 Hello and welcome to my YouTube studio. My name is Sandy Olnock. I'm an artist I work in a lot of different mediums and a lot all kinds of projects from small and Mailable things to large and frameables and everything in between and whatever you make You are welcome here Today I'm going to talk about gouache and stamping together now You might not have thought about gouache as a medium that you might consider to use for coloring stamps making cards and postcards But guess what? It's going to give you super bright color and yes I am going to show you all of these Later in this video. It's new release day for Colorado Craft Company But I want to show you some tips for how you can use gouache with your stamping the things that are possible least a few of them and I will also introduce you to a new class because I just released gouache jump start And if you're brand new to gouache and it intrigues you that might be a great place to start So let's get going and I'll show you the new Colorado Craft Company release gouache is an opaque watercolor and that means it's water soluble So you need some water of course you need something to mix on and that would be for me a ceramic tile And I got in the hardware store for 89 cents nice and cheap and then you need brushes You can use your cheapest brushes because you don't want anything that holds a lot of water Because you need a little more control with the water This set of Jack Richardson brushes that I bought has a case and it just has a nice range of flats and rounds Which is perfect for me then there's Putting the paints in a palette or you can just squeeze out a little dot over them to use You don't have to get a palette for them, but this is supposedly airtight I wouldn't say any pallets gonna be 100% airtight This one has proved Pretty well with Daniel Smith paints because they don't dry out very fast the top row is Windsor and Newton They do dry out some bottom row is Daniel Smith But the price difference is about half for the Windsor and Newton and for crafters You're totally going to be fine with the Windsor and Newton Just don't fill your palette completely completely full so that you don't have to reconstitute a lot So here's what I mean by reconstituting you put a drop or two of water in it and mix it So you can see how kind of not creamy it is and that's just what the Windsor and Newton paints do But it's fairly easy to reconstitute using water in a toothpick But you can only do that so many times before the paint just kind of starts losing its integrity So be aware of that That's why I say just put a small amount of paint in the bottom then you can use it up by the time it becomes unusable So I'll be using some Kansan XL watercolor paper while I don't like it really much at all for traditional watercolor I adore it for gouache It's really a nice surface because it doesn't have a lot of friction So that your brush can travel a little easier over top of it You can put a border around whatever piece of paper you're working on either that was a half inch This is a quarter inch and you can also decide if you just want to go all the way to the edge Whatever you'd like to do and then you could trim it down, especially if you're making cards Throughout this video. I'll be showing you clips of some of the cards It's not everything here in this video because we'd be here for hours, but I'm going to be stamping in the misty So that's gonna be a cool technique thing that I think you're gonna be able to use if you decide to get into gouache so the new release has mostly Christmas stuff in it and This stamp set is so cute has two bunny sets in it bunny stamps and this one the bunnies building a Snow bunny and I added the tree myself and I also added the clouds I'll show you in the class that I mentioned and I'll talk about more at the end that you can learn to paint clouds But just did some fun colors on the other stamp this little guy I'll show you a few steps so you can kind of get an idea how I work with gouache and stamps So I've stamped the rabbit first onto the paper and then painted the background It's a nice light color And I'm just gonna kind of paint it even over top of some of those lines and then re-stamp it Then I only have a small bit of repair that I need to do if I'm gonna You know bring some of the bunny back to white but I was gonna be painting the bunny in other colors so I could just paint over top of it and Paint all the little bits and then re-stamp it again In order to get the lines back It's a really easy way to do this so here I've stamped the bird on top and painted the bird and then You know got the stamps dry and I could add more ink onto it by stamping again Soon get a lot of different images in there in order to make a scene You know me and I like to make scenes on my cards And you can do that using the misty and you can paint right over top of a layer of gouache Now this stamp set has a dog and a cat and I wanted the two of them touching noses Which meant that I couldn't stamp them both at the same time So I'd have to use the technique that I used before when I added the bird Here I'm gonna have to add one of the animals I chose to stamp the dog first and get the whole background in and then I would add the cat on top So I'm stamping again in Versa fine onyx black. You need a waterproof ink because this is a water-soluble Medium, you don't want to get all that ink all over the place and then I wanted to mix a color Now you could just keep rinsing your brush and taking it back to the paint and then bring it back over to the mixing Well, but I have found that if I think of it if I remember to do it It's a lot more effective and efficient with the paint if I use a palette knife to grab the other colors And then I don't have to keep rinsing the brush and losing paint in the water, which is nice I'm all for saving as much paint as possible. So that, you know, since you're we're using it thicker as you can see We're gonna go through paint faster than we would with watercolor But since you can use cheap paper and cheap brushes I think wash is maybe either comparable or cheaper than watercolor hard to say Guess it depends on how often you do it and whether or not you do full backgrounds like this so I've painted the whole background of the wall behind the dog and the cat and then I'm just gonna paint some yellow for the ground and Both of these mixtures of paint are nice and thick because I want nice rich color in this to take advantage of what watercolor does really strong beautiful color Now I overpainted the lines a bit so that I could make sure I got that background all the way into where the dog is and That means I have some painting to do in the dog both adding my shading to the dog as well as Maybe fixing some of the stuff where there was Paint some of the red came into the dog or some of the yellow covered up the foot I can cover that up because this is an opaque paint But it is still water-soluble even after you finish painting it So you can still rework some areas if you want to try to blend some colors You can use a damp brush to move color around still But you also need to use paint thickly like this when you're painting over top of something or else You'll just pick up color from underneath because you'll be rewetting it So I have dried the whole thing before doing the stamping and once I added the stamping on you can see how nice it comes out There might be some little repairs you have to do but that is well worth getting all that nice bright color So the cat is now nose-to-nose with the dog and I'm gonna have to paint it on top of this strong color It was really easy to paint a blue bird on top of that light blue sky background That's where I'd recommend starting if you're getting started in gouache and doing this Because you need to get used to how to mix the paint thick enough that you can cover a color underneath and here I'm not making the cat white because that's really hard to make it look white white When you're painting it on top of red because that red is still water soluble You could easily pick that color up and end up with a pink cat That's the reason why I left the dog being white I didn't want to have to deal with making the the paint so thick So I just left most of the dog white and didn't have anything but a little bit of repair around the edges to work on But the cat's gonna be brown and have a light brown highlight on it so I'm not stressed out about having white that has to look white because you know I Can make that choice as an artist to make my cat brown just to make the process work So once I get it painted I can stamp it again. I can add more highlights onto things like the bone Etc and stamp it another time. Just make sure you dry it in between each layer. I Decided to add something to the background. I didn't want to put a sentiment on the outside So the sentiment is going to be within the painting on the wall so I just painted a square of Yellow paint using a flat brush painted a frame around it And then I'm gonna add onto it a heart and I'm gonna just kind of play around with colors and Make it feel like a mixed media painting on the wall So it's not just a plain heart, but it's gonna have a little bit more But I decided to do that after adding the line work I wanted to kind of get an idea whether or not a leak needed more texture in that painting and I'm using Some waterproof ink in my fountain pen use any kind of Waterproof type of pen on this you can even use colored pencils on top of gouache So outline the baseboard and the frame and then once that was dry I took the tape off I wanted to get an idea of whether or not I really needed some texture in that picture frame or not in that Little piece of art because this would kind of give me a clearer picture of what I was looking at and I did decide That should be just more fun So I added more brushstrokes using dry brush in the colors that were already in the card itself So that's how you would handle a really strong background color This video that you're watching is Actually going to become part of the gouache jumpstart class in the pre-class lesson Because the gouache jumpstart class is in a sketchbook and it doesn't include stamps But I thought this video has enough ideas to give you a way that you can use the gouache jumpstart class in your Stamping if you want to as well So in the class we're going to go through a sketchbook We're going to do a bunch of color studies talk about color theory Mixing colors warms and cools that kind of thing most of the class You're going to be just mixing your own colors because it's really hard for me to tell you Mix this and that to get this such lesson such color because gouache is like watercolor It does its own thing but I'm going to give you some great ideas on how to get started and then we're going to go through a bunch of techniques in all of the painting lessons so there's like I think it's 17 paintings that we do and On the left you see one that's more clean and simple and posterized And then the other one is more expressive and I do some crazy techniques So you can do both exercises in the class I recommend trying both and then deciding if there's one or the other that works really well for you To pursue as you continue on in your artwork So there's a link down below to the class and you can get more information on it. Just remember while it's still World watercolor month in july 2023 use the coupon code that's listed in the doobly do To go get 10 off Now let's move on to some of these others This one is such a cute little stamp set has a mouse peeking into a stocking Getting a little heads up on what's coming and I was able to make that stocking look soft and fluffy because gouache will Cover over the stamp lines as we know and I use that to my advantage to make the stocking look fuzzy around the top Then we've got this one that has just a lot of lights I painted the whole background first and then added The cords on top Because that would be really hard to paint in between all those little bits But just doing the background first works easily with gouache And then we've got this one again, you know painted the background first And did it in soft colors and decided to add more color to the background and just added it in black This guy is just fun. This is a super fun bright and very simple Stamp set lots of big open areas to practice gouache on so that's a good thing added my own textures and patterns onto the papers Then this one I thought would be kind of interesting to show you how I handled this because The tree is kind of complex. It didn't have any snow on it and I wanted it to feel really snowy So I decided to try something entirely different than was probably ever expected for something like this And I'm using some paint on my mixing tile I got some blue and some red And I'm going to add a little bit of a different blue in here because I wanted something a little stronger So I'm adding some ultramarine In addition to the primary blue so I can make a really strong purple color And remember this is watercolor. It's opaque watercolor So we're going to be able to move it like watercolor And I thought this would be a great way to show that off So I'm going to paint around the base of this I wanted the Middle around the fox to be nice and dark so the fox would show up because there's just so much going on in a stamp It was really hard to figure out how to make the fox the feature I left a little room for the tree trunk in here And then after I got the base of it painted. I just used water To start moving the color around and make that splashy background And it's real easy to do with gouache because it is water soluble So once that was all dry, I re-stamped on top of it And then I could start working on the fox and if I need to re-stamp over it I could re-stamp over it again, which I obviously am going to need to And I painted the trees I just painted blobs in there because I was going to paint all this snow on top anyway So I just used a bigish kind of round brush to make super blobby snow And then used a toothbrush with some gouache on it to flick little dots So it would look like super fine snow coming down And I think it came out really cute with something that just feels really peaceful These last two cards. I'm just going to show you the cards themselves They're a little epic on the painting side. So there was just a lot going on And this first one these mice are Getting their decorations ready for their tree So I made the tree in there just kind of hanging down So that's what they're going to put the decorations on So I thought that would be kind of a fun way to highlight the stamp itself And then this one Took me quite some time to do because I kept changing my mind But with gouache I could keep changing my mind. I eventually built a barn around them Like it got really dark and I fought with try to have how to make those highlights really pop And with gouache it was easy once I figured out where I was headed with it Don't forget to go over to my blog. There's a link in the doobly-doo because Colorado Craft Company always does giveaways on their new release days So you might want to check that out. All that information is on the blog post And I will see you again next week guys come back again. There's more fun to be had. I'll see you then