 Hi there, I'm Sandy Almak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I got out my zigs, a little bit of water, and some hippo stamps for today's card. And I was playing around with something because some of my zigs are running out of ink and I wanted to extend their life, so I'll show you some tips for that. This is a stamp set from Darcy's. Has a bunch of different sentiments, love ones, birthday ones. I like this, you're kind of a big deal one. And I'm going to use a couple of zigs. Now my 022 is starting to lose its power just a little bit, but I also wanted it to be a little bit lighter. I wanted another shade lighter, and then I'll make a shade lighter. So I have just a little bit of water that I put onto a block and dip the pen in. Now you don't want to dip your hallmarker into a big glass of water to try to rejuvenate it. And pulling out a little bit of moisture is going to help the color move better. So if you're even just having trouble on a paper like this, I'm using some watercolor paper that's cold press. And for some folks, they kind of like the look of it, but they also have trouble blending on it. Then just a little bit more water in the coloring process can help. And you can add that water with the brush later, but you're going to get water put in it, whereas here you're going to get some of that ink, whatever's in the marker, is going to be slightly watered down. That's all. And if you do this, like I said, don't dip it all the way into something because you're going to pull all that water into the marker and dull the color of the ink. It's going to water it down, but if, especially if your marker is dying already, it's not going to hurt because you're already losing the color. But if you take just a little tiny bit off a block like this, it can help you to get your blending down nicely because it's going to lighten whatever color is in the pen. So I'm just going to make this, you know, do the same kind of technique on the rest of my hippo here. And I wanted to talk about why I'm making a pink hippo. And it looks a little bit red here on the screen, but it's actually more of a pink with a little bit of dark color on the outside. And the reason I use the brown for the dark is because I looked up hippos. I wanted to find out what does a real hippo look like? What are the real colors? And if you look at photos, there's pink kind of underneath their bellies, underneath of their armpits. There's, you know, like in different places on their head and their nose and their mouth and stuff. And originally I tried this a couple times, which is why I think my pink marker was starting to lose its jazz because I was trying to make them mostly gray and brown, which is what they are mostly gray and brown with just that little bit of pink underneath. And I just was not happy with it. They didn't look like happy hippos when they were colored that way. And I thought, wait a minute, why don't I just make them pink? And just adding that little bit of brownness gives me that feeling that I'm doing a nod toward my research on hippos. And they turned into then cute, happy hippos that were more of a pink color, pink and red. And with some of these areas, I'm just going to kind of go over them because I didn't want them to look like he was super shiny type of highlights on it. So just dull those down a little bit. Move on to the top of his little head. And I noticed that I'm putting my my pinks down, excuse me. Sorry about that. I had to go get a glass of water. I was ready to lose it. I'm putting my pinks down and then adding the brown. If I were to add the brown first, the brown's going to really move into the pink potentially before I'm ready for it to do that. So I wanted to add just a little bit of it after I got the bulk of the pink down and then blend it all in. Now my little birdie, I was debating what color to make him. If you make him any old color, he's going to be holding a sign with the you're kind of a big deal. So I decided I needed yellow on it because yellow is my favorite color. So I put a little bit of red around the outside edges of my birdie. And then I'm going to use the same water technique to lighten up that yellow in the inside. Now my yellow marker, I've re-bought this one a couple times because it is the best color in the zigs. So it's not running out, but I did decide to use the same water technique to see if it would lighten up and it did. Now for the sign, as I've made signs before on my videos, I wanted to make something that was interactive rather than just slapping a sentiment on. So I decided the birdie is going to hold onto the sign and I'm using a micron pen which is waterproof to draw it. And I was going to draw this little line up there and I went uh-oh, guess what I did? It's still wet. I did not. I was not very smart in this, yeah. So instead of worrying about it and freaking out, it didn't bleed too far. I'm just going to make my line thicker and that'll be fine, right? You know, some people get really freaked out. If one little thing happens, they threw the whole piece of paper away and they start all over again, well it's just a piece of paper. You know, if it didn't work out after you're all finished, then you can throw it away. But learn something from it. Squeeze all the learning you can of whatever paper you're using because we need to learn more things. And if we're just throwing paper away before we even, you know, I guess if you throw it away before you've learned something from it, you've wasted that piece of paper. If you've learned something, it's not a waste because you got some education out of it. Even if you save it for later and you're going to try some other techniques on it, try to see what different colors look like, test things out, make a swatch card, whatever. It's going to help if you're, if you're able to see past whatever mistake you made and just keep going. So now I'm going to continue on with my ground. Just put a little bit of green ground underneath of them using the water technique again to get some lighter color. But if I keep using that water, then it's not going to ever blend out to white. And I wanted this to kind of soften out eventually to be really soft white so that's when I grab a brush because I'm going to try to add more water to it. And the more water you add out to the edge, the softer it will get. That sort of thing. So I just want it a little bit of ground underneath of them to give them somewhere to stand. So there we go with the coloring. Now for the rest of the card, I decided to get out some dyes. And I have a lot of polka dotted paper. It's really old. I don't even know what brand it is anymore. But I die cut one piece at an angle so that I could get the polka dots straight. And it was just a way to add a little bit more interest to the card. I don't know if it worked or not. You can tell me if it did. I wanted more fun color in it and that added more fun color to my card. So I'm going to call it good. So I hope you enjoyed this one. Got a few tips. Got a little inspiration to keep using that piece of paper until you learn something from it. And I will see you in the next video. Make sure you're subscribed. And click that little bell so that you can get the videos delivered to you by email if you have not already. Because I don't want you to miss any. I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.