 Well, hi there! I'm Sandy Olnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to be painting a magical wizard in some new Daniel Smith watercolors today. And I'm going to be painting, surprisingly, on Nina cardstock. I have two pieces of Nina ready for some new grounds. Daniel Smith makes watercolor grounds in which you can turn any piece of paper or any object, and I'll show you some objects later, into a watercolor surface. And they have a new iridescent gold and pearlescent white that I want to show you. They're very creamy and you apply them to your paper and then let it dry, and then you can paint on top of it. So I'm going to show you how I did it. I'm using one of the Ranger ink applicators, little round ink applicators, has a little foam pad. You can wash these after you're finished and absolutely use them again and again, which is helpful. Don't let them dry completely because, let me tell you, they won't be able to be recovered after that. They will be useless. So I'm just going to apply a layer of this. Depending on what you're applying it to, then there's a lot of different things that you'll learn as you go. I've tried it on a lot of different surfaces. And on this paper, I'm getting sort of those little round marks. So what I decided to do is create a texture that feels a little more like the rough paper that I like. I like Arches Rough. And so I just started tapping and adding more of this on and started tapping until I started seeing a texture appear. Now if you end up adding more texture on it than you originally wanted to get, then you could knock it down with actually surprisingly a luffa, a nice clean luffa that works on that. So I went over it a couple times and you can wait till it dries in and go over it one more time as well, which I decided to do. The gold one is a little different. The gold one goes on really thin at first. I'm going to be speeding this way up because we could be here forever when I get to the painting. But I will do a couple layers for sure on the gold. So depending on what you're going over top of, if you're doing something like I painted over top of a piece of wood that was already painted, I had to go over it a couple times. And I even did a gesso underneath one piece before I started putting this watercolor ground on top. So you do need to cover up what's under there. And with gold, you're going to still see some of that white paper underneath. So if you want it really heavy gold, we'll do it a couple times. So this is after one layer and now it's dry after about the amounts of time that it took to do both of these. So you could get a couple boards ready and have them all taped down and start doing a couple of them at once. By the time one set is dry, you can work on the other. So this is the second coat that I'm putting on these. And two coats was more than enough for the project that I'm going to be working on to show you here in a few minutes. Don't pull your tape up straight up. You want to pull it sideways. I learned that the hard way. So I'm pulling away from the paper. And I don't know if this is only because I did it when it was still wet. But I would just suggest that and I'm pulling sideways on the paper. I don't want to pull up so that I don't rip it. That's just a little extra bonus tip from Sandy from the things she learned from doing this. Now Daniel Smith also has some new colors. So I'm going to show you the new colors while all the rest of that is drying. There's Payne's Blue Gray, a lavender and a wisteria, which are really pretty. There's a new quinacridone. I love the quinacridones. Rose Matter is a color that's never been permanent before, but now it is. There's Burnt Umber and Raw Umber and there's an Aussie Gold. So these are all colors that are brand new to Daniel Smith. And I'm going to be painting exclusively with this group of colors today. And this is them all splotched out. And look at that yummy quinacridone. Yum yum. Delicious. So let us begin by stamping my stamping Bella image. This is the wizard that I'm going to color. And it's a stamp called the Wiz. And I'm going to use my Misti because when you stamp onto any kind of bumpy surface, which is what we've created, you're going to want to stamp a couple times potentially. And using the Misti allows me to stamp over and over again to get a good impression. So I'm going to do this onto the pearlescent that I had prepped earlier. And I let it dry for probably three hours before I did this. And that seemed to be more than adequate, even though a lot of grounds and things say that you should wait 24 hours. I'm not that patient. So here it is all ready to paint. And you can see that shiny pearlescent. And I will paint the this little guy using my silver brushes as always. Now the difference that I felt or saw or noticed between this and painting on a piece of paper, because I painted this image both on this pearlized paper on a regular piece of watercolor paper and on the gold. It seems to float on top a little bit more. It doesn't even though it turns into a watercolorable surface, it doesn't turn it into watercolor paper. I'm used to a rag field to the paper. And this has just a little different feel to it. If you're at CHA, please do come by the Daniel Smith booth because I will be there with these cards and the other samples and I'm going to show you later in this video. And if you know anybody who is going to the show, then text them and tell them to come on by because I will be doing demos and stuff there all weekend long. And I'm just going to be using these colors and painting just like I would with anything else. I'm going to add my shadow colors and do this in layers. So one part is dry by the time I move on to the next part. So this surface that's created using these grounds does not slow down the drying, even though it feels a little shinier, a little bit more. I want to say plastic, but it's not plastic. It's just a different feel. It's just very different. It's worth getting a little jar of one of the grounds and trying it out to see. And especially when you see the projects at the end, for card makers, since we can get flat watercolor paper, and that's usually what we make cards out of, we don't usually need a ground. So we don't usually end up using these very much for card making, but for other DIY projects, they're just absolutely wonderful to have. And to add this pearlized shimmer, that's a really big bonus. So just moving all these jars. Now they don't normally come in jars, just so you know. I was given these test jars of some of these pigments so I could try them out and shoot this video, but they will be sold in the normal tubes like normal colors. One of the reasons that some of these colors have been created was because artists around the world have been asking for them. Rose Matter is one I know for sure. It's just an arch, I'm gonna say archival. It's a paint that's been used for generation after generation of artists, but it's one of those fugitive colors. And they were asked, you know, can you please create us a rose matter that is not fugitive so we can use it and it will stay. So Daniel Smith likes to accommodate us artists. We love that about them, right? I love working with the team there. They're absolutely wonderful people and they love supporting artists and giving us the stuff that we need like supplies. So this is that Payne's blue-gray color and I'm adding some of that on here and you can see that it mixes a little bit differently than it might on watercolor paper. Part of it is that this is still a little damp but it's also that surface that's created. So you'll get a little bit different textures sometimes on the watercolor grounds than you would on paper. So test things out and try it out on the scrap of something and see if there's technique things that you want to adapt before you start a real project. But they're a whole lot of fun to have in your collection to add some different surfaces underneath. You can see here that I can lift colors very easily off of this ground surface so that is something that you do regularly in your watercoloring. That that function is here for you as well. So it's nice to know that a lot of the things that we do we don't have to relearn how to watercolor. It's just some of the ways the pigment goes on. You might find you want to adapt a little bit in order to to achieve the kind of results that you're looking for. So I'm just gonna continue painting around him. This is it. As I said an image from Stamping Bella and it's by Mo Manning and Mo Manning is one of the most talented stamp designers out there. I don't know about you but I love the things that she creates. As soon as I saw this stamp I said I need, need, need, need must have it because I want to color this in a lot of different mediums. He's gonna be fun to do in Copic Markers. I'm also going to try to make a scene around him. I'm gonna do like a Lord of the Rings thing because he just looks like Gandalf to me. He's just really, he's just something wonderful about him and you don't get that feel necessarily in watercolor. Watercolor is a very different type of medium and I haven't gotten to the point where I'm very good at creating backgrounds for things in watercolor but that's a, that's a goal. I get goals and that's one of mine for this year. One of my resolutions and I want to start working on. So here is the finished wizard on that shiny, shiny pearlescent. Isn't it pretty? Let me give you a really nice close look at that and what that's, what that comes out like. Now painting on gold is different because of course now we have this white beard. So I tried out the different whites that I have and the Chinese white didn't work very well but titanium white worked nicely. So that is just a thing. Now nothing is going to be opaque like an acrylic. If you want this to be really, really white then I would recommend just getting an acrylic and watering it down a little bit but this white watercolor does seem to be working okay for me and I could add more onto it later and give it more of a density by adding other layers of it later on but just gonna add a little bit of the white in some places where I want to add some highlights and if the light is all coming off of this this globe that he's holding then all that light is going to be on the left side of everything. So you can see here exactly where I'm putting my highlights as they're shining out onto him. Now I'm really, really speeding up because this video is going on and on and on but I wish I could watercolor that fast in your life and now I'm gonna go through and use the same color combinations that I used on the pearlescent because I'm wanting to have sort of an apples at apples and see how the two of them compare to each other and whether the colors are different. One of the main things you'll notice is that there's just more yellow to everything because there is this gold underneath. It's giving it a gold underpainting basically in order to anything it's gonna be painted on this. So the pearlescent will give you more of that the same kinds of colors as you get if you're painting on a piece of white paper. So I'm just gonna keep adding more layers of other colors mixing in some of that paint's blue gray into his outfit to give him a little more contrast. You can see there I did a little lifting with the brush that worked just fine. The surface of this one felt very much like the surface of the pearlescent so the color doesn't make the same much difference. I layered a little bit of other colors over top of the white as well which gives it another option for building up colors using the white as an underpainting basically. And they do warp however so I just wanted to let you know on the 80 pound Mina you get a little bit of warping so you do have to layer it and then glue it down really nicely. I used some score tape and that works very well to adhere it down to a nice piece of heavy card stock so that the card will end up flat. Now here's the difference between the pearlized and just a regular piece of card stock or water color paper. So I just wanted to show you the color difference. The colors come out just about the same. So now I have die cut my panels and I'm adding them on to a piece of heavy black card stock so I have a nice layer underneath of it So for my finished cards I added those already layered pieces on to a nice piece of black card stock for the bases which just gives them a little more strength a little more heft so they will survive a little bit better and last a little longer since I put all this effort into them and I stamped a birthday message on the inside from the stamp set. So that is the cards and I wanted to show you some other projects that I used these grounds on. I used the pearlescent brown on one of these chipboard boxes that I got at the craft store and painted on it just painted right over top of it so it did some pretty poppies and there's a lot of different designs you could do of course but you can cover like I said a lot of different surfaces with these grounds and do some really amazing things. This one was a tin a very small tin and I painted flowers on that one and some other stuff around the bottom so tin is another surface that seems to work very nicely kind of amazing to be able to paint on a tin so this gives you lots of different options for DIY projects and this one was one that used to be red white and blue and hung outside my house but it was all faded and yucky from being outside forever so I painted over it I did some gesso underneath all of it and then used the pearlescent ground and stamped on top of it with a bunch of flowers from Altenew so this came out really pretty and was a lot of fun to watercolor on this piece of wood and now I have this hanging outside my house it is under a roof so it's not going to get hit by the rain but you could also use on top of it some distressed glaze and that would seal in the watercolor as well if you're concerned about the weather. The last project I want to show you was a candle I just took a regular old wax candle and used the pearlescent ground on the outside of it and painted flowers on it and this came out really pretty I don't know what it's going to happen when it burns I will let you know if anything lights on fire but I'm very excited about coming up with really pretty projects that use these new grounds and new colors so thank you for joining me feel free to click on my face right there to subscribe to my channel you can watch a couple other videos if you're interested and there's also watercolor class if you're interested in learning more about watercolor from me and I'll talk to you guys later thank you bye bye