 Hello my crafty friends and welcome back to another card making video today I'm going to play with stencils. I will play with the watercolor wash stencils by my favorite things You can see these are the ones and you get both the stencil as well as the mask They provide the perfect background You can easily go ahead and create lots and lots of backgrounds And then all you have to do to put together a card is to just add a focal point that you can find On your stamps and a sentiment and I'm going to do just that today I will show you how I create three different backgrounds and then how I put together my cards For all my backgrounds today, I will play with different colors of Distress Oxide I like how easy they are to blend since they kind of stay on top of the paper and you can easily blend them out For this first background I'm playing with three different shades of blue I'm starting from lighter all the way to darker color And of course you can use any blending brush that you have at home. Anything works really for this technique I make sure that I over saturate the color I add too much ink on the paper which makes it super easy to blend the colors together when you work with Oxide inks. I Also don't have many brushes for blues. I use the same brush for all the shades All I do is just wipe it off on a paper towel By the way the colors that I used for this blending are apicot fithers, Mermaid Lagoon and Blueprint Sketch Before I remove the stencil from the paper, I'm going to add some splashes just with water This is going to react with the ink and then I can use a paper towel to lift excess water And I will end up with an interesting background that has some visual texture and it doesn't look flat I'm going to take off the stencil and you can see the background. I'm absolutely happy with this I'm going to put it aside and move on on another background For my second background example, I am choosing a different color combo this time. I'm using pink and yellow And instead of going gradually from lighter to darker like I did on the previous background this time I'm going completely randomly I just want to make sure that I have both those colors on my background I believe that this design is one of those stencils that you can get the most out of it You can use it again and again throughout the year, it is really versatile And when you don't have an idea of what you want to create, just go ahead do some blending through that lovely design It's going to provide the perfect background and by changing color combinations you can get completely different looks Here again I'm adding some water splashes because I just love that look And also remember that with this stencil since it has that big opening You can combine it with other stencils that you have Especially if they are quite versatile like geometric shapes to get interesting looks One thing to remember is that oxide inks work beautifully on top of black or darker cardstock So that's exactly what I'm going to do here just to get a completely different look like than the two previous ones that I created on top of white cardstock So this time I'm going with two shades of green I'm keeping the lighter one all over the place and mainly at the center And then with the darker one I'm going to go only on the edges However for this background I think that I didn't pick from the start two colors that were really far apart from each other So when it dries it's going to look completely flat But I'm going to show you what I'll do to fix that Anyway here is how that background looks at the moment And let's start creating cards for all those backgrounds Now you can add one focal point, you can add many focal points Or you can even create a scene and that's exactly what I'm going to do for today So for this blue background I'm going to use the whale This comes from this little stamp set that I used in a previous video It is called best catch ever It's from the previous collection and I cannot stay away from that whale I find it super adorable Now for this example I'm only going to use one focal point at my sentiment You will see that for all my cards I'm going to pretty much use the same design A lovely color wash background blended through that stencil And then on top just stick focal points that I stamped and cut out Since I'm mainly focusing on the design of the cards today I didn't show how I colored everything but it's just some quick coloring with my alcohol markers I went with a sentiment that says a whale always love you Which is adorable and to finish off my card I'm just taking some tiny little hearts Coming out of my whale As if they are air bubbles And you can see here some close up photos on the finished card For my yellow and pink background I decided to go with something fresh So I used fruits from the new stamp set by my favorite things Which is called bunch of happiness I stamped, colored and cut out the orange The pineapple as well as the watermelon But there are even more fruits that you can find in this stamp set such as cherries A strawberry and an apple And they do have accessories such as burners There is a little crown you can find little burners that the fruits can hold That you can fit sentiments in them I find them really adorable And in terms of design notice that this time I'm using that background In a portrait card while previously it was in a landscape So you can use it any way that you like And also in the first card I used one focal point just a whale Here I have three focal points I did finish it off by adding some gems I just love gems and I cannot stay away from them I think that they add something extra on any card And now for the third and last card for today I did use focal points from this stamp set Again this is a new one from the latest release by my favorite things And it's called something to squack about I did stamp my images, colored them with alcohol markers But I didn't have the matching dice So I just fuzzy cut everything with my scissors leaving some white space Now I don't like how that background turned out It looks completely flat So I'm going to place a stencil again back on And I'm going to blend in one more color just throw it there To create something more interesting This background is not going to show as much Since for this card I'm going with a little scene So when you see the card you will mainly focus on what I have on the foreground So you see what I did there I just placed a little bit of yellow at the center Nothing looks beautiful at the moment But I'm not giving up, I'm just going to keep it as it is I don't really mind, you will see everything is going to come together at the end I'm also going to add some splashes Just to add some extra visual texture Since for this card I'm going to create a little scene Most of the background is not going to show I just didn't want to have just one flat color back there And it's time to put everything together I am creating a little less in With that toucan on the branch And at the end I just wanted to demonstrate that this background works For one random focal point on top of it For many random focal points Just like I did with the fruit Or for a scene where you arrange everything In a meaningful way And you just don't have cutouts that are floating on your card Just like in the first two examples Now just like always down below in the description area Here on YouTube or on my blog You will find the full list of supplies that I use to create these cards I hope that you had fun, that you got inspired Thank you all so much for joining me today Before you go don't forget to like the video, it really helps As well as leave me a comment I hope you all have a lovely weekend And although I'm still on vacation I do have another video scheduled for you for the next week Thank you all for joining me and I'll see you all next time