 Well hello there, I'm Sandy Olnack and today I'm going to paint some really beautiful little foxes and a super simple background that looks really elegant. A lot of folks ask about the difference between the 8 and the 12 round brushes that I use, so I'm going to show you specifically what I'm using them for in this video and I'm going to start off by using the number 8 because I'm going to be painting the foxes. Red Sienna is kind of a foxish color, but on something like this that's going to be a happy kind of coloring, I want to make it a little brighter so I'm going to mix it with some Aussie Red Gold and that's going to brighten up the color. You can mix it with any kind of a yellow color that will just change the color up and brighten it a little bit because it's more of a brick type of brownish red and sometimes that can feel a little bit darkish and it's helpful to play around with what else in your palette you can mix things and turn something into a different color that you want because I had a vision for this card with simple color, big blocks kind of sections of color, but without a whole lot of detail in them if that makes sense. I wanted some really simple background elements to make a scene without going into a whole lot of detail painting, but I do need to do a little bit of detail work because of course these are foxes and they have tiny places in them. I love Stacy Yakula's stamps. I'm glad she's designing for MFT as well as over at Purple Onion because we get double the fun because she produces lots of stamps that way. Recently on Facebook somebody was asking, hey anybody know where you can get those cute little animal stamps and they were all going back and forth about where to get them and I was like, oh hello there by Stacy so you can find her work at MFT and at Purple Onion so if you fall in love with her in one site or the other you have more places to get her stamps. So I'm going to let these guys dry entirely before moving on to the sky and for a really simple sky and I've left lots of room on the card, lots of sky space. I'm just going to start by painting some clean water just some random swatches of of water spots and leaving some dry spots as well and then dropping in some cobalt teal blue kind of a fun color that granulates really well especially if you put down a lot of pigment and since I knew I wanted to have kind of a big blocky almost blocky sky even though it's going to have clouds in it I wanted it to feel like a mass of blue so I'm starting by putting in a little lighter color and then I'll add more to it once I get my color kind of across the whole thing. You do need to work fairly quickly with something like this if you want to drop in wet in wet color because you don't want to start letting it dry and then try to revise it because once you start letting something dry you're going to start getting hard edges and blooms and that sort of thing so once I got that base down I started using thicker paint just lots and lots of color on my brush and dropping it back in just nice big heavy blobs of color sometimes they're too heavy and you have to play around with them to move them but leave yourself some white areas because the white areas that's really what makes the clouds sing and makes watercolor sing when you have some of that white paper showing. Be a little careful as you get around to your foxes because if you're using colors that lift and you touch the brush to them even though they're dry you could lift some colors so you want to be careful not to take too many risks with that. Now while the sky is still wet and I'm working quickly here while the sky is still wet I want to meet the grass and the sky together. Now you can do a flat ground like this is or you can do what I'm going to do which is make a little hillside just a little bit drag that color up on one side more than the other and it's going to make it feel like a little more of a natural scene and just let the colors blend however they're going to blend. I wanted a little richer color in the grass so I went straight from the palette to the paper dropping wet in wet and I'm just playing around with the color just moving it around in different ways until it starts to blend together with the serpentine green so this is sap green dropped into the serpentine and I love having a couple of different greens in my palette. I don't like to mix greens all that much even though I can do it it's nice to have I have four greens in my palette because sometimes I just don't mix enough of anything and it's fun to just be able to go straight from the palette and have some fun colors to play with. So you can just keep dropping color in as long as it's wet I have to be a little careful over here on this side section because I wanted that soft edge and have the the grass sort of just softly blend into the sky. If you need to you can spritz right across all of this while it's at this stage and it will also help to blend some of that color but I just let it dry completely and now I'm going to add a little bit more to my painting. I'm going to start by mixing a warm gray because I want to put a little color in my foxes and I didn't want it to just be neutral tint so I added a little bit of yellow ochre to it to make it warmer and that's just a little happier color to put some shadows on their bodies because even though they're white white things have shadows and when you have a shadow on something it just tends to make it look more realistic so I wanted to add a little bit of that in there let that dry completely and then I'm going to use two of my darker greens my green appetite and my perline green. Perline is really dark so if you've ever struggled with like gosh I just can't get a color dark enough perline is very dark and green appetite can get dark and I'm going to add the shadows underneath of my little foxes and going back in there with the number eight brush the sky and the grass the background parts were done with the twelve forgot to mention that and everything else in the little scene these little grassy parts I went back to my eight so for big background things it's super helpful to have a bigger brush I one of my teachers always said use as bigger brushes you can possibly use and try to use bigger than you think you should for any task and it will start to loosen you up so now I'm going to add a little bit now that the green is dry I'm going to add a little bit to the ties because one has a long tie on and the other has a little bow tie and I thought they could both stand to have little red ties using my anthraconoid scarlet and dropping in a little tiny bit of the pierol scarlet pierol is a semi opaque color and the anthraconoid scarlet is a transparent color so I wanted a little bit more punch to it so there's my finished card so sweet and would be a great card for a dad because father's day is not too far away but it could also be for anybody else I hope you enjoyed this video if you did click that like button and if you haven't subscribed yet please go ahead and do that you can see all the supplies in the description down below as well as over on the blog and I will see you again very soon with another video take care bye bye