 Hi, I'm Sandy Allnog, and today I am painting a full crocus garden on a long skinny card. The stamp sets I'm using are both from Pretty Pink Posh. One is crocus flowers, has lots of different variations on a crocus, and Courage, which has some simple sentiments. And I'm going to use the Inspiration set from Daniel Smith. This is one of the little sets that I've talked about recently. There is a video about them all, but it has these purples in it. It's got a little bit of yellow and a little opera pink. So I'm going to use some of these colors to paint the the crocuses. I'm keeping it off screen there, but I've listed the colors up above. And when I paint really loose flowers like this, and I encourage that you try it, a lot of us try to color in all the things. But if you just loosen yourself up and kind of make yourself do something crazy like this, it's going to give you a fresh perspective on what watercolor can be. So I'm just kind of slapping some colors into different flowers. Notice one thing that light purple that I just painted on that very top flower, that one has some opacity to it. So I'm going to have to be careful with that color because it's not fully transparent like all the others are. But I'm kind of playing around with what happens if I throw some opera pink into some of these other colors and what do they do? What do those colors do when they mix? And then spray it with water. Holy cow. Sandy's crazy. She's gone nuts. And I noticed I like that orangey color off in the right hand side that's mixed with the Indian yellow and the rose of ultramarine. Kind of a neat color. It makes this really interesting brownish purple color. Going to have to figure out how to use that on something in the future on purpose. But this kind of an exercise while making a really beautiful background for my flowers is also teaching me things. I'm noticing how the colors react to each other when they're next to each other. Do they blend right into each other or do they push away from each other? There's a lot of different things, different pigments will do, and you can't guarantee what's going to happen until you try it. You can have somebody tell you that nickel azo is amazing, which is not in this video by the way, but until you actually use it and see it right in front of you, it's not really going to teach you so that you know internally what color to pick. So I'm just taking an almost dry baby wipe to wipe off some of the color and then I let it dry because I wanted that background to be super soft. And that allows me to have all this space now to paint just a couple of petals here and there. I'm not painting them all. I'm not painting them consistently. Some of the flowers are going to be orangey yellowy pink. Some of them are going to have more of the darker purple, some will have more of the lighter, and it really depends on which flower you feel like focusing on. The one that I've just removed color from had a little bit too much of that wisteria. The wisteria is the one that has a little too much of that opacity for me. I'll use that deliberately sometimes to make a highlight on something maybe in a dark color because it has opacity but here it's just going to cover up my stamp lines. So I just want it in there very light and if I use it with a lot of water and just let it mix in a little bit with some other colors then it's not going to be a problem that it's partially opaque. So I'm just kind of throwing some colors in here and there and playing around with my brush. This is a great time to learn your brush strokes and mess around with them. See look at me I used my finger on something because I have this loose soft background. If I mess up and my brush goes outside the lines it doesn't matter because I've got this beautiful loose background anyway. It's very forgiving this kind of painting and just helps to loosen you up. So if you're one of those people that loves to paint in the lines every single time and try to make everything look perfect this is a whole technique that will loosen you up. So even if you practice this way and then go to your tight painting afterwards sometimes I find just letting it out helps me just feel more relaxed in my next painting session. So sometimes I'll start off with something like this and then go do something else entirely different. Back when I still used brush oh which I don't haven't really used a whole lot lately but when I did that was one of my favorite things to do until now I've kind of learned how to do that same thing but with regular watercolors and just kind of letting the watercolor do what the watercolor feels like doing. I did do this card in a long skinny format because I wanted something to use all the flowers on. I just wanted to paint all the flowers because you know that's what we like to do. We like to paint them all. So using a format that's going to fit in a business envelope instead is going to allow me to have more of a crocus garden. I've loaded up my brush with a couple of the colors that are in here and dabbed some of them off so that they wouldn't be super bright and strong but they would be just little splatters of color here and there just add a little bit more interest. So there is my finished card. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did click the like button etc and make sure you go see the blog hop because Pretty Pink Posh is celebrating this new release. They're having a big old blog hop and you want to see what everybody else has been creating as well. I will see you guys again another time. Have a lovely lovely day. Go create something beautiful yourself. Bye bye.