 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Allnacht. Long live snail mail. I am going to be doing some distress in watercolor today Today I'm introducing Concord & 9th and Evelyn T because I wanted to use both of their stamp sets on my card I've got all these great mailboxes and I wanted to make it interactive and make the mailbox open I want to add a post to it and then add flowers down beneath it And that's where Evelyn T is going to come in because I'm going to add those to make a garden where the mailbox is going to be sitting And I'm going to be using some techniques you've seen with other stamp lines here on my channel So I will get to that as we go and I'm putting some ink onto the The background stamp so there's two pieces of this mailbox and you can treat them in different ways But I'm treating that one as the the inside of the mailbox and then I'm going to Stamp on a different piece to create the door that opens. There's going to be a little snail inside little guy and I'm stamping the other portions of it separately the flag and the face of it to create the The kind of pole that this is sitting on I'm using these little lines I'm not sure what the lines are for But I'm mask. I'm asked off one side of it the right hand side and then line the left side of those stripes on the left side of where the pole would be and I'm using distress inks so I can just add water to it and it's going to soften the ink Now distress ink is not watercolor just so you know that so I'm not going to get the same kinds of textures and things that I'm going to get if I use regular watercolor And I'm not going to get the same movement that I get with regular watercolor and There's a whole lot of different reasons why you might want to use one or the other and for this I just thought it would be fun to try it and play around with these colors and See what I could create out of using just distress inks instead of watercolors You could also just use your watercolor or your your distress inks to stamp with and use watercolor to do the painting portion But this technique you may have seen me do quite a bit with the art impressions stamps because art impressions Does a lot with they have little flowers and things and you stamp them with water-based inks and Water-based markers and then you can turn them into watercolor in this same kind of a way So I'm going to get the inside of this mailbox all Painted up and I'm doing that by just using the distress ink on a quote-unquote palette I'm just putting some onto the block you can put it on to anything Plasticy that you want so that you have a full puddle of ink that you can pick up with the brush I'm going to add some flowers here, and I masked off the Pose by just using a little sticky note nothing fancy at all and then I'll add some flowers now With this technique that I've shown in if you're interested in more of this go look for my art impressions watercolor Playlist because I do this a ton in those these are just larger flowers art impressions has little tiny ones So these are big ones, but then the principle is very much the same if you like that kind of a technique Then you're just going to apply it in a sort of bigger way here on a card like this And you can just paint in the little flowers and put water just in the blossoms or you can just take your brush and really make big swooshy moves and create more of fuzzy flowers in the distance so you get some depth in your flower arrangement here underneath of your mailbox by Putting down the first layer and letting it be soft and washing and then stamp over top of it And if you stamp over top while it's wet, you'll end up with softer edges and Here I'm painting over top of it with more distressing While it's wet and I'm getting really soft edges on these flowers as the paper dries I can get harder edges and sharper lines So it really depends on what kind of line you're looking for at what point and I love mixing all of it Mixing all the different types of techniques together when making a little garden like this Because if you look at a garden, not every flower is going to be in focus to your eye You're going to be looking at the ones that are most likely right in front and those are going to have the Sharpest edges the ones in the distance in the background If you think about your your phone if you have an iPhone There's a portrait mode and the portrait mode fuzz is out everything in the distance and that's basically what this is doing So I'm stamping while this area is still wet and I get really soft stamp lines and As it starts to dry Watch how some portions of it are going to have harder edges and the ink is going to get darker To stamp around that post I can again use a sticky note Just put it right there along the edge so that I can create a dark edge with some of these really detailed little Flowers that stops right at the edge of The post and it starts to make it look like those are behind the post We can make some flowers then cascade in front of it. There's innumerable ways you can do this I'm keeping all my flowers kind of in the lower right hand section of the card just To not make it such a cacophony. I tried this one earlier. I was practicing with it And I just had too many flowers. I needed some white space for the eye to rest So when I finally started doing this one I made sure I left that upper left section at the top and really just light and bright and put more of the rich color down here at the bottom and You can see I've got darker colors So these are starting to pull forward and the colors that I had painted earlier that were really soft recede to the background and you can end up building up a beautiful garden this way And I decided I wanted a little bit of that Reddish color and not a ton of it because I was trying to keep most of my colors that I pulled out in that really soft cool blues, cool purples, cool greens Kind of a look with just that little pop of Something hot right in the middle of it to pull attention to the flag and then to the little little guy inside the mailbox So now I've got a scrap and I am stamping what I see is the front of the mailbox And I put a couple different colors on it You can just tap on different colors onto the stamp and when you start watercoloring then you end up with a little bit of Both colors in there. It'll make it look like it's a little rustier a little older and again, you can paint around all those little letters so that the letters are mainly white and then use some Some more ink on your quote-unquote palette on your block To start painting in more color so you can have something a little bit richer You can decide how much you want intensity or do you want to leave it just sort of a grayish Type of a box now. I'm gonna be making this mailbox Look like it opens. So I'm gonna be trimming it out. So I realized I didn't have to stay in the lines I could have just Slopped it around and that sort of thing. So I'm gonna just do a real quick trim around it It's a really easy shape to do some hand trimming little detail scissors love these little guys and Then I could just put some adhesive on the bottom. I'm using just some Some B creative tape I did do a little extra painting on the inside that did not get captured there on the inside of the The mailbox because I wanted a more intense blue so Now we've got that ready to roll and I'm gonna Add this on now. I put it onto the card base Adding my sentiment to it. I decided to do two colors So I have one stamping that I did with the lighter color and then add a little extra ink to stamp these snail mail And having the misty in there really helped to line that up so now I've got my Little card that opens up and the snail says hello inside Very sweet little type of interactive card with just one little bit of motion All the supplies are listed in the WD down below if you liked this video Click the like button hop over to the blog if you want to pin something and I will see you guys in the next video Thanks. Bye. Bye