I want a light stamping first. You can see it's just partial stamping there. This works really good in the MISTI because you can re-stamp in the same spot again. And now I can go bear by bear and look at where I want to have more ink and where I want to have less ink. Right around the skis is where the snow is going to be like poofing out, so that's the part you want to have less ink. And a lot of times just doing the stamping like this and very light coloring, you can create some really interesting effects making it look like there's a poof of snow. There was a video I did a while back that had a poof of dirt and it's the same kind of a technique. And now I'm going to move on to another one of the bears and looking at exactly where I want to have the darker ink and where I want to have the spray coming. If you want the spray to come like hit them in the face and make a funny scene that way, then wipe the ink off of the face. If you want the face to show, then obviously ink it more. And you can do it repeatedly when you're doing it in the MISTI because you can just keep over stamping again and again to try to make it look like what you want. And you can do a few of them like I'm doing and then go back at the end and see if there's any final areas you want to touch up. But you don't have to do all the bears at the same time, just do them little by little so that you're in control of exactly how much ink goes where and how much darkness you have in different areas. But his skis are kind of disappearing into the snow, which is the effect that I want. And I'm going to add to that effect with the painting that I do around it and we'll see how that happens. When I start the watercoloring, you can do this with more than watercolor. I will show you a Copic card that is made from the same stamping. I stamped it also in Copic friendly ink at the same time as doing this so that I could show you. You can do this in other mediums as well. And the sentiment that I chose to use for this one is that you're super cool because I want your snow cools, right? Because I want to be able to use this card for Christmas if I am able, if I have someone to send it to, or I can save it for sometime in January or February and send a snow cool type of card at that time. I like doing that for some of the Christmas cards just because it gives me a little more flexibility. So looking around at some of these little bears and realize that, you know, maybe I want a little bit more of his ski boots showing in a particular area and just kind of playing around with, okay, maybe the back of his skis. I need to see a little bit more of that. Some of it will depend on how much you can actually figure out for yourself. And if you're new to this, you might want to have a little more of it stamped so that you know where the ski starts and stops and that kind of thing. So I'm going to put a little bit of dark paint. I'm using manganese blue, a little bit of dark in the areas that are right next to the bears. So right where they're going to cast a specific shadow. And then I'm going to take a clean brush, rinsed it off and wiped off most of the water and I'm just going to fuzz out that edge. Just kind of tap along the edge. And then I'll lighten up some of this color in here. I got a little more blue than I wanted. And I just used a dry brush to pull that color out. And then by dry brush, I mean just rinse the brush and then let it be dry enough, you know, wipe out most of the water so it's, it's thirsty and drinks in the rest of that pigment. And here I'm going to use more water to fuzz out that color and let it slowly blend as it gets away from him because I want more of that punch of color right around the bears and right around both sides of the skis, both below and above. And that will start to make it look like that ski is kind of invisible in there and that the snow is poofing out in front of everything. Now you can of course go back in with white pens and draw in your snow, but it's much more fun and even I think more effective to throw more of it in using the paint itself or whatever you're coloring with, because it just looks cool and it's a fun effect. It's a great way to practice blending into white and a great way to practice some of your dry brushwork because when you're doing dry brushwork, you're letting the edge be a little bit rough around it rather than trying to blend everything out smoothly, but doing that in some cases and not in others. So with the snow, some of it's going to have a blended edge and others is going to be a hard edge and they're both perfectly okay for snow. You almost want both because the contrast between them will really communicate that snow and here I've got a really wet area and I wanted more pigment so I'm just dropping in some pigment into a wet spot. It's a great way to just play with your paints and see what happens. And for something like this, if you're new to doing scenes and things, it might be best like I'm doing to paint first the background stuff because if you mess that up, you can always just get out another piece of watercolor paper or turn this over on the back and stamp it again and try it again. If you do all the painting first and then you mess up on the snow, you might not be so happy with yourself so it's always fun to get the hardest part done first and be able to come back to it and finish the painting of the bears, et cetera. So here again, I'm going to put my darkest color right around the bear so he looks like he's creating a shaded hollow in the place where he's leaning against the snow or he's right up against it. There's a shadow coming from behind him or he's casting a shadow, shall I say, behind him. And then blend that out using a brush that's just got water on it. It's kind of clean and dry-ish so that that color just kind of carries along. Now you can add a whole bunch of rough snow all over the place. I'm going to add a little bit here and there but not a ton of it because the more you add, then you're just making the card fussy. And you don't want to make it look like you were just fussing all over the place. Make it look like it was strategic by having a few areas that are definite snow and then a whole bunch that's just white. Because if you look at a picture, if you Google, you know, person skiing or something, look at what the snow looks like. See how much of that has a blue or a gray shadow in it. And I'm using blue just because it's a much happier color. You could also do this with gray or mix a color that's blue and gray. So now I'm going to move into painting the rest of it. And I'm speeding this up because you've got stuff to do and it's Christmas time. And we have all kinds of other things to keep ourselves busy. But I have let the blue dry for the most part so that I can just work on the red without anything bleeding. And we'll see how well I do with that as we go on. I'm going to use two colors to to color their outfits, but I'm going to alternate them. So I'm going to have red and some teal or some turquoise and be able to to use two different colors, but use them repeated. So on one, it's a scarf. On the other, it's a shirt, that kind of thing. So I can trade them around just a little bit. Now, the teal I'm painting right here is right next to the red. So yay for not being smart. Sometimes I don't do the smartest thing. And it will have some areas that I'll need to fix because I'll have a little bleeding here and there. But that's all right, because we all make those mistakes. And a lot of you guys say you love it when I have a big goober because it makes you realize that that you're OK to and we're all OK. For the bears, I'm coloring them a little tiny bit with the a little tiny bit of black, just a little bit, not very much, because I don't want them to look like they're black bears. But I want them to have some depth and contrast in them. And so I'm doing a first layer. It's drying really light, so I can actually add a little bit more of the great pigment in there to give them a little bit more depth. And that sort of thing. So I'm going to, you know, I'm going to leave as much as I can with just the focus on the snow. So I decided not to add a lot of shading to the bears. But what I did do is die cut the panel with that die set that you see there. It's my favorite new thing that I've been using a lot. It's one of MFT's A2 stitch dies. And I've been doing it on a lot of cards you may have seen. There's two different sizes or two different ones of them. They're both roughly the same. They're they're like just more increments, different increments in both of them. I do have both sets because, you know, that's how I roll. But here I added just a little bit of glossy accents and glitter to the card as well, just to add some sparkle because it was fun. So this between the stitched edge and that tiny, tiny bit of sparkle. I think it just came out really cute with all the snow in it. And here is a version with the Copic markers. So I did the same thing and I even used a little bit of white pen to add a little bit more snow cascading onto the little bear's outfits. So these are all pinnable images on my blog. If you want to go over there and throw them on your Pinterest for reminders of a technique to try. And you can watch more videos or whatever. And I will see you guys later. Have a really awesome day. Bye bye.