 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube with a stamped watercolor Christmas card and a marker conversion chart. I've been asked forever for conversion charts for all different kinds of things and I finally have done one for 20 colors in water-based markers for Tombow, Marvie, Zig, both the clean color and the twin tip markers works for this and distress. They're not perfect matches because there's just no way to make perfect matches and there might be other colors you could substitute here and there but I wanted something available for a particular reason. There are classes coming up at art-classes.com and we're going to be doing some stamped watercolor classes with art impressions watercolor stamps and I wanted to have a common set of markers or common set of colors that everybody can use so you can grab that conversion chart and pull out the colors that you're going to need or you can wait to get this particular set of Tombow's. It's the one I'm going to be using and Ellen Hudson is going to be making a set of just those colors eventually and there will be a discount so hang tight on getting your supplies for that class but I'll talk a little more about it shortly. For the card for today, I'm going to be using the Winter Kids stamp set and it's got lots of elements to make a scene. I love the fact that the snowman and the kid are hugging and they're in one stamp so you don't have to actually merge them which is nice. You can use these other stamps to create a scene though and I'm coloring this one with a black, a brown, just kind of a couple different colors, a little blue at the bottom for the snow and I did some tan in the area where the fire is going to be in the lantern and the reason is because that won't contaminate my yellow so I can color the yellow straight in there and make a little flame and not be concerned if I have a black or brown on the that line down the middle that it's going to just kind of bleed out into my flame and then all I have to do is add some water to it. I'm using a number eight silver brush and if you did want to get something for the class that is one of those things that you're going to be able to get and that's the size that I'm going to be using throughout the class. Most of the art impressions watercolor stamps are not ones that would warrant a number 12 brush so when I tell you you can get an eight or 12 that won't be one you'll really need probably for this particular class. So now we're going to work on the big image and you could do a card with just with that lantern wouldn't that be beautiful? Just something really nice and simple. You can add all the stamps. I like to color all the things so I'm going to color all the stamps from the set into my little scene and I'm just going to use various colors to add on to this. You could do all of this in one color and then paint in all the other colors but I kind of like to get a start for them and use the color that's in the outline when I actually do the painting when I start adding color to it. Going to be showing you some real good tips for strengthening color. You guys know me I love to do contrasty things so I'm going to be trying to add a lot more punch to this than you would normally get just from using the watercolor outlines. So I'm going to wipe off this side of the snowman for a particular reason. You'll see why in just a few minutes because I want to stamp the little kid that's leaning down and grabbing a snowball. I want to stamp that one right there and I don't want to have the snowman in the way so actually that whole left side of the snowman disappeared entirely. That was the first thing that I colored and part of it might have dried so more than just the area that I wiped off ended up disappearing but that's okay. Doesn't really mean that any kind of problem we're going to be able to fix that. This was a little bit of a problem that I did on purpose. I wanted to show you how to fix that if it happens to you because when you're coloring multiple colors on a little stamp like this you're very likely to have one color on one side one color on the other. Fortunately with this it's red and green. Red and green are complementary colors and they're actually going to work fine together because we're going to make that little snow suit on that child. We're going to make that kind of dark and the red is going to actually help eventually. So here's the little kid that I'm stamping right in that empty spot and when you're stamped something over top of an image that way it starts to make them interact in the picture instead of just making a whole row of evenly spaced images or everything looks like it's on the same plane. This makes it look like one is in front of the other and this way I didn't have to do any crazy masking. I just wiped off that half of the snowman and I could stamp the child down there. This little kid I had a happy accident happen. The hand I forgot to put any color on. Whoopsies. There's just a little hand held out but I'm going to change it. I'm going to just do something different with it. I'm going to add a little bit of green because what I'm doing on each of my kids they're either wearing a green outfit with red accoutrements like hat and scarf and boots or vice versa. So she's going to have green gloves on and then I did a little circle, a little half circle of blue that is the snowball she's holding. So she's just kind of sitting there ready to get involved. Now you'll also notice that that red went really pink and most reds do go really pink. That's just the way water-based markers are. They're not intended to be really dark in color. So I took two reds. One is a deeper red than the other. One is more of a tomato red. The other is a little more of a cherry red and I'm mixing them to create a darker color. I took one swipe of black and just put one swipe of black in the middle of all of that and look at how much richer the color is. You can increase that. You can add two swipes of black to make a darker color. That's one of the reasons why you don't really have to have a whole ton of markers just like you don't have to have every watercolor known demand because you can mix them and we'll be doing a little bit more of that as we go here. So the lantern here is going to cast some light down below it. So I'm going to put a little bit of yellow. I'm risking yellow snow. I realized that. I didn't realize it completely until I started putting it down there and started thinking yellow snow might not be a good thing but there you go. I'm just going to blend that really quickly. I didn't let the yellow dry before I put in all of this other background because then I'd get a hard edge between them. If you want something to be really well blended then you've got to do it right away. Just do it while it's wet. In the stamped watercolor classes we're going to be having soon. I can't wait. They are filmed and the reason actually that I'm holding off on launching them if it hasn't launched by the time this video goes live which I don't think it will is because we're waiting for all the supplies to get in and we're waiting on manufacturers to ship things etc and I want to have everything available for you and a coupon code at the same time. So hang tight and that will all be coming very soon. So notice that I'm painting all of that blue on the snowman because the child is shading the snowman. I want all that light to just be hitting the edges of everything that's facing the light. The light is kind of in a center spot so the child on the right has highlights on the left side and the kids on the left have the highlights on the right side and that sort of thing. So when you have a light in the middle like that it kind of changes things a bit. So I mixed up some extra of the darker red color and started putting a little bit more in the child on the left and then I'll just start watercoloring some of these other portions and on the block I just kind of keep putting extra colors that I want to paint with and that I want to use for the watercolor and just picking them up. I can control how dark they are by how much pigment versus water there is and that's something you kind of have to practice but what I'm doing here is actually using the marker directly on the paper. It can be scary to do that because not all watercolor markers will water out the same and that is one of the things that in the pre-class I'm going to have a whole video talking about it but I tested out all the different brands of markers. The Tombos do the best job at not sticking and being unable to blend so that's why I'm recommending using them because all the other marker brands are just tougher to use. If you've tried using these art impressions watercolor stamps with other marker brands it's possible that may have been your issue but also I find that individual colors sometimes are harder to move than others so sometimes it's just the marker itself and it could be that it's got dry and it's just not moving very much could just be the pigment itself. There's a lot of different factors that it could be but look how rich that green color is when I went directly into painting it on the paper itself. I'm doing it quickly I mean this is sped up but I'm doing it quickly. I take the quick swipe of the dark green on the paper and then immediately go in with pigment from the acrylic block to get some blending going so darkening up a little bit of the red I mixed up some of the darker red again and just going over one more layer on that you can get all kinds of crazy with your depth on this and mix more of that dark color again put more of the black in there to darken that red but I was kind of feeling this was good enough for horseshoes and hand grenades as my dad used to say and now I wanted to put a sky in the background and I'm going to have that horizontal line the horizon across there so I wasn't worried about getting a hard line there but I'm going to be really careful about creating any kind of hard edge on my sky and I'm actually painting this upside down I turned the video right set up so you could see it a little bit easier rather than watching me paint upside down but I've turned upside down so that I could kind of get access to everything more easily but I'm making sure that I keep all of the leading edges wet and this is the same with watercolor except it's more urgent when you're watercoloring with water-based markers. Water-based markers don't like to move nearly as much as watercolor. Watercolors have a lot more time to deal with the things like this but whatever the outside edge is that and that's what I call the leading edge that outside edge needs to remain wet even if you just wet it with with water alone that will at least give you a soft edge to blend with and I keep adding more color onto my block and I have to do this quickly so that I can get the whole background in there. I'm also risking I know here the possibility of bleeding that hat out into the rest of the picture. The folks over at Art Impressions I've noticed when they do backgrounds they'll leave a white edge around things. I don't like to leave a white edge that's just the way I am so you can leave a white edge around things. Go look at some of Bonnie's videos and you'll see some of the beautiful work she does. So my final touch is going to be to add some strong shadows and the shadows are all pointing out from the light out in a variety of directions and if you've taken some my other classes you'll know I've talked a lot about shading and stuff. I'm not going to get into a lot of that in these two classes that we're going to be having. There is going to be a jump start and a mini intermediate class. I recommend definitely doing the jump start before you do the mini but if you're very experienced you'll be able to jump over and do the intermediate if you wish. But both of them are going to be so much fun. I can't wait. Now I'm adding some just kind of extra finishing details. I wanted a little stronger shadow on my snowman. You thought it was dark before when I had the blue on there. Look at me adding some gray to it and then once it was all dry I added some snow to it which I always do with my white pen. Don't we just love the white pen come Christmas time. I actually have already run through so many white pens so I'm going to have to order some more real quickly so I can finish making Christmas cards this year. Stay tuned to my channel. Make sure you're subscribed if you want to get the first word when those classes are live and available. And I will see you again very very soon. You can find links to everything in the doobly-doo or over on the blog and more information as well about that conversion chart. And I will see you guys very soon. Take care. Bye.