 Well, hello there. It's Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here with some watercolor stamped flowers in a size you didn't expect. Normally I do art impressions watercolor when I do stamped watercolor, but these are from Altenew and they're huge. Look how big these are compared to my hands. I normally do little teeny tiny flowers and little teeny tiny scenes, but I decided to try that technique with these because I also picked up some of Altenew's markers. They've been out for a while. I haven't used them before. I only just bought them and I'm going to baptize them here on camera. And we're going to try them out. This is the spring set. They have a bunch of different color sets. And let's give them a shot and take them all out. And one of the things you see is that neon little ring and that will be the first thing you take off in any brush marker. They all seem to come with that little ring to keep the ink from going into the nib until you're ready. So once you squeeze that on and twist that on, it's going to puncture something so it allows the ink to flow out into the nib. So it doesn't do that until you own the markers and take that little ring out. And you squeeze the thing, the body of the marker until color comes out. And it does seem to water out nicely. That was a good thing because a lot of markers don't do that. But these are extra juicy because of the kind of brush marker they are. They're like liquid liquid, whereas I think others like the zigs and the tombos, they don't come out gushing like these do. These have actual liquid liquid in them that can squeeze out and bloop. So took out all the little rings and then I'm going to sit here and squeeze and test them all out to scribble a little bit of each one of the colors. And you can see sometimes I got a little frustrated. I was really squeezing hard two hands to get it started because it was not enjoying the whole getting started process all the time. And it also, there were a couple things about these that I wasn't super thrilled with, even though there were some that I was. One is that this nib, you can see it kind of, it flattens out quickly and you end up, I feel like I'm scraping across the paper with that, that plastic part, the plastic holder part. And the, just the way that the nib works, it's not like other brush nibs that I've used. So there's that. I kept finding it as I was coloring on the stamps themselves that I was scraping that, that little piece of black plastic that holds the nib because I just, I'm used to being able to give a little bit of pressure to that brush. And you know, it's just something I think to get used to. So there you go. I put a couple different colors on the vase and then spritzed it with some water. And I didn't know with these what technique was going to work and what I was going to need to do to it. This is on Arches, the cold press kind. And you get different effects on different papers. If you've taken my stamp to watercolor classes, you'll know a lot of different things that you can try and try with different markers, etc. And these didn't color really well on the markers themselves, even though this technique really looks gorgeous. And I think the reason is because they come out of the marker a little weirdly. I'm used to with the Tombows, with them coming out pretty solid, you can actually draw on the stamp itself. And over on my Instagram today, I'm going to have a version of this done with Tombow markers, just so you can see the difference in what I mean. That doesn't mean that these are not good at this. It just means they're going to go on differently. And a lot of what I got on these was a look of stone. So the texture of what I'm getting here ends up looking more like stone because of the way the ink goes on to the stamp itself. Now I'm playing around with these. This is my first blush attempts of doing anything with these markers and with these stamps. And I was just playing with them. I was playing with whether I stamped into something that was already wet. Do I stamp into something that's dry? Do I stamp onto something where the stamp itself gets spritz first? Because that seems to make the color move a little bit more. And some of the colors were also juicier. Like Emerald was super, super juicy. I think it was called Emerald and was super strong. And then other colors were weaker. And that's just a matter of getting used to the markers. But this all was a blast to play with. I'm used to those teeny tiny ones from Art Impressions. And they're really fun and they make great scenes. But this was like, wow, they're really huge. And you could do something that's frameable, like giant frameable, because they're so big. So I only tried a couple of the vases in this video, but I'm going to be playing with the other ones because goodness gracious, great balls of fire, lots of fun. And I'm pretty sure what they mean for you to do with these is just do some solid stamping. But you know, solid stamping to me is not nearly as fun as doing something like this with it. The stamp set, the large vases stamp set, which is separate from the flowers, has the water in it. And the water, one problem I have with it is the water is swooshed. So you can see that the line of the water is at an angle. That would only be like reality if the jar itself was moving. When it's in a vase, it's just going to be flat or just barely a curve. So that was a little little question in my mind scientifically, but not enough to bother me about not liking the stamp set. I still liked it anyway. So for the flowers, now to put in each one of these, I'm going to use multiple colors on them, put some purples and pinks in the flowers and then greens into the stems. And depending on what colors you put next to each other, you could end up with some bloops. I ended up with some in a few of these and others work just perfectly. So just play around with them and learn which colors in your marker set go well together and which ones take over and do a little bit too much. Another plus with these markers in the fact that they are so wet is that they don't always require a bunch of water, but you can add water to them. They tend to seem to stay wetter on the paper a little bit longer. So here I decided to take a darker green and stamp it into that really light yellow green kind of color. And I was able to do so pretty easily. I just put a little bit of it at the base of that green leafy thing and then stamped it right into the other colors and it mixed really nicely and made some beautiful little flowers, little leaves I guess, and let that dry so that I could stamp this other one in there. Now here I had another maybe a bit of a bloop area because the green ended up touching the little red flower. So it ended up with a little goober in there. No big deal though because it's just a little bit of watercolor mess and watercolor is always a little bit of a mess when it's in my world. So there you go. There were sometimes when I remembered to spray it, sometimes when I didn't and it was always a little disappointment when I didn't spray it because I think the spray ended up looking a little bit better. It looked softer but you also get some really nice crisp areas when you don't use the water spritz on top of it. And as with the art impressions watercolor you can always take these and stamp them and and then just add water to them once they're on the paper just taking your brush to go in and add detail. And I did do that on some of this. Now if you're interested in this kind of watercolor technique again I have stamped watercolor classes but they are with the small stamps the small art impressions watercolor but the same techniques would apply and the same kind of watercolor markers whatever kind of watercolor markers you have can be used for those different ones just take different amounts of I guess efforts in order to get them to stamp the way that you want but it's really fun to be able to see what you can do with them in a way that is kind of unnatural for a lot of stampers because we think of these solid stamps as something that's going to be a solid color and this allows you to just go crazy and do all kinds of watercolor-y fun stuff. And here I'm adding more little filler stuff into the bouquet so it's not just all airy with lots of empty space in there and I added it with a kind of more intense color to brighten up the entire thing just a little bit extra. And then these were actually one of my favorite little flowers these yellow ones that hang down and then I put some leaves in there you can stamp just part of each one of them just put some color on a few of the leaves and you can make all kinds of little mini branches to make each one of them look the way that you want them to look. So these were a heck of a lot of fun to play with. I don't know how much I'm going to be using these markers on a regular basis just they were a little awkward for me to figure out my favorite way to use them so I will leave that in your hands to decide if you need another set of watercolor markers. I'm not sure why I thought I needed another set but I'm glad to know what these are so when people ask me questions about them at least I can answer that. And there are my beautiful vases now the problem with what I did here is I stamped them all in one sheet and they were really close together I couldn't make cards but look I made beautiful bookmarks out of them instead. I just trimmed them in long strips and put them on layers of paper and I put ribbon through a hole at the top and I just used a brad to wrap around it to hold the ribbon in place nice and simple kind of way to finish those off. So thank you very much for watching hope you'll stick around for more videos by subscribing there's like a thousand something videos on my channel so if you're bored and stuck at home because a lot of people are nowadays troll through and watch the videos go learn some art and go make something and I'll see you later