 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to watercolor this super, super sweet little bunny rabbit from Impression Obsession. I'm going to use one of the small sets of Daniel Smith Watercolors. This is the Skecher set to which I added a few other colors because I wanted to be able to use this set for things like this where I have maybe some animals in it. And this one has some interesting colors that I wanted to try together. And that's literally how I do a lot of my watercoloring is I try things together. So if you're looking to me to give you the exact colors you should use on something, then you're probably looking to me for more than I'm able to give you. I'm still new enough, even years into it at watercolor, that I don't really have an intuitive knowledge of what every color is going to do with every other color. So I'm just playing. And what I decided to do was use this Monty, yeah I can't even pronounce it, something something natural Sienna color with some bloodstone over top of it. Bloodstone is one of the Primitech colors and it's got a little bit of purple in it, a little bit of brown in it. The two of them together make a really interesting natural looking brown. And I'm putting them down in different mixtures. So some places it's more of one color, some places more of the other. And that's giving it a little bit more of a natural look as well. This is some Payne's Gray added into those colors and then a little bit more of the bloodstone. And just playing around with different quantities of different colors to see what kind of bunny rabbit that I could create out of the colors that are in this palette. These miniature palettes from Daniel Smith come with, as I've explained in previous videos, they come with six colors in the center row. There's center three colors and then the ones just below them are the ones that come with the set. And I've chosen all the other colors. So that is what this particular set is. I'll have all the colors listed on my blog if you're interested in knowing exactly which ones each one of them is. And there's a whole video that I did when I talked about each one of the sets and you can get more information on them. They're kind of a nice way to get started in a Daniel Smith palette without having to invest in getting a palette as well as the colors and the tubes and everything. You can get just a little set with six colors. And this one has two different red, yellow, blue combinations, which is nice. Now for the rest of my rabbit, I'm going to continue doing kind of the same thing except on his chest where I want it to feel like it's lighter fur, like it's white. White is never white. There's always some color in it. And you need to have some color to make it look like it's dimensional. So I'm using a little bit of that Monty Blah Blah Blah Natural Sienna Monty Amiata. I'm not sure if this color will ever make it in my palette because I just can't say it well. But I'm using that very lightly with just a lot of water in it. And then just a very bare minimal touch of the blood stone because the blood stone might give it a little texture. And I don't know whether the texture is going to appear as it dries or whether it will appear at all in this quantity of pigment. Because the textures in a lot of the Primatec colors, they'll be really visible if you use them in particular ways. So if you use really thick paint, sometimes that granulation really pops out. And by granulation, I mean texture. And other times it's in certain colors when it's in combination with certain colors are used with water in particular ways. So any one of them you'd have to kind of play with them and see what brings out the most texture if that's what you're looking for. For his legs, I'm going to do the same thing that I did with the ears. Just paint a lot of that that natural Sienna color down on the legs themselves and then start adding other colors into it. And even though I'm kind of trying to make the amount of that Sienna color match here on the two legs, it really doesn't matter if you actually looked at a rabbit or any animal, you would see just like we have differences in our skin tones from one side of the face to the other, we have differences in the symmetry of our bodies and our features and that sort of thing from the left half to the right half of us, animals do too. And if they're a little bit different on one side of an animal than another, then so be it. The way that the pigment is moving is just blending on its own. Notice that I'm not mixing anything in a palette. So in order to watercolor, you don't have to mix in a palette. I actually prefer putting color directly on the paper and letting that be the mixing. And it's challenging sometimes because you have to move the pigment around and manage your quantities of pigment in a way that you can control a little bit of what happens. But I find it to be more interesting and spontaneous than constantly trying to mix up things in a palette in a large quantity. Now that makes it much more difficult for me to do entire scenes because I don't like to mix up tons of color for things, but you know, there you go. There's pluses and minuses to every way of painting. So my bunny now has a little pink nose and I've added a little bit of pink kind of trailing up into the nose. You can just barely see that. For the rabbit's back legs, now that the front legs are a little more dry, I'm going to do the same procedure, just adding that yellowish base color down first and then adding the other colors into it and making the color a little bit thicker and darker behind so that it starts to push the front legs forward and lets those back legs be in the back. And of course you can add more color to these and darken them as needed. If you want the color to blend in softly like this, then you have to do that while it's wet. And if you want to add texture onto it, like some of those little tiny strokes that I did, that you can do later once the paper is dry. And you'll notice that I'm not using a hairdryer or a heat gun or anything to dry my paper. I'm also not taping it down because what I find is if I can just adhere my paper in place and when I'm using, doing this with cards, I just use some ATG tape on the back to hold it down so it's not moving all over the table while I'm filming. But when I'm doing large pieces, I still don't tape anything down. There's sometimes when I do, if I want to have a specific border on it, if I want to have that white border on the edge of the paper. But what I have found is that if I heat set things, then the paper curls, because that's changing the way the paper functions. It's adding heat as an element to it and it may cause it all kinds of problems. So I find that it's safer to just let things air dry if I can. It also allows the paint to dry more naturally. The only time I use a hairdryer or a heat gun is if I have a particular area that is perfect as it is and I don't want it to move, one iota, then I might zap that particular spot because I want that spot to stay as is and not do any bleeding or develop any blooms or anything like that. So while the rest of this is drying, I'm going to start painting the flowers on the top. The flowers are in set. There's a couple different types of flower clumps and this one seemed to be a good crown for the little bunny. I even stamped it so that it kind of comes over one eye. I thought that looked a little bit more playful than it might otherwise and masked that portion out to just stamp the bunny so he kind of appears up and under there. My masking is not always perfect so I did end up coloring that right or the his left eye, the right eye looking at the screen. I did have to fill that back in because my mask wasn't perfect but I just did that with a waterproof pen like a Sharpie and you could fix little areas like that and hello to the puppies barking outside. I don't know if you heard that but I know some of you guys noticed that there's little noises in the back of my videos from time to time because I get busy trying to get my voiceovers done and the kids are playing. Oh the joys of working at home when you have dogs especially young dogs who love to wrestle and play a whole lot. So I'm using a couple of these different colors to create some flowers on the top painting around them with pinks and yellows and greens and that sort of thing just having kind of some fun with that and letting that be very flat color. I'm not trying to put in a whole lot of shading just a little tiny bit of darker color in in one side of it for a little bit of shadows but I really loved how the bunny came out and I didn't want to risk doing anything funky to it. I did want to add a little bit of background and not a ton. I don't want it to feel like it's a detailed scene or anything but the bunny needed a little bit of home to be in somehow so I've created a horizon line behind there and I'm just going to paint one color this serpentine green going upward and as I get to the top section just going to use some dry brush to create almost just some little texture that feels like a plant and when I got that part done I thought oh what if I added a little bit of one of the colors that's in this palette that that I like quite a bit is nickel azo and so I was thinking as I was doing this do I add some nickel azo to this and see what happens and so I tried that once I got my my base serpentine green down there and what I found is that my paint was not wet enough to actually do anything so I ended up with these blobs of the nickel azo instead of that wonderful burst that it tends to do when you drop it into another color and I'll have to play with it and see if it's the fact that it's serpentine green or if it's the fact that it was very dry because I did use that dry brush on the top which is where I wanted that bright yellow so then I decided after that that I would make it look a little rougher overall by adding some of my darker green which in this particular case is under sea green and just adding a little bit of that to create a little bit of dimension a little bit of texture within that green yellow blobby area it's just going to disappear in the background it's going to dry lighter than this so I just wanted something back there that's going to give it a setting rather than worrying too much about trying to make it look like anything which I think it was successful I mounted it onto a nice heavy car base and called it done and what I decided to do was to put the sentiment on the inside because this sentiment is quite hilarious I'm totally not sure for what occasion I will send this card I don't really know it might just be one of those for my patrons because they like fun cards regardless but who knows we'll see it was a fun card to make it was really fun to paint and I'm going to be coloring this bunny a whole lot it's one of those stamps that's probably not going to make it into the prize box for quite some time because he's really fun to color in a lot of different mediums I will see you guys later have a great day