 Well, hi there! I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter, and today I'm going to show you some tips on how to make a beautiful graduated wash. I've had a number of students asking me about graduated washes. So I got out the Heavenly Piece stamp set from Impression Obsession, and it's got a section at the bottom with the picture and then the star up at the top that you can see there. And if you want to cut this stamp in half, you could do that. Or you could do what I did, which is just put the ink on the bottom of the stamp and just not stamp the top part. And then you can put the star wherever you want to because I wasn't sure how my graduated wash was going to end up, and if that was going to be the right place. Because sometimes when you're painting over stamped ink, it'll start to pool and collect around stamped lines. And the first time I tried this, that's what I got around the star. That's why I took the star out on this one. I'm using phthalo blue, which is a phthalo blue green shade at the top, which is a staining color. And it's a really powerful color. I don't use it really often because of that. And I paired it this time with nickel azo, which is a really cool color because it sort of likes to blend into everything that it touches. So when you put it next to something that's wet, it likes to blend in. It likes to play nice with pretty much everything. And I wasn't sure what I was going to do here if I was going to end up with a green sky. And if I did, was I going to like that? But I tilted my board. I wasn't getting exactly the blending I was looking for, and a lot of paint was pooling up at that top end. So I just kept going over it with my brush. I'm using a number 12 round, so you need a bigger brush to do a full graduated wash for a card like this. If you're working bigger, you might want a bigger brush than that. Or use a big flat brush. I put a little bit of water on there, just spritz really quickly and lightly without getting any puddling going on, because that's going to help the pigment to move. You can tell it's collecting up at the top, so I just kind of pulled that off with a brush that's been dried off a little bit. And then I tilted the board the other direction. You can keep going back and forth as long as the pigment is wet, and let those colors slowly blend into each other. And depending on whether you want a hard edge blend, or you want something softer just keep tilting the board until it works the way that you are wanting it to. Here I was ending up with like a strange kind of thing going on here. I wanted this to be a smoother sky, so I just took my brush since everything's wet, and just went over it again. And I was convinced by this time that the green color of the sky was still going to be okay, so I decided to leave it and not mess with it anymore. The foreground is going to be dark, but I wanted to have a little bit of warmth underneath the dark color that I was going to put down there. So I put a little bit more of the Ozzy Red Gold at the bottom. And then as my paper was drying just a little bit, you can't do this when it's too dry, so it has to be just the right amount of dry. I dropped in that Nickel-Azo, and look how beautiful that just pushes color out. It doesn't do blooms or blossoms or cauliflower or broccoli or all those different names for the kinds of blooms that we tend not to like, but it does something really smooth. It does do however that little blob of pigment that's sitting there, that happens. It tends to happen a little bit more with Nickel-Azo than with others, but I'm going to paint a star over that in white anyway so I'm not really worried about that. The foreground image I wanted to have in a dark color, so I mixed up a little bit of neutral tint along with some Pains Blue-Grey and I'm just painting over the images, leaving only some highlight areas. And highlights in this particular case are just on the outside slash tops of each one of the shapes of the animals and stuff. The paint is going to dry back enough that you'll still be able to see some of the stamp lines in the interior, so you don't necessarily need to leave a whole lot showing because you'll see when it's all dry. Watercolor tends to dry about 30 to 40% lighter than what you put it on, so if you want it really dark, then go darker than you think you need and the color will lighten up as it dries. So that was all done with my number eight, my smaller brush and then you can start kind of putting in more color with a larger brush and filling in the rest of that foreground. It's got that nice Aussie Red Gold underneath of it, so it's making it more of a warm gray than a cool gray, which is what those colors would normally give. So I've got a little bit of color difference down there in the bottom, which is going to help to define my little donkey and kid with the bunny. I'm not 100% sure why there's a bunny in the image. I've never really seen a Christmas image like this with things like a donkey and a sheep and you would assume that would be like a little tiny boy shepherd with a bunny there. Maybe he's got something else and I'm seeing a bunny where there isn't one. You can tell me what you see in the image, but I'm just filling in more dark colors along the image and letting some of that light color come through in the bottom section. And while all that dries, I'm going to use some of the Daniel Smith watercolor grounds to paint a star in the top section and I'm using my watercolor brush and you can use that. Just make sure you wash it out really, really good because any type of paints or acrylic paints or anything like that will ruin your watercolor brushes. So just wash it out real quickly when you're finished because I don't like to keep a separate set of brushes for different uses. I like to use them all. So there you go. I added a little bit more to areas where I hadn't left enough white in the image. Just a few highlights on top of the donkey, little bit of brightening highlights on some of the animals down at the bottom. The sentiment that I used is from a different stamp set because the impression obsession doesn't come with a sentiment. But I borrowed a sentiment from this other card that I have another video on that I did recently and it has a number of sentiments that go with it. I will link to both of those if you're interested in it because that one has some really cool stuff going on in it from Colorado Craft Company. Alright, that is it for today. I hope you all have a wonderful day. Go make something beautiful. Hope you're getting your Christmas cards done because it's that time here and I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.