 Hello there, it's Sandy Alma with Five Ways to Apply Ink Tense Pencils. I haven't had these out in a long time and I thought this cute little stamp set from Sunny Studio Stamps would be a helpful one maybe to show you a couple different ways you can apply the pencil. And the stamp set has a lot of love type sentiments but I added the word friend from a different stamp set so that it could be a friend card and I picked out some swatches from my swatch book to use for my coloring and I'm starting off with traditional coloring. So this is when you've got watercolor pencils, most people just start to do the coloring and then add the water and that's kind of the most obvious way to use watercolor pencils and ink tense pencils are really strong in color. If you've ever used them before, there's a reason they're called ink tense because they're intense, they're more like an ink than they are like a watercolor because a watercolor pencil, once it's dry you could still lift it and you could still do things with it. This is more stable. It's not a hundred percent stable because believe me I have thought it was stable and tried painting over something and it bled the bottom layer quite a bit so they're not perfectly stable but they're more stable than your average watercolor pencil. But what I want to show you for the next technique is my really silly little tea strainer. I got this at the grocery store and I take the top off and make powdered pencil and I'm mixing it with the wet pigment that's already on the card that's already there for two of the little otters and it's one way to adjust the color so I didn't put down as much color as I might have wanted in my first pass when I was doing the scribbling on the paper. Well I still have the option to add more while it's still wet just do some of this powdered pigment on top and then paint right into that same area. You can add a different color too so I'm gonna add a darker type of brown to one of them and see if I could change that color so it was a little more yellow than I was necessarily intending it to be. But notice there's all kinds of powdered pigment around on the paper at this point. Don't worry about that right now because as soon as you get your heat gun out it will blow away when you turn it on. Sometimes not all of it will blow away so if you have any remnants little little bits of pigment once it's completely and totally and 100% dry then brush it off with a really soft brush so that you're not like if you move it with your hand you're gonna get streaks across it because your hand is gonna press that pigment into the paper. So this second technique we're gonna use the powdered pigment again but we're gonna use it just dropping it into water and this is a really forgiving way to work with watercolor pencils. A little bit of a problem started with the top water because I hadn't rinsed my brush out which is why it was a little bit yellow at first but the other one started with clean water that's generally how you would want to do it but here I could just paint with water and if I screw up if my brush goes out of the lines or something all you have to do is wait for it to dry or heat set it before putting any pigment there it'll disappear and then you can just repaint put more paint more water down and then add the pigment to it and not have to worry about it so when you're painting just with the water you have a lot of freedom to not move forward if you're not ready to. So I'm gonna add another color to it as well and as I'm adding this color it should not stick to the parts that are dry so the otters that I painted earlier should not change. There might be some of the dry pigment sitting across them that's just sitting on the paper that loose stuff but it should blow away and then you can be left with just the pigment sticking to the wet parts because that's that's what makes it stick on the paper is when it hits water. The fourth idea for adding color is traditional layering of color so I'm just adding some of the darker colors bark to the feet of the adults because the adults have dark feet and then putting some shadow areas into some of my my otters just to give them a little more darkness. When I was looking on the internet for pictures they were kind of a blackish brown so they were much darker than what I had going on here but when they're drier when they're sitting on land they can look more like a brown. So this next is going to be basically the same thing as I just did painting the water down first then putting down the pigment. This is the lighter of the two greens. I just painted a couple of swooshes so I'd have somewhere for the pigment to stick to but I'm spreading it out further than where the original brush strokes landed so I'm just gonna put a couple down just to hold some of that pigment in place because otherwise if you sneeze it'll all go away so it kind of helps to have some of that held in place and then painting almost a bell curve around each one of the otters because when they're swimming then they push the water away from them and they end up with kind of this you know this ripple thing that they have around them. Again I looked at pictures online to see what it looked like when otters were swimming across the surface of the water and so this is a really light color I made sure I softened that edge out to the left top corner so it would have a really soft color and that brings us to our final technique which is creating a palette of color and I'm gonna just scribble on a scratch piece of watercolor paper. I think you can do it on regular paper too but the watercolor paper scratches off more of the pencil pigment so you get a nice puddle of paper and then I can use that just to paint and if you're trying to match a color but you want to do some painting like this and you know you don't need to necessarily draw it in there but you want it to match that exact color then this is a great way to do that create yourself a little palette that you can pull color from and the amount of water that you put on that little puddle of color will determine how dark the pigment is that you're painting with so if you need more color then go to a thicker area of that little scrap piece of paper and pull color from it but if you want something really light just get a whole bunch of water on your brush and soften out one area of it and you'll see me do that in a minute and that will spread the pigment out so you'll have see down at the bottom here a much lighter color so I can start to get that gradation of color from the darker stuff at the center to lighter out towards the edges and it works the same as it would if you had a palette of watercolor but you're just dealing with the scribbling of the pigment on the paper itself and just working back and forth helps me to get kind of a flow across the whole thing of the water there's a video that I did recently of trying to do little critters making snow angels this is very very similar in terms of background technique of that so little bonus tip on using the t-strainer by the way clean it really well between colors especially if you're switching between brown and blue you want to use a baby white first to get the color out of that and then dry it really well if there's dampness in your grid of the little strainer it's not going to go through you're going to have all your pigment stay on the strainer and you want it to go through and hit the paper so little bonus tip so here's my cute little card I put a layer of brown cardstock and then popped both layers onto a teal card base and a little piece of this may arts twine around it which I just bought I love having just a generic craft-colored twine in my collection so links to all of the supplies are in the doobly-doo as always and I hope you will tag me if you use my techniques on your cards I will see you again very soon take care bye