 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and crafter and today I'm going to show you how to paint this sweet little bunny for an Easter card. I have got such a thing for bunnies. I don't know what it is. My mom collects bunnies so maybe that's it. I'm part of a blog hop today and Waffle Flower was so sweet they sent me the stamps and the dies for this. When I said really I just wanted to use the die but I'm really glad they did because I never knew this about Waffle Flower stamp and die sets. They have special packaging. I was wondering why they were a little more expensive than other things because I'm you know that's how I roll but I rarely use dies so I thought it would be kind of interesting to try painting just the die. But I got the whole set and look at this it comes with a piece of the magnetic stuff and then that goes in the really hefty plastic sheet thing that they have that it all comes in and then you take the stamp set out of this one and you pop that into the sleeve as well and it's pretty cool. It stores nicely. It's a little excessive on the plastic at the get go but once you get over that it's really nice to have everything together in one little package and it's got even this really cool thing and the designer in me really like this last little feature which is the closure for the back of the package. It's got two semicircles and they kind of tuck into these semicircles on the back and I was like wow that's that's slick that's really slick. So yeah there's the graphic designer geek in me loving the actual packaging but what I'm going to do is just use the die. After all of that I'm going to just use the die on this particular card and I'm going to trace the die with a pencil that is actually a mechanical pencil. So I'm going to trace the die onto a piece of watercolor paper and since the die doesn't have things like the eyeballs in it I have to draw them myself. So I used the stamp set for the model since I want it to look like the stamp set because it's an adorable little super super cute bunny and yeah I just wanted him to have that little happy pleased expression so he's got a big smile on his face and his little kind of closed eyes they're just so cute and I did decide to draw a little bit of the ears in there but I'm going to paint my own flowers and I'll show you a really simple way to do that. So I've got my palette ready I've got my paper taped down and I'm going to put out a little bit of the colors that I'm going to use in the bunny just so they're there and ready and I wanted not to dip straight into the pans I want to be able to just drop color that's already kind of wet because I'm going to do this wet in wet thing I wanted it to be really soft so got a little angle so you can see it's wet but it's not super puddley if it's super puddley you're going to get blooms so I want it to be wet enough that it stays wet for this painting portion just not like goopy so I dropped in first some Aussie red gold or Aussie red gold I keep having people tell me that I'm not saying the Z instead of just the Aussie but it's spelled with two S's so what's up with that you crazy Aussies need to have like spellings that match anyway I've got my Aussie red gold here dropped in I've got it just in the centers of things I want the outside to be soft so I'm cleaning off my brush it's like rinsing and then wiping it a paper towel and then lifting along the edges that's going to give me a soft edge around everywhere where I've got this paint at it's kind of like sopping it up I'm sopping it up with a just barely damp brush and down here at the bottom I'm going to have flowers down there so I can have some hard edges for where leaves and things might stick up into the painting and then once all of that is settled and while it's still wet before it dries up just going to drop in a little bit of the darker colors the reddish brown and a brownish brown it's actually burnt umber and burnt sienna if you're looking for particular color names and then I'm tending it I tend things as they're drying because I don't want like to suddenly have a bloom appear where I didn't expect it that sort of thing so I used a baby wipe to dab off a few places and then zapped it real quick just so it would stop moving and I could get busy on the flowers so I have painted with water just clean water and then I'm dropping in a few little bits of the green paint and it just looks like leaves doesn't it it's like super easy it just sketch in some water just leave some empty spaces not filling in everything and then drop in the paint and let it move on its own it just makes a really natural looking kind of thing I'm adding extra water down at the bottom so it just sort of fades off into the distance and then zapping it not completely I don't want it totally dry in case I find some nice blends that happen and then I have a couple other colors ready that was sap green I used originally dropping in a little bit of cornacridone rose a little bit of new gambos and a little bit of anthraconite scarlet can use whatever colors you want for flowers of course and these three colors will also blend to make other colors so I wanted to even touch some of them next to each other and let them make their own colors as they they blend and the color moves and that sort of thing so I was just having fun dropping colors in remember that water color is always going to dry lighter and a little bit duller than it goes on so take that into account when you're making your flower sections I've never made cheeks on anything so I started out trying to paint with really thin pink paint that didn't work very well so I downed it off and then I thought what if I just drop in a little bit into that damp area and it worked really well it gave me a nice soft edge around the pink cheeks so I took a kneaded eraser and erase those solid lines and decided to put in some hash mark lines not even filling in the whole thing and not making them like solid or anything or not making them join just enough to indicate where the bunny is and that made me very happy just to have that little detail and also since it's in pencil it looks like it's a hand-drawn thing as opposed to being a stamp so you can impress your friends by getting the die sets for different stamps and using them to make things like this add the whiskers don't forget the whiskers and this is what it looks like using the same techniques but stamping it so you can get a nice look without without having to like paint your own flowers they give you a very different look for the two of them but I think they're both pretty cute and over on Instagram today I'm going to be posting a video for this one the Copic one it's just going to be a little speed video so you can see how I did that and on my blog I have all the colors for the Copic one listed too if you need to know what that is and there is of course a blog hop so go comment because that's what you do when it's a blog hop even if you don't hop along with everybody go comment on mine it makes me feel happy to know that you're participating all righty I will see you guys later have a great day go make something beautiful maybe paint something today wouldn't that be awesome I'll see ya bye bye