 Well, hi everybody, it's Sandy and it is World Watercolor Month still, July 2019. And since the prompt for today was beach fun, I went back to a stamp set that I promised I was going to do a video with and it's halfway through the summer. So let's get on it with the Art Impressions watercolor, okay? My recommendation with Art Impressions watercolor stamps is always to just dedicate a sheet of paper to just practicing with them. And if you want to practice one image over and over and over again, that might help. But just practicing is going to make it so that you can do it better on your card later. There's a palm tree set and you can paint in the rest of the scene yourself, but you can also just add all these little branches to each of the palm trees, these little fronds. And there are two of the tree trunks in that set. And then we've got a little boy set and little girl set and they're both facing or well, all of them have different positions for the kids that are facing away from you. You don't have to deal with faces and they can also look like anyone. I use the Kansan XL watercolor paper. It's a student grade, which moves the color a little bit better for these kind of this kind of technique in these stamps. I thought I'd show you a couple blocks. This one is by Lawn Fawn. It has lines on it and stuff, but it has those grips around the edge, which are really helpful for gripping the block if you like that kind of thing. There's also these Catherine Pooler ones and they have a really soft rounded edge to them, which is nice. I like both of these. I like these, and I use the rectangular ones as well. But then these are little, little teeny tiny ones that work really great without all the tiny stamps for art impressions. And this is a set from art impressions that they make with those teeny blocks. I'll be using the Art Impressions watercolor markers. These are Tombow markers and they used to use Marvy. Now they have Tombow sets and that's what's carried in the Ellen Hudson store. So I'll be using those and I'll also be using my Silver Brush. And you can use an 8 or 12 and 8. Usually is good for these kinds of things just because they're smaller. And what you do with these stamps is just stick them on your block and stamp them. If you want to make a curved tree like they have in the picture, just curve the stamp when you stick it down. And then you can make a kind of a curved, low hanging type of palm tree. When I was in Puerto Rico, they leaned all different kind of which ways. I never really realized that palm trees practically grow sideways sometimes. So I am just putting the color on them. I use some brown on the tree trunks and then some greens on the fronds up on top. And for one of these, I'm stamping the same stamp twice. One I use one color and one I use two different greens. Just putting the color on there with the marker. And then with each one of these little different fronds, just pay attention to which direction the curve is going and which way you want those branches to lean out. You don't want them to look too much like lollipops or something. But giving them a little bit of a natural look is helpful. What I like to do with watercolor stamps from Art Impressions is to do basically a background layer for something like this. So first I'm putting in some of these that I'm going to use a fair amount of water, not a ton of water, but a fair amount to make these really washy and light in the background. And that is going to help to create some depth when I stamp the second round of stamping. So I'll stamp more on top of this. And you'll see how that works out in just a moment because I'll walk through all of that for you. With the tree trunks literally just dropping some water in, makes it look like you've watercolored this wonderful tree trunk without having to do a thing. Here's the two little sets, the two little pairs of trees. The one on the left has one color of green. The one on the right has two colors of green. And the one on the right, they just kind of blend together because they're both being hit by the same water. But on these trees now on my second layer of stamping, I'm using that more bluish green color on top of the olive green kind of color. I didn't write down what all these colors were that I was using. Sorry about that. But they are in the two sets that Ellen carries. So if you have those or whatever, you can choose whatever kinds of greens you want. And then where the stamping is over top of an area that's already wet, you're going to get some natural blending. And then I'll do a little bit of blending with the brush. But I'm allowing some of those fronds to remain sharp and not get blended out. Because with watercolor, when you have both the hard edges and the soft edges, I think that's where the magic comes. And since I had a little bit of this brown on my brush, I decided to just do some swooshes real quickly and make some sand underneath of them. Now for the little kids, you can do them a bunch of different ways. I've done it in the Misty as well before. So there's other videos that you can check out. I'll put a playlist at the end of this video so you can see all of them. But you can also just do it with a block by coloring a couple different parts. So I'm coloring the shorts on the little boy in each one with a blue, that one I stamped crooked. Oops. That was a good learning. It's good to practice that and find out that I had a different picture in my mind for how to line up that stamp. And but for each one of these, I'm coloring the blue on the stamp at the same time as I'm coloring the brown. You can use a Misty just color the brown part and then clean that off. And then since it's in the Misty and is going to be replaced in the same spot, then you can add the blue to it and just do the blue section. But nonetheless, I am going to go through these and watercolor them. You can see that the watercolor or the water takes the color that you've got on your your stamp and turns that into watercolor. If you put too much water down, everything is going to just go blob. That is where having the Misty can be a big help for some folks. If you tend to go too much water with them, because then after you get it finished, you can stamp one more time with watercolor or with the markers after it's dry and firm those lines back up and they'll they'll reappear. But on a practice sheet like this, I don't bother with that. I just try to see what it's going to take, how much water do I need and where do I want to leave some highlights? So here I'm leaving some areas that just have white in them. I'm not making the water go all the way to the top edge of each shoulder and that sort of thing. I'm in in doing all of these. I'm just in my mind placing the sun in the upper right. So they all have basically the same kind of highlights and shadows. The little boy on the left has less color than the ones on the right. So I'm going to have to go back and add some color from my block later on with him because he didn't have enough color when I stamped him. And that's one of the things that practicing this is going to help you with. You're going to know how much color you need to put on and what to do when it doesn't appear the way you want. Art Impressions watercolor is kind of like traditional watercolor in that it's going to surprise you. There are a lot of different techniques with stamping and watercolor where you get a little more of a consistent result. With these, the watercolor and the markers are all going to change everything. And especially if you're using something like Zig Clean color markers or that sort of thing, some of the markers change colors when they get wet. So you need to know that and practicing with whatever markers you're going to use is really helpful. Any water-based markers work with these. Don't use your Copics, of course, because Copics are not going to do diddly for you. But here I've got some marker, the same colors that I've scribbled onto that block. And I can just pick them up like it's a palette and paint right back into the picture. Super easy to do, super easy to do too much. So he turned into a giant blob. So there you go. I'm going to go a little more quickly here and paint in all the hair and the shorts and all that sort of thing, because we could be here forever. This is already a long video for me. And I'm just going to put in the shorts color for each one of these and add some color to the other elements that are in there. Don't forget to stamp the other things so that you know what those are. Keeping a sheet like this with your stamps, whether you make a little key sheet so that you can kind of figure out what your stamps can do before you pull them out of your storage, that can help. Or just keep them in a book, just keep a whole book full of all of your samples and write down which sets each one of them is from. And that will help you when you go to make some cards. So I finished my whole sheet and you can get a still picture of the full sheet over on my blog if that is of help, but I suggest you make your own. I am going to make a card using, of course, these same stamps and create a scene and kind of show you and talk through how I do that. So I'm putting my two stamps, a little boy and a little girl, onto the Catherine Pooler block. And that's going to help me, since it's a small block, to kind of get them snugged close together so you don't want them too far apart. If you have them too far apart, then it just feels like they're not building on the same sandcastle. They are playing elsewhere and one of the dirt will be playing together. So I'm going to take my different marker colors and color them right onto the block from the skin tones to their little outfits. They're the shorts for the little boy and the bathing suit for the little girl, her little hat, their hair, all those sorts of things. If you end up getting interrupted while you're doing all of this, you don't have to recolor on top of all of this. You can just take the block up to your face and go into it and and basically that rewets it a bit so that it's fresher ink again. And sometimes if you're coloring this much, it can take a while. So this is sped up a little bit, but not a ton. And you might end up if you're slow at it, it might take a while to get all the color on there. And then I'm just going to place it where I want it, trying to decide exactly where on my card I want them to be because I'm going to put palm trees around them and press down. The next step for me is going to be putting the sky in there because I can stamp the trees over top of the sky. But if I do the trees first, I end up painting the sky around the trees and then the trees bleed into the sky and et cetera. So it's just easier to put a little bit of blue in there first. So I've just painted some water into the sky and have a little blue on my block and then just drop the color in in various combinations. There's going to be trees up there. I just want something that feels like it's a summer sky, but I did accidentally touch my brush to the child's head. So I have to figure out how to fix that. And you'll find all kinds of things in order to press this watercolor that's going to happen that you have to fix. And it's just a matter of thinking through it. So I know I'm going to have some palm trees back there and I'm going to hide that, basically mask that mistake on the top of his head with the branch of a palm tree. So don't throw away any piece of paper if it starts acting weird on you, if things start going awry. You don't feel like you have to throw it away and start all over again. Work with it and see what you can learn from that piece of paper. At the very least, stamp the image a couple of times on there and practice watercoloring it because it's going to make it better when you go to do it for your finished card anyway. If you've got a piece of paper you've ruined, then by all means, don't make it for no reason. So I'm going to use some color from the block to add some sand. Just really light wash of a little bit of sand. Know that your markers, whether you're using the marvies or the tombows or distress markers or clean color or whatever, they are not, they don't have the same properties as watercolor. So if you're used to watercolor, these will act a little different. You can't lift color nearly as much as you can with watercolors. And so if you end up with hard edges around something, you're going to be stuck with those hard edges once they dry with watercolor. There's techniques you can use to fix some of that. So just being a little bit on the careful side when you're doing that. With their little bathing suits, after they're finished, once you finish watercoloring, it would be kind of cute. I didn't do it on this card, but you could go in with a white pen and make polka dots or stripes on them or something and add a little detail to them. Once it was completely dry, I used some sticky notes to just do a real quick masking so that I can put that palm tree up there. And actually it turned out I didn't need to do much masking because I could see exactly what I was doing without having to block anything off. But I'm putting the palm branches up high and then I'm going to start leaning some down toward the top of his head so that I can mask off some of the little blooper there. Same with the little girl. I wanted to have some trees behind her, but I wanted one to definitely be behind her, behind her back. So if you want that kind of an effect, you definitely need to mask that out, but a quick sticky note does just great. You don't have to actually cut out and do fancy masking for this sort of thing. So now I'm just going to do that first base watercoloring of the tree and all that loose stuff kind of in the background. And I brought it down to his head so it looks like that branch is just back there and it's not that brown blob that I had where I made my mistake. So that that's a helpful thing to be able to cover something up. Just put a tree behind something or, you know, put a flower there if it's in a flower garden and no one will know. No one but you and YouTube. If you put it on YouTube, everybody knows that you made a booboo. So next up is going to be to stamp some different branches and do them in a different color. So this is going to give me some richness of color and richness of detail. And you can tell real clearly where the paper is still wet because there's some areas where that green melts in right away and other areas where it doesn't. And so adding that in is is kind of helpful when you add it while it's still wet. So you don't end up with just one big kind of one kind of blob of color. You have foreground and background and shadow colors right within those greens taking a little bit more color from my palette to add some shadows and then some just dots for the sand texture underneath of the kids. And then I die cut it with a little stitch die and added a hello sentiment from Ellen Hudson, which is a very pretty die and added some birds in the background. So there you go. A quick note about storage, because I do get asked about that for these stamps. I combine my sets. So my girls, boys and palm trees are in one case. These are cases I found on Amazon. Link in the doobly do. And I put all of my large foliage in one. I put small foliage in another. I've got all my benches here together. I have all my trees in one so that I can just kind of pick from all the different sets that I own rather than trying to sort through all of those big packages. And then this these sheet sheets, I'm just going to chop that up and put it into the case. So I have it for reference next time I make a card with this. Thanks so much for watching this crazy long video. Make sure you share with your friends. Hit the like button, subscribe if you haven't, etc. Enjoy the rest of World Watercolor Month. And I will see you guys again another time. Thank you very much for watching.