 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I was challenged recently to try some kind of Mix Media card, so that's what I'm doing. Quite a little while ago I picked up this cute little stamp set from Waffle Flower. It had an idea for a dress that I was thinking about putting in a drawing, and I saw it on a stamp and I went, well, I guess that wasn't an original idea, so I'm going to try it with a stamp first. And I've got some letterpress cardstock that I'm going to use for this, because I wanted to do an inked background. You might know. I don't do that very often, so I thought I'd try it since I now have blending brushes, and I have a couple colors of Distress Oxides. So I got out my craft assistant, which is that 12 by 12 black metal plate, because it's real easy to clean up, and I cut a mask out of some Judy Kinn's Eclipse tape for just the head and torso, and I'm going to start inking. And this is one of my Trinity brushes. They have these nice little sets of brushes that you can just apply inks and stuff with, and I haven't really played with them very much, so here goes. And I learned something while I was doing this that I'm kind of excited to show you. You probably already know this. Probably everybody in the world knows how to do what I'm going to show you, but just in case you don't, if you have lived under a rock just like me, then there you go. So I'm starting with some Peacock Feathers, one of my favorite of the Ranger inks, and then I'm going to grab some Chipped Sapphire. I was thinking of making this like she's a little angel floating on a cloud, so I want the sky to be kind of darkish and then have a little white cloud underneath of her that she's floating on. So I've got a couple colors going on in the background just so it's not just a plain solid color. But what I was finding was, even though I was getting not blobbyness necessarily, like I used to with just trying to blend with a regular ink blending tool, the blending brushes were better, but I just wasn't getting that solidness that everybody else gets. So I thought, well, let me try changing colors or doing something and I tried to get some of the ink off of my brush by just wiping it on a damp baby wipe. And as soon as I went back and started to re-ink again, look what happened. It went on like super smooth and all of a sudden things were working. Now, I don't know whether you're supposed to like maybe apply something over all the inks and that's what I hadn't been doing all this time, but I was really frustrated because I couldn't ever get anything to work. But as soon as I got my brush a little bit damp, the colors started moving and blending better. And I don't know a whole lot about inks. I'm not an ink girl, you may have realized, so I maybe have some explanation that you can tell me in the doobly-do. I know these are water soluble inks, so you're supposed to be able to use different water techniques on them, but I just didn't think that getting them a little bit damp was going to make that much difference in the application of the color and the blending, which was really fun. I love learning new things and trying stuff and have my accidents work out because really, I just was trying to clean extra ink off of my blending brush. And these brushes wash out pretty nicely. They stay a little bit stained, but they don't retain any color on them after you wash them under the sink with a little water and a little tiny bit of soap. So I wanted to use that little baby wipe technique, maybe as a way to make the cloud really soft. So I wiped off most of the ink on the baby wipe and then I was able to apply a very, very light bit of ink down at the bottom that would be the cloud. So I could have some little cloud color in there and removed my mask. And now we've got the little girl ready to roll. I had to take a little marker. I took a BV04 and went around some of the areas that my mask didn't work really well in because I didn't cut my mask real carefully. And then I put it back in the misty with the girl in the same spot. And now I can ink just the bottom of it. I did let it dry first because I didn't want embossing powder sticking to everything. And I also didn't want to end up putting the de-static powder all over everything because then that would just change the color and I didn't want to leave that powder residue on all of this beautiful inking. And then I just tipped it so that I would end up getting the embossing powder onto the VersaMark ink but just on the dress portion and then I'm using my little extra brush to just knock off any extra little pieces here and there where a little bit of extra powder got stuck on there. And then he'd set it and my dress is at least done. I wanted to do some more work on this but I wanted the paper nice and stable and I didn't want to be touching it afterward because I had some ideas for what I wanted to do to it and so I wanted to get it onto the card base first. So I've layered it onto some navy card stock and then popped that on some dimensional adhesive onto my card base and then started coloring her with some Copic markers. Yes, you can color Copics on some of this paper. Yeah, letterpress. That's it. That's it. Yeah, the word escaped my brain and I'm going to use a couple different colors and since the cloud is where the lights coming from, I'm putting all the shadows on the top so her chin looks like it's lit from underneath and just making my colors slowly work their way down toward the lightest part on her chin area. Added a little color for her cheeks and then her hair. I'll do the same thing. I'll put some light color on the whole thing but my shadows are going to be on the top instead of on the bottom just because you know sometimes the lighting is weird in places and when you're standing on a cloud and the cloud is glowing, that would be how the light would fall on you and you could of course make your hair colors any color that you want. You could do rainbow skies for something like this. Lots of different ways you could use this sort of a technique and now I will finish off the blending with a mid-tone color and just kind of darken out the the bun at the top because that wouldn't really have much light hitting just a little tiny bit and then a little bit of color in the top portion of her dress. Then I wanted to put wings on. They do have stamps that are wings in the stamp set but I didn't really want to stamp lines on here so I started by trying to see if colorless blender would remove any of that Distress Oxide ink and it didn't but it did mark it so that then when I went in with a brush and some water I could actually lift a little bit of color using that and I kind of had an idea where I wanted that because that's where my brush or my my Copic marker brush nib had been and I was able to follow that along sometimes it's easier to draw something in a medium that doesn't bleed all over the place so it might be helpful to sketch it out first like I did with a colorless blender or something just to mark it in that spot. The rest of this is going to be white pen of course because me loves me some white pen and a card like this you could put a Christmas sentiment on it and it could be a little Christmas angel you could make it a birthday card it could be a new baby card there are a gazillion uses for this this stamp actually may not end up being in my prize boxes because I can see so many uses for it. I don't keep a whole lot of stamps for a really long period of time but this one was so much fun to do I could do airbrush with it there's just a million different ways that I can see using this particular stamp set so I am glad I have it and I added a little bit of glossy accents to the wings which is why I wanted all this settled down on the cardstock and everything and all my layers done before I got to all the coloring so I could just let that sit and dry because the number of times I have moved something and touched the glossy accents before it was dry teaches me not to do that so anyway thank you so much for joining me for the video click that like button which is actually a thumbs up button doesn't say like someone pointed that out to me recently and I will see you again in my next video thank you bye bye