 Hi, I'm Sandy Olnok artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today we're gonna be painting with dot charts I was excited to hear that hero arts and Daniel Smith were partnering for one of the monthly hero arts kits And this is what the kit contains and I didn't get the dies with my set But I'll show you the rest of what I've got and this is available for April 2016 only so get them while they're available As soon as they're out they're out But in the kit you get a bunch of different wonderful things You get a stamp set of course because hero arts makes rock and stamps a flower a bunch of buds There's some leaves and greens and then three really nice sentiments a thinking of you a thank you and a just a really nice Wishing you the most beautiful day, which is perfect for flowers, right? And I've got two packs of pearls little jammies Then they give you a bunch of card bases I'm not going to use these because my painting ended up coming out more on the peachy orange side Rather than the purple side, so I used one of their sunshine card bases But I'll talk about the paper in a moment I want to talk for a moment about the watercolor palette and the brush This is a water brush if you haven't used one before you just put water in it This is one where you just stick it under the sink so let me go fill that sucker up and be right back and Look how fast I am I ran all the way to the bathroom and fill that up And you break break up the surface of the brush often they have a little bit of something on them So just bend it a little bit and then squeeze the brush and water comes out Now generally I like a regular brush because I get more control over it But I'm going to use the water brush just because I can and all you do with these dots They are dots of paint you pick up the the color with the brush and paint it on your paper I just got a little piece of scratch paper to show you how and then I wipe it off on my hand or on a paper towel or whatever So that you aren't contaminating from one dot into the next dot because you don't have much paint here And it would be easy to contaminate them if you're not careful now I've taken my tube paints and done a large swatch chart because I want you to be able to see it I would recommend doing a small one like those little little dots that I did Rather than a giant chart because you'll use up all your paint using the giant giant chart Here is the paper that's included in the kit. This is letterpress paper. It's not watercolor paper It's like a heavy heavy cardstock I've used it for watercoloring before and Before I knew a whole lot about watercolor paper and it worked fine. So I'm going to go ahead and use it today The letterpress paper just has an interesting surface to it It doesn't pill too bad these long as you don't scrub at it So I'm going to show you how to do that. So you're not like working up the surface too heavily I'm using my misty To do my stamping and one of the reasons I like the misty is because I'm a terrible stamper I intend to get things uneven and when I use the misty I can re-stamp So you put your your image or your stamp down in place And you can see there's just an area on the right that I didn't quite get so I can re-stamp it real easily done and Then I can move it around I can change the location of the stamp and the paper and everything and stamp another flower and Then stamp all of my my little pieces in there and the the misty just makes my life easier This is the regular sized one. I do have a video coming soon with the mini so you'll be able to see the two in comparison So this is the palette that I've made that that I made larger And I want to use yellows underneath and then some of the pinks on top and looking at these two yellows There's the cadmium yellow deep hue and the quinacridone gold and I'm looking at these two little circles The quinacridone gold has an empty circle and the cadmium yellow has a half a circle, which means it's partially opaque So I was originally going to try to do the pink first and then Do the yellow on top but since I want to use the brighter yellow. I decided to do that first That's one of the reasons why the Daniel Smith paints are pretty fabulous because you get these Numbers with them and you know how transparent or opaque it is I could have ended up painting the pink first and been really surprised When it covered up part of that pinky color now when they say opaque or partially opaque or semi transparent semi opaque They don't mean like acrylics. It's a watercolor type of of opacity It just means you're not going to get as much color showing through below But when I do the pink on top I'm gonna get plenty of that yellow underneath And you know me and yellow I like to have yellow on everything so I'm just throwing the the yellow paint across this I I'm squeezing the brush and water comes out and I get plenty of water in there and then just kind of Moving the color around I'm using puddles of paint that maybe got too thick in one area and Pulling it around to fill in the rest of the flower This is really easy if you want to leave your flower just like this Totally fine. You don't even have to do the second layer that I'm gonna be doing with the shading on it But I'll show it to you Because it's really pretty The paint is still wet here. So I am going to go wet in wet with my Connectome paint and I just have paint on the tip of the brush Just on the very very tip where I touched it to that little dot Which means it's gonna put color out on the tip and I'm gonna get that Somewhat hard edge the paint is not soppy way if your paint is puddley Then you'll end up with it bleeding all over the place, but this is just kind of damp and Then I'm letting the the brush which is putting out water Have that soft edge in the side that's toward my hand so that you get the hard edge on one side and the soft edge on the other And I'm gonna do that underneath each one of the places where the petals curl You can see in the drawing there's these little curls on on the ends of a bunch of them And then on others. I'm just trying to knock back the petal that's behind by putting a little color into it I'm letting the watercolor vary in how heavy it gets so sometimes it's really heavy sometimes less and Watercolor will soften over time as it dries So I'll be going back in at the end to add some really strong contrast in a few spots But for now just trying to get the really soft watercoloury shapes of each one of those petals kind of established so that I At least have a base down there for these I'm not going to show you both of these flowers because they are the identical flower But we're just going to look at it on this one So we can get an idea of how to paint a flower Now if you're using other watercolors to do this kind of a flower You may need to look at the opacity and you may need to test it out for yourself because most companies don't even tell you what those Opacity ratings are So I'll just put that out there for you because if you end up painting this pink on top And you wanted it to be this kind of a soft see-through pink. You may not have that with all of your other paints and While I'm also chit chatting while you're watching me paint The paints each one of these tubes is available as add-ons in with the kit this month at Hero Arts and Add-ons meaning, you know, they're gonna cost you more than the kit. The kit is I think 29.99 I'll put it on the screen if I find out that's different. I'm pretty sure it's 29.99 the paints vary by Which painted is so each one will cost a different amount because it depends on how much the pigment costs and all that sort of thing But you can check all that out on the Hero Arts site There's also another stamp set and you know more more stuff that you can get as add-ons that will go with a great Spring kit so some Mother's Day type stuff if you're interested in that as well But you can get quite a bit of painting done just from these dot sheets And it's a great way to try out different colors You can also get dot sheets of the entire Daniel Smith collection and just buy the dot sheet itself I've links for you on my blog and down below in the description for that as well If you just want to try out colors and see what colors you want what what you might like That's a clean off the brush in between colors Just scribble it onto a piece of scratch paper. You can see the discoloration on the end of my brush is not making any difference I'm still getting clear water. So don't worry if your brush gets a little bit on the funky side Now I had a little issue here I'm speeding this up just because this is going to take a little while if we if we keep going at that regular speed But when I started doing the leaves I was just happily painting along and everything was all great and I was you know thinking about Okay, which colors am I going to put in with this and then the phone rang and Usually I'll just stop the video and start answering the phone and seeing what's going on Well, it was an 800 number and it was my bank lady and she was calling about my refi And she was reading disclaimers You know like all that legal mumbo jumbo that they have to do bless her heart and I had to sit and listen to that I thought I really don't have time to pause the video So I'm just gonna paint while she talks because all I had to do was listen and say yes So I was really not thinking about what I was doing and I painted these really awkward looking stems on these two buds in The middle and I was like that looks really weird And I'm like well, maybe I can add a little bit of you know little leave type things to them And I'm mindlessly just starting to put leaves in the background now I'm like well, I could throw some leaves back there Maybe that will hide the fact that I messed up on the stems and they just have an awkward curve to them and then I thought well, maybe I need more leaves then because You know, I started putting some leaves in you can't have just some then not more And you know, I the whole time I'm thinking this is a wasted piece of paper now I've wrecked it. I'm gonna consider it practice as soon as the phone calls over I'm just gonna go ahead and restart and stamp all over again and start the piece over But since I had the paint out and she was still talking Don't tell her nobody tell her if any of you works for Bank of America Don't tell her that I was painting while she was talking because she was being very sweet I just kept painting it that well, let me just put more leaves and more of a bush behind it And as I got further on and realized I kind of liked it So don't stop your watercolor even if you think I've really ruined this let yourself practice and finish it If it doesn't come out you can still throw it away later. It's still just a piece of paper But as I went I kept making that little puddle of water down at the bottom So I'd have some water to pick up and then when I was picking up that really light green water I could make this really soft kind of edge to it on that right side And I was like, oh, I kind of like this. This actually looks pretty good. That's pretty excited So yeah a little lesson for you in Don't answer the phone while you're doing things except when you do maybe fun things will happen And you'll come out with something like anyway So next I wanted to add a little bit of dark to this I wanted a little more contrast because I had some of those dark areas in the greens And I wanted to just get a little bit on the dark side Somewhere else in the the image So I decided those centers and the little I don't even know what those things are called the little thingy's inside the flower Pistols and stamens or something isn't that that I'm trying to remember back to my days of School and my brain is not working Anyway, I just started coloring those in with a little bit of that Poonacadone violet and then I wanted to add a little bit of this fuchsia as well The fuchsia doesn't look at all like it looks in the solid paint It looks pinker in the solid paint and it's a little more I Guess warmer. I'm not sure if you'd call it warmer, but I liked the color I liked the contrast it was gonna give it and I went to some of the areas Underneath some of the petals. I just wanted some of the petals to have a little more contrast in them And so I looked for ones where that there would be a petal on top of it So I just put some shadows in the very deepest parts of those and just a few I didn't even have to do all of them. So don't obsess about it Just do it until your eye is a little bit happy with what you're seeing there And actually did end up adding a little more yellow onto that flower at the bottom too because I got more yellow at The top and I think I was just too light in my coat of yellow on the flower at the bottom Decided to add a little more of the fuchsia as well to the buds just to pull them together and make them fit with the coloration I'd done on the larger flowers and Just going into the very deepest areas that and you can tell the deepest areas usually by the stamp drawing Usually the artist will give you some sort of a clue So This is also by the way going to be trimmed out more so I'm not worried about the tape covering up some of the areas Because I'm gonna cut the panel down Now I'm using a yellow car base as I said earlier from the sunshine collection because I had I didn't have enough purple on this I thought I was gonna put more purple in it and I didn't it ended up with more of the yellow and the pink So There you have it so I trimmed it down so that I would have a little tiny yellow border on the left and a much Larger yellow border on the right and I've got my phone tape under it I put a lot of it when I use watercolor just because I want to make sure it stays really stable So I put a bunch of it around different areas And I've got my stamp runner and my sentiment I stamped with the same two inks I'm not sure if I mentioned them It's bubble gum and field greens that I stamped this in all the supply links will be in the description down below of course And then I had my sentiment to be able to move it around and figure out where I want it And did I want it down below? Did I want it up above? I have it stamped on the same Cream letterpress paper so it would match and I decided as I was nudging it around to make sure that that top flower Didn't peek through underneath at all So there is my finished card which came out so pretty the gems that I put on I added the large gem on The right hand side where the card is recessed a little bit So it didn't pop up and it won't go through the envelope when I mail it to somebody So here's a couple more flower videos that I've done before There's a white and a red in different mediums and then a link to my watercolor flower series as well This is number 12 I'm sure that I've done more than 12 water color flowers But I've collected a bunch of them into a playlist here on YouTube You can also subscribe if you'd like to get more videos from me There's more information on my blog and I will see you guys later. Take care. Have a great day