 Hi there, my name is Sandy Allnach, I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to show you how to do a very simple wet-in-wet watercolor background. I'm going to use the Elfie Selfie Stamp Set from Lawn Fawn that just came out. And I've got it stamped onto some Arches Cold Press paper, it's got a nice texture to it, a nice rag or 100% cotton paper. And I'm painting the water around the area where I'm going to put the background. You could do the background after you paint the images, but I find that if I screw up the background, I might not want to spend the time painting the images. So on something like this, you might want to try it first. I did stamp this in a MISTI so that if I decided I wanted to re-stamp it and start all over, I could do that. The little umbrella is not attached to his nose, I have it stamped above because I'm going to draw that in later to connect it to his little trunk. I'm going to take three different colors of Daniel Smith watercolor paints and drop them into this wet area. I've just painted around everywhere where I want the color. I haven't painted the water right underneath of the umbrella because I want that one, that area under there to be sheltered. So little bird is sheltered by his friend, the elephant. And I'm dropping color in. I want you to note what those edges look like, there's these little tendrils coming out from them. And that's blooming because I had a pool of water that all of this color went out into. And this is one look and I'm going to show you a different way to do it as well in just a moment. But when you have this pool of water, the paint is moving throughout that water color. It's just traveling along and that's what's giving me the blooms. Some people love that look. I'm not a big fan of that look, I want a softer blend to it. So what I'm going to do is take off all that color and all that water and I'm not letting it dry like the amount of time you saw there is almost real time in showing you how long it took. I want to keep the dampness of this paper underneath and then start painting again. Basically do the same thing as I just did, but now I'm painting over damp paper, not on super wet paper. And you'll see the difference in how the color starts to blend when I put a second color in there. My paint is not super puddley at this point. It's wet and there is plenty of moisture in there but it's just not puddley the way it was when I put all that water on there. But look at the difference in how this blend happens. It starts to move a little more carefully, a little more in a blendy, blendy way. Not really sure, there's probably some technical definition for how this color is moving. But I just like the look of this better. It's looking more like the colors are sinking into each other and merging with each other instead of getting those big long tendrils. And this might be a good time to scrub back to that point where the color was mixing and see the difference. And you could put less water or wait for the water to sink all the way into the paper before getting to this step instead of painting and then repainting, but it's always helpful to practice the first time and just see where you want the colors or are the colors the kind that you want. You could change colors in the second painting of this perfectly well. But I just, I like how it looks in the second pass of this and doing that rather than trying to do it all in one fell swoop in the first pass. So I'm adding these colors back in, again being careful not to put the red, blue and yellow in too much proximity over and on top of each other simply because red, blue and yellow when they all mix completely together are going to turn into brown. So you don't want to get too muddy with the color. You want to allow things like that, that blue that I tapped into the yellow will make green because it's only those two colors. If I added it with some red right in there, I'm also going to end up with the possibility of making brown. And that's usually not such a good thing. All of this is painted by the way in real time. So you're getting to see how the colors kind of mix out into each other. You may hit different results if you use different paints because different paints will have different amounts of the ability to lift as well as if you get something that's not as transparent as these Daniel Smith watercolors, you could end up with some mud because of the pigments being a little cloudier. So the reason that I'm getting this really soft light background color is because of some of the properties of Daniel Smith paint. So if you haven't tried them, they're worth a try even if you just get a small set of them. There's a set of six essentials that's two yellows, two reds and two blues. And I find I can do all kinds of stuff with just those six colors. So if you wanted to try something like that, just to see the difference between them and whatever watercolors you're currently using, that is a interesting way to go to be able to try out some of the colors and see how they compare. So once I have all that background dried, I started painting in with black, my little elephant and I'm doing him in a couple layers and I'm not allowing it to completely dry in between. You're seeing this all in real time. So I'm adding my wet and wet paint right into what I've just painted seconds before. I'll let it dry for just a few seconds so that I don't end up putting puddle after puddle on top of each other and just moving the color around with my brush. I am using a silver brush number eight and the silver brushes I find hold a good amount of water, a good amount of pigment, that sort of thing, but I'm careful here not to be adding straight water. I'm adding pigment mixed with water because if I add just plain water to this, I'm going to end up with a big white spot and it's going to bloom out into my my elephant. So be careful and make sure you mix your paint so that you're painting always with pigment rather than painting with water, unless you're looking to create that kind of a texture and get that to happen deliberately. So now I'm going to finish the umbrella and I did wait to dry those other two colors prior to painting the yellow because I didn't want to mess that up, that would have been a problem. And now I took a pen and I drew the curl of the elephant's nose, his nose, his trunk and finished off my umbrella. So here's my finished card. I just mounted it onto some card stock and kept it really simple but this was fun to do and I hope you'll try it sometime. The supplies are all listed in the doobly-doo down below and if you'd like to subscribe there's a link you can click on my face in order to subscribe to my channel. I put out three videos a week. There's more you can watch here and a watercolor class on my blog if you're interested in that. See you guys later. Take care. Bye-bye.