 Hi there! I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. I'm going to talk about scenic storytelling avec les chats et les chiennes with the cats and dogs. And I'm going to show you some new stamps. Top Flight Stamps is a new retailer and they are focusing on something very exciting that nobody else has because getting stuff from overseas is difficult here in the United States. So they have collected a lot of brands all in one place. So I'm excited to see what we are going to be influenced by now since we have stamps from around the world that are much more accessible to us than they have been in the past. So these are just a few of the countries that you might see on their website. They sent me some stamps to play with today in this little treat package. Very excited to receive goodies sometimes. And these are from Catzel Craft Stamps in France. Which is why this whole thing is going to have a little bit of a flinch type of theme to it. I'll tell you more stories as we go. But these have been around for a number of years for quite a long time. So I have heard rumors of them and here they are in my house. Very excited. She also sent me some easy mount which you can get in a lot of different places. I don't see it on her site yet. She may end up carrying them. I don't know. But you do need some easy mount with these because they are rubber stamps without a backing on them. So they're not going to stick to anything. I am going to show you how to do this. I'll give you some quick tips and then we'll get into some storytelling and coloring and card making and all that stuff. This easy mount stuff has two sides to it. One is really super sticky and that's the side you want to put your stamps on. And what I do is cut off some extra pieces because I wasn't sure I was going to have enough. And so I saved that little piece with the paper protector on top of it because this stuff is really sticky and then just trim around each of the stamps. How close you cut to the stamp depends on how good you are at inking because if you leave a lot of room around the stamp you could get ink on it. You could also end up with points if you don't round your edges that sort of thing. So cut them out and then you peel off the backing and sometimes backing is a little more challenging than others. But if you peel it off then you're left with a backing that's going to stick to your acrylic blocks and then these are just regular old cling stamps. So I keep mine in stamp envelopes just like I do everything else. So for those who are going to ask that's what I do with mine. You can also put them in different kinds of thick like video DVD cases types of things. Now another way that you can do these this cling mount without wasting a lot of that extra space. There's a lot of that extra rubber in between is to trim these out. Trim them out a little bit wider than you're going to want. Eventually and that that way you're going to be able to snug these up and make a little puzzle piece out of them. So get all of your sheets trimmed out and then stick them onto your sheet of cling mount so that you can actually save some space. And there's that whole big section up there. I'm going to cover that up with the paper again and save it in case I have little stamps that need it. And I ended up actually meeting it when I was doing the accessories. So here we go. We're all done. But some of the stamps sometimes will retain a little bit of sticky around the edge when you cut out with this easy mount because it is seriously sticky. If you have that as an issue then just take your embossing powder tool whatever kind you have and run it around the edge and that will take the sticky off. So that is the little short quick primer on using your cling mount easy mount. There's a lot of different brands out there. I'll have some links of course in the doobly-doo because that's what I do. And I'm just going to sit here and color not putting colors up and everything because I thought I just do some storytelling instead because we're going to get to the cards that I make out of these. I did do my stamping just on a half sheet of paper in my Misti so that I could stamp a couple sheets and then have lots of kitties and doggies. Just to color over time and that's what I did. I'm coloring on Nina cardstock but you can watercolor on these. You can do all different kinds of things, whatever kinds of coloring you wish to do. Now I do not know why there is a bottle of nail polish sitting right there in the corner. But since you probably want to know now that I called attention to it, it's 400 Royal Flush is the color number and it's Revlon's Color Stay Gel and Bee. There you go. That's the color I'm wearing today. I don't know why it's in the camera. When you call things out, then they disappear. People don't think about them, right? OK, so storytelling. I was in college a French minor. I had taken a bunch of French in high school and did very well at it. So I thought I would be a French minor. I didn't finish the full French minor, but I took a whole bunch of years of it. And for a long time, I was actually thinking in French, not all the time, but I was translating things in my mind in French and things would come out of my mouth in French weirdly. Just random random things. I eventually slowed down on doing that, but I still do it with my dogs to this day. Every once in a while, if I think of a French word or if I'm saying something to them that I know how to say in French, I do so. I will not torture you with my bad French accent, but there you go. The names of these two sets, by the way, are Les Chagruces, the Russian cats, and then these are just the dogs, Les Chiennes. They also have jungle animals. They have birds. That was their first one a number of years back. So you can check them all out in the top plates store. And then these are the funny accessories that they have. So you can add hats and glasses and all sorts of fun things to them. And what I did was after I finished all this coloring, I trimmed everything out. That was quite the beast. And then around each one of the images, I went around it with a black marker so that I could get rid of some of that extra white outline from trimming, because, you know, trimming is the thing. You could do that this way, the way that I'm talking about doing trimming your images out, or you could stamp them in a scene by doing masking. This time, I'm just going to stamp them and glue them down on top of the scene that I color. So we're going to go through that for each one of the cards that I made to go with this set. So here are all my finished images and then I sat in front of the TV set and just trimmed, trimmed, trimmed so that I could arrange them into groupings to put on cards. And this first one, this cat looked like he was grumpy looking at the alarm clock when I saw those two images together. So I drew a bedroom scene. It's in very soft colors. I drew a little kind of quilted blanket that he's sitting on. I had an extra hat after setting up all the other scenes. So he's got a hat hanging off bed post. And with the clock, I ended up putting it on an angle so it looked like it was ringing and then just adding lines around it, both with markers and then with a pen to just add a little bit of detail to it. So that is my sleeping kitty. He's so funny. He looks at the clock the way I do when it goes off in the morning. Next up, we have the birthday scene. This was one of those where I just took a whole bunch of the animals. I tried to see which ones might stack up well on top of each other because a birthday party seemed good and festive for a lot of imagery. And this would have been a lot harder to mask because there's so many layers and so many things in front of each other. So trimming them out and gluing them down on some instances is going to work out a lot better for you because you don't have to do all that fussy masking. And then you can just play with the images and kind of tilt them at whatever angles you need them at. And I just put some carpet and wallpaper behind them to give them a little bit of a scene to sort of set them in a place. This little guy was one of my last leftovers that I had and the little scooter was there too. And I thought, wait a minute, if he's riding the scooter and he's facing backwards, he is too cool for school. So he has to have glasses on. And if he's going to have glasses on and ride a scooter, he's going to be on the boardwalk. Because where else would you find a dog with that much talent except on the boardwalk? So I drew the boardwalk under him, some really far distant, with really light colors, seeing of the ocean and the sand and the clouds and stuff in the background so that all the focus is on him and the foreground. Next up we have some kitties who are going to, yeah, steal the ice cream off of the table. I was trying to figure out what these kitties might be doing and I laid them on my card and sort of figured out they might want to steal some ice cream. So I drew a chair and a table with just simple geometric rectangle shapes. It was going to be a frame behind them, but it looks almost like a window because I was trying to put a nondescript painting in the frame. But it could be a window outside as well. But how is that for like a cute little card that would look like something you could send somebody and say, hey, treat yourself. You deserve something special. And this one is for the cat of gloom and doom. So if you know somebody who needs a guard like this, it's a perfect one. There was this grumpy looking cat and an umbrella and they just seemed to go together. So I did the background with just a whole bunch of swipes of Copic markers. There's a lot of flicking. The ground is horizontal and the sky is vertical and less color, of course, on the inside of where the umbrella is blocking off the rain. So that he just looks like he's kind of semi-protected, but he's not happy at all, right? That is, some days, that is my attitude totally. And I know a lot of people who could use a card like this sometimes. And the last one is kind of the crazy fun one. There is this signage 1, 2, 3, and I'm assuming that that is like a train station kind of sign. So I drew two pillars in the distance back there, which you can't see because I put so many dogs in it. The distance is like a little sign of a train. And then I put my three dogs in front and they're all wearing hats because they are dapper and they are traveling and visiting somewhere fun. I don't really know why three dogs would be going by themselves, but they do have a suitcase. So they've got all their stuff packed. I'm pretty sure they have some toys in their suitcase. So you have a bunch of stamps trying to see what kind of a storyline you could make up for them. What kind of a scene can you put with them? It might be something really simple. It might be something complex, but it's a whole lot of fun to tell a story in a picture like that. If you haven't yet subscribed to my channel, you can do so by clicking on my face. You can watch other videos. There's a Copic class linked here on the screen and you can check that out if you're interested in more Copic coloring. And click on the link in the doobly-doo to go to my blog to get hooked up with top flight stamps for the blog up. And I will talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.