 Hi there. I'm Sandy Olnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to show you how you can get a little more usage out of a solid stamp. I bought the beautiful bell tower stamp, and I had an idea for a while, and I've been looking for just the right stamp to try out the idea, and this was the one. So I've got some watercolor paper in my MISTI. You don't have to do this portion in the MISTI, but I am going to use the MISTI to stamp it. But I wanted a sky first, because I wanted to have a sky behind the whole stamp itself, but painting this on top of the stamping was not going to work very well, so I wanted to make sure I got it down there first. And what I did was just kind of paint some random water, drop in some random blues, and I'm going to be stamping it in the center and then trimming it out, so I'm just making sure that my clouds go beyond where the stamp's going to be. That's my only concern here, and I just needed to have some areas that are going to be white so that it looks like there's some clouds, and then some areas that are going to have some blues in them. You can see I'm just putting in random different kinds of blues, little splotches and stuff, and with watercolor, if you just let it do its thing and have enough water on the paper that it moves around, then it's going to look like clouds when it's all done. That darker blue tended to kind of stay in one place, so I spread it out a little bit more just to make sure it didn't get too clumpy. Depending on what kind of stamp you're putting on top of it, you may want to be aware of where that stamp is going to show up on it so that you make sure you have enough blue sky behind it. And I just went overboard. I'm going both left to right and top to bottom, and then I let it air dry, and look how beautifully that air dried. Isn't that gorgeous? If you heat set things, the paper curls, so just FYI, heat setting will cause you often more problems than just patience will. So then I've stamped it using some Distress Oxide ink. This is black soot, and I'm just using clean water on it. I'm using the fact, this was the technique part that I wanted to see what this would do, I'm using the fact that the paper is bumpy because this is a solid stamp. If I was stamping it on flatter paper, it would be solid. I'd have lacy edges to the trees, but it would be a solid stamp. I wanted to see if I could use the fact that it's bumpy, and I'm going to get this modeled image. And I'm just using plain water to paint the trees back in, and I'm leaving some white gaps in there, and I'm doing that deliberately. Depending on the kind of image you're using, this may be more challenging because if you have areas that are too lacy, then you're going to have a lot more detail work, but I'm only doing some of the detail on the outside edges of the trees, and kind of letting more of that water kind of fill in the rest of the tree toward the inside. In the actual stamp, that whole bottom section is completely solid. And as I was working on this, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with the top of the church, the whole roof here. And I decided I wanted to make it look a little bit like slats. And I wanted to pull the tree on the right toward the front and the tree on the left toward the back. So I'm making the slats on the roof that horizontal pattern with my brush, just with some water, leaving some of those white gaps and filling in those bottom sections. And on the right hand side, though, I'm stopping short so that that tree is retaining its laziness in the front. And that way I'm getting some dimension here already in that tree. So just doing some final touches with water and then looking at the little bell tower itself, because that needs a little bit of work done on it. And looking at the picture on the package, I can kind of tell what it's supposed to look like, because it did come out pretty wobbly because of the way that it's stamped, but certainly, certainly something that you can do just by following what's on the package. And now what I'm doing is taking some water color and throwing in a little bit of green into the black soot distress oxide ink. And what the water color is doing is kind of coloring those dark shadows. So I'm still getting that nice dark shadow shape of the tree, but it's getting a cast of green and just a little bit of it, not a whole ton of it. And on the right hand side, I wanted to make it more of a fall tree. And you can do that with yellows. And I actually ended up putting reds in it as well on top. And the reds took over the yellows. If you use something like a purel scarlet, it's more opaque. So it's going to cover more things than than the yellow might. So you can play around with different colors and see which ones work the way that you want it to work. You can also make the edges as lacy as you want. If you wanted to make this into a spring tree, you could do the whole tree itself in green and then just put little pink flowers on the edges. That sort of thing. Lots of different ways that you can play with a stamp like this in different seasons of the year. And I was a little worried I was getting carried away with things. So I decided to lighten it up a little bit, just dab off a little color. And now I have this kind of overall grayish kind of haze and I could put the tree back in just with a little lighter pigment this time, learn my lesson from putting in it, putting in a little heavier than I appreciated the first time. There is a little tree that kind of hangs out in the background of the the roof back there peeking over top. And I'm using a little bit of that purel scarlet and a little bit. I think I mixed it with a little burnt sienna as well just to put some color into the roof now because I wanted the roof to feel like that was definitely a brownish kind of roof. And I can add in as many colors in different areas that I want to. With something like this, you don't want to go too overboard. Keep it somewhat simple. I wanted to make a cross on the top of the bell tower. So I just took a brush and pulled color around from other places so that I could make the horizontal crossbar on it and just fussing around with it here and there. I'm going to add more green so that I get more intense color now that it kind of soaked into the paper a little bit, all that stuff that I dabbed off so that now the green the green is getting a little bit brighter because it's sitting on top rather than soaking all the way into that black soot color that was already there. But it's looking super realistic to me, which is kind of cool. It's sort of the idea that I had in mind. Now, the purel I put again a little bit too heavy. So I got my brush wet and I'm just going to pull the color around from those few spots that I did do and make that much more of a bright red fall tree. And this whole thing, I just remember as I was filming this yesterday doing my voice over the next day, I just remember the excitement like, oh, my gosh, this worked. I didn't know this would work and it worked. There are a lot of solid stamps out there that are like this. A lot of really great solid stamps and a lot of a lot of different companies do them. And I think I'm going to be trying this more in the future because it's a really great way to get a scene going and be able to turn it into a painting when it's really just a solid stamp that you're modifying. Now, I've put a little heavier of the the red color in the roof going over it again with a little bit of darker color, a little bit of black from my palette, just because I wanted to make sure it stayed nice and black. And you can play around with this till the cows come home. Just kind of goof around with adding different colors into different areas and create something really interesting. You can make your trees different colors, depending on the time of year, like I said, and here I'm adding just some darker blue into the green so that I end up with more shadow areas. And once it dries, this whole thing just came together so beautifully. All I had to do was trim out that center section and I did a little double matting with different blues that were already in the picture so that that would really set them off and added it onto a card base and I can put any kind of sentiment on the inside that I want and how gorgeous is that? It looks like a real painting and it's just a stamp. So I hope that gave you some ideas for things you could try as well. I will see you again another time in another crafty video or sometime in December, you might see some fine art videos coming. I'll see you later. Take care. Bye.