 Well, hello there. My name is Sandy Allnock. I'm an artist and I have been a card making fool. I pre-launched the brushstroke florals class a few days ago. And at the time, I apologize because I didn't have the cards done. Well, guess what? I have the cards done. The videos will be uploaded later on today, the 23rd of April. I just ran out of time. I'm recording this very, very late at night on the 22nd. Nothing like last minute. I had a different plan for today's video, but I think it actually worked out better. I was going to show you how to paint some apple blossoms or cherry blossoms in this same kind of a brushstroke floral style. And I had the footage and everything was ready. And I was going to be doing a large one and then a couple of small ones and then making cards out of them. And the only footage I seemed to have retained is this Buddha board painting and then a large painting. And then I had done three small ones and the three small ones are the ones that disappeared. The footage just went by. I don't know what happened. But I did have all of the card making footage and lots and lots to talk about that I have learned over the last couple of days. So we're going to kind of adapt the plan a little bit and it's going to make it a shorter video than it was going to be. So that's good, right? Alright, let's get started painting. So in the brushstroke florals class, it's just one flower at a time. So this one is going to be a group of flowers on a branch. And it can be either apple blossom, cherry blossom, whatever you think it might be. But I'm going to use a piece of Sumi paper and it has a soft side and a not as soft side. They both paint about the same as far as I'm concerned, a little bit more definition maybe on one side than the other. But I've kind of painted on both sides. And here I'm just throwing some really watered down quinacridone rose, like just plain watercolor onto the paper to establish where I want my branches to hang down. And then using ink, I'm putting some lines in using a Chinese calligraphy brush set. And this is a brush set that I reviewed in my previous video, if you want to go see that. I also talked in that video about how I made my ink mixes, because I have one that's 100% black, one that's about 50% and one that's about 15 to 20%. Just so I have some variations in how much value I'm putting in there. You can paint on both sides of this. And you can also go back and forth between them with a caveat that I'll be sharing with you here in a few minutes, because I found out some things about the paper and the adhesive that I used to mount my pieces. But I'm just kind of painting in some heavier pink now, just with thicker mixture, more pigment, less water, so that I get stronger color. And I even wet the brush and then started flicking paint on to make very tiny little blobs, which was kind of fun. Gave me a really nice look for this. When you turn it over, only some parts come through. So then I could kind of choose which branches I wanted to reaffirm that sort of thing. And it came out just kind of lovely. I did the same thing small, as I had said, the footage of painting that disappeared, but I have the rest. And I'm mounting it onto a heavier piece of paper because this sumi paper is really delicate. And if you're going to make cards with it like I am, it's going to be a problem. So I'm going to wet the back of the paper and notice how bleedy it's getting. You can notice it, especially in that little floaty bit of pink. That was my little signature in a square. Well, not really my signature because I can't paint that small. But nonetheless, you can see how much it's bleeding. It was very defined and it's not now. The other piece of paper is Nina cardstock. And I'd say probably try using something a little bit heavier. If you have some, you know, this is the 80 pound, maybe the 110 pound would work better. Because this did curl a little bit on me as I was working with it. But I'm putting nori paste on it with a brush. You don't want to use a dry brush with it. Use a damp brush. So I was wetting my brush a little bit. And then you want to paste this on here with the wet side going toward the glue. But the whole thing is really wet. The front of it is damp at the very least. But put it on there. And I highly recommend after going through this process, make sure your sumi paper is bigger than you need. And make sure you just have lots of room to work around it because you can trim that down later for a card. But look at the mess that that pink made. I'm going to have to add some extra blossoms and a little branch down there when it's dry. But wrap it in between a piece of folded wax paper and then you'll put it in a book overnight. You want to definitely leave it overnight. It's going to take some time to dry. So let's do another one. This one also is done with the same ink that bled as in the previous one. And this one is it it's a diamine diamine ink like a fountain pen type of ink, a duochrome. It's got some shimmer to it. And it just bleeds like crazy. It's not waterproof. And it just made a mess. The same thing I've got the little signature block that's going to have to turn into a little flower cluster again, because it got really kind of mushy. I was hoping that the previous one was just accidental. But that was not the case. It was not accidental. So unfortunately, I had to adapt. So if your little signature block is something that's important to you, you might wait until after you finish the mounting process, just to make sure or else do it in a permanent ink that's not going to bleed with water. So I've got the Nori paste on my Nina cardstock again. I'll place this one, kind of flip it upside down so that the wet side goes down toward the glue. And you can see it's a little on the curled side. So trying to get it down just perfect is not great. So I always give myself a little more room just more room around your paper is easier to manage. This one is done in watercolor. It's done in Daniel Smith watercolor. And that worked a whole lot better. The paint has been put on both sides, both the front and the back. This little signature that you see in the corner is the one part to watch. That will tell you exactly what's going on here because I can paint right over that signature and nothing happened to it. It didn't bleed at all. And the flowers, I was a little nervous to make them bleed too much. But what I found is if I'm just a little less slathering of the water, when I go over the watercolor, then watercolor doesn't really do a lot of bleeding. If you start like putting a whole lot of water and then, you know, swishing the brush back and forth, you can lift that color. But if you're gentle with it, you should be okay. So if you, you know, if you're doing this, if you're in the class and you're trying this, I would potentially recommend doing your watercolor on the front side that you're not going to put water on, you don't paint your water onto. But also if you're using a different brand, I don't know what's going to happen with every brand. So you'll have to test it out and see. But put some wax paper over it or deli paper or something smooth it all out nicely. It really sharpens up the artwork and just makes the whole thing look so much better to have it mounted on this. And then it's going to be easier to work with when you're actually making something from it. But here you can see my little square with the heart in it is just fine. Everything else got a little softer but not enough to be much of a problem. And, you know, you can always go back in after it's all dried and rework some of that painting if you want. This one is going to have to be reworked a little bit to turn my little blob into a flower. I just need a little branch going down to it. But everything else is kind of okay. It didn't matter a whole lot that those little blobs ended up a little softer. Didn't hurt anything. So I'll put those two both between wax paper and put them in a big heavy art history book. That's what my art history books are good for now. And I have this one that was on hot press watercolor paper. And it's done with the diamine, diamine inks, however you say that. I used a mat around it that is sized for a slimline card so I could kind of gauge where I wanted to do my trimming. And then could just whack at it. I decided to make it not as long as a slimline card. So I made it a little bit on the shorter side and started trying to figure out then what I was going to do with the rest of the card design. And I kind of got out a scrap of red. Wanted to have maybe an outline around it. So do a layer of red underneath of it. And then it was a matter of deciding do I want it on black card stock, do I want it on white card stock. And what I started discovering too was that my white card stocks don't all match my watercolor papers. If you've ever had that problem, I found that having the red divider in between the white of the watercolor paper and the white of the card stock, the card base, actually worked out better because they were separated. Like when they're right next to each other, if you're trying to do white on white and you're using watercolor paper, it sometimes looks like one is dingier than the other. But if you put another color in between some sort of layer, then it's not nearly as noticeable that they're not perfect. That open space could either house a sentiment or I could just leave it blank, put a sentiment on the inside. And I decided that the sentiment on the outside would be nice. I love the decaled edge on the outside of my scrap watercolor paper that was sitting on my table. So I just left that and tied some embroidery floss around it in a little bow. The next day, I was able to get out all of the things that were in the book. So not just the three that I'm going to show you, but the rest of the ones that went into the class stash. And it was a day. It was just a crazy day of card making and yeah, craziness. These each need a little bit of fixing, but the first step was going to be to figure out how to trim them. I wanted to get them to card size and this mask is a two-sized. So it could help me at least get these things arranged the way I want them, even though they'll have to be a little bit smaller if I'm going to use any layers on my cards. And when I determine layers, I just start layering card stock and I try to see which colors I have that would look nice. Do I want a white card base, a black card base, a black layer, a white layer, pink layers? There's innumerable ways to go and when you've got really small art paintings like art cards like this, I find that just a couple of beautiful layers underneath of them, even if they're really thin layers or thicker layers like this, they just make everything that much more beautiful. I got out some ribbon to put around it. I taped just a band around the card and taped it on the back and then on the front side, I didn't want it to just be a straight old piece of ribbon. So I got out some embroidery floss again. I was just in an embroidery floss mood, I guess, and tied a little knot around it and then made a bow out of it because that way it feels like it's a tied bow out of that larger pink ribbon, but without making a big old chunky one that's going to make it get eaten by the post office. So a little tiny piece of embroidery floss worked great and then I used dimensional adhesive under these panels to attach them to the card and then realized I hadn't done anything to fix the stuff that needed fixed. So I got out the inks, the same ink that I had painted the flowers in, but then I just made my little square and did a heart inside of it, my little quote unquote signature, but then I started working with the inks again to just connect the little blob that is now a flower and reaffirmed some of these lines too because it just felt like they weren't as beefy as I wanted them to be, so I could straighten them out, add a little bit of detail here and there, you could add more to the flowers at this point and what I did find was once this had been attached onto the backer board and I had done the whole nori paste thing, I could paint without getting nearly the bleeding that I had gotten when I was working with just the paper by itself, so if there's any tweaks that you want to do that you want to keep really sharp, this would be the time to take care of that. The rest of the time, you know, you may lose some of that when the paper gets wet when you're doing the mounting process. So I fixed my big tree as well, added a little more detail onto it and this one I decided to make most of the card a pink background and the card base is black, I rounded the corners, just added a couple of pearls and my signature block again because not every card needs a sentiment on the outside and I kind of even like one without a sentiment because it feels like you could kind of stick it on the mantle like it's a piece of artwork rather than a card, which is nice and then the embroidery thread made an appearance again for this card, I'm tying it around the front almost to hide the fact that my panel was cut too short so I have a little piece sticking out and I just put the twine around the edge where where it's sticking out and the painting portion is on dimensional adhesive so I've got some dimension there but since it's cut short now it has a bow on one side of it and I'm adhering it down with some clear glossy accents and adhesive so that'll hold it in place and then decided to add a small sentiment there just kind of hanging over the edge doing that on some dimensional adhesive so that is my little card so my beautiful deckled edge on this and I used a stronger red paper for this one whereas pinks for the other ones so that one came out pretty nice we've got this guy that has the the black on the bottom really echoes the black in the tree branch and I really liked the combination of it and the fact that I was able to hide my little blooper that got all bleedy that worked really nicely I do like to try to make sure I line the insides while I'm making cards because I can't tell you how many end up in a stash of cards that like I can't write because they're in a box and they don't have liners in them but I do love putting liners in cards that don't even need liners too because it just adds design-wise to them and it adds as well some beefiness to the cards so it feels more substantial and when it's an art card you know being more substantial is not a bad thing right because that means people will keep it because it feels like like it's got some oomph to it now I want to give you a little peek into the brushstroke flowers since those cards are now done and they came out really nice I was pretty pleased with the whole set of them lots of little tiny things that I tried with these cards to make them a little fancier than just a painting on a card so if you have one that maybe doesn't look perfect you want to embellish it or something I got some great ideas for how to do that in the design lesson we're going to talk about layering we'll talk about you know some alternate types of cards some alternate shapes that sort of thing ways to make a black and white card more interesting just lots of different ideas that have stemmed from my crazy day of card making a lot of it is like different ways to use ribbon and twine just because I love ribbon and twine and they just make me happy so that's always good like using stuff that makes you happy so I hope that this is a class that you might be interested in it's linked in the doobly-doo and I've also put it on both the wash and ink page as well as the watercolor page so it's findable now on the website because I had had it hidden since the class wasn't quite finished look at me I even did slimline cards that are the A-frame types instead of the side opening figured out how to do that so be sure to check out the class and I guess that's about it for me today hope you'll try some apple blossoms or cherry blossoms and I will see you in class if you decide to go that route take care and I'll see you in a couple of days with another video bye bye