 Hi everybody, it's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today we're going to be painting perfect trees and perfect is of course in the eye of the beholder but I've got some stamp sets that are really going to help to make really beautiful trees super easy. These are stamp sets that are generally meant to be stamped in ink colors and layered over top of each other but if you do them in distressed inks and add water they turn into watercolor trees. This one on the left could be used for any time of year. They're meant for fall trees right now but you could use them for spring trees as well. I'll talk about that later and pine trees can be used any time of year as well. They don't need to just be for winter but here are my Christmas and fall cards that we're going to be making today. Yes, four cards, one video. Now I've laid out all the ink colors and all of my stamps. I have them on individual blocks. If you wanted to mass produce a whole bunch of these it would be really easy to do. On your craft desk you would probably put your inks right next to each of the blocks but since I'm trying to make this pretty for YouTube I tried to line everything up so I had all my inks lined up square and then every time I put something down it all went kittywomp as so. If it drives you nuts I'm sorry because it's driving me nuts just while I'm watching the video doing this voiceover. Oh the things we go through to craft on YouTube. But anyway I've got all of my stamps inked and then it's going to make it really quick to just stamp them onto my paper and I'll put the top of the tree and kind of the top two-thirds or so of my watercolor paper. This is Kansan XL watercolor cardstock. I'll zoom in here so you can watch the development of the tree and you can see easily that all of these different reds and orangey colors would be really great in other colors too. If you stamped everything in greens and then added that big blobby one in a flower color you could make a spring tree very easily with the same stamp set so if you get this one don't put it away when fall is over because you can use it any time of year. You could also put less of them and make it just a bare winter tree as well and put some snow on it and a bird in the tree wouldn't that be pretty? So I'm going to grab my water brush. This is a zig water brush and it's a detailer so it's really tiny. It's got a super fine point and I'm going to squeeze it here and drop some water onto the tree and then just start spreading it. I'm not rubbing at the paper very much. I don't want to push the color too much. I want the water to move the color so I'm just pushing the water around over the surface of the paper so that the water is what pulls the color around across the the entirety of the stamping. And there's a few areas that I didn't get any stamping on so I'm going to drag that water down there so I get some light color there and just add a little bit more here and there. I'm leaving some white spots and what I found was if I colored it all in and didn't leave white spots it didn't look as water colored but it looks perfectly water colored now and you can tell those those little holes that didn't get filled in look awesome. While I had paint on the brush I just made basically a little triangle and stretched out two sides of the triangle out to either end and then I cleaned my brush and painted water down below so I just got a really soft bit of ground underneath of my tree and spread that out and then I just heat set it. You could just set it aside and let it dry but I'm impatient and I wanted to use my wooden board to tape something else down and get another one done so I tried to do my heat setting and you can just watch as the paint starts to dry it the color kind of as watercolor dries it congeals around the edge a lot and that's what this is doing so we're getting a dark edge around the outside and some of the texture of the stamping is preserved inside the tree so it it has a really cool texture as well as some real dark burnt looking edges and I just love how how simple it was but how beautiful it still came out in the long run I put it on an oval I cut it out and that is brush show on the panel behind it it's a scrap that I had used for a different card that didn't work out but it works perfectly to do for a background on the card and now I'm going to do three trees and this first tree I stamped just like I did the one that we just finished but I'm going to stamp two more trees one on either side and I switched the order of the ink because that's going to help the trees to look like they're all different I just cleaned them off with baby wipes in between and now I'm doing the same thing I'm going to have a third round and I'm even going to turn some of the stamps so it doesn't look like the same tree repeated and it'll look like a natural collection of trees and this time I'm going to do something a little bit different in how I add the water because I'm going to add it with a mini mister and a mini mister is going to go everywhere if you're familiar with those so what I'm doing is grabbing a piece of scratch paper it's an old scrap of watercolor paper and I have it a couple inches maybe an inch and a half or so perhaps above the paper so that I protect those those tree trunks because I didn't want to stop the tree trunks with water I just wanted the water to hit the top section so I'm trying to see how light of a spray I can get and I was spraying from quite a distance to try to make it really soft because every time I tried this earlier I got it too close and it just splooched everywhere I do have a paper towel on hand to do some dabbing here and there either around the edges or right around in very specifically in some of the sections in the middle because you can see it's starting to pool a little bit and that's just what watercolor will do when there's a gathering of water it's going to gather color into it and that's kind of what it's doing there in the center a few of those spots I'm just going to dab with a rough edge of a paper towel because I didn't want it to look like it was all even I wanted it to look very natural and then some of the other areas where there's heavy color I just started pulling that color around with the brush a little bit just doing some adjustments to that and I'm mostly just waiting and watching to see what it does because it's going to continue moving over time so I noticed that none of the color in the center had really remained none of the the mixture of color with a little bit of green so I'm stamping again on top of the damp paper I'm not stamping onto pool paper but just onto the damp paper so you can add other colors on the very top if you did these trees in all greens then you could stamp like with a pink to make some pink flowers in the trees for a spring card which would be really pretty so I'm going to finish off the bottom section of the image while I'm still waiting on the top and I wanted to make some grass under the trees this time so I just put a little bit of ink onto my acrylic block by tapping it on there and then I'm just going to pick up a little ink and again I'm going to make just a line along the bottom it does touch that brown ink that's already stamped there so I'm going to get a little brown green grass which is fine because it looks really gorgeous and watercolor-y anyway cleaning off my brush again and then adding just clean water down in the bottom and this this water brush is actually really nice I haven't used this one very much but I do like it and there's links by the way to all the supplies in the description down below as well as more information on my blog so I'm just making a few grass hairs now just a couple places where I'm making little tiny tiny tick marks above the grass just to create a little interest there and then I saw that section at the top I wanted to just feather it out but I'm just doing it very very gently because I didn't want to have that that section just go up in flames so I decided to give it a shot and then I had my paper towel handy so that I could stop the color from moving too far and then I'm just going to heat set it so it stays in place and doesn't get too rambunctious on me and get it all dried up and then add it to a card and all I had to do with this particular one which was actually pretty nice was to add a sentiment to it I added it to a panel and put the sentiment on and it was super simple to finish this one off so if you stamped a bunch of these and then you know went and sat in the backyard or go to the kids games or something you could do the watercolor part while you're out somewhere how's that for efficiency in getting your cards done so let's move on to the winter trees these are Christmas trees but again you can use these any time of year because pine trees are green year round and notice there that my stamping is bad I am a bad stamper and it doesn't help to be stamping with distress inks because distress inks and clear stamps don't go together all that well so you'll notice there you may have some issues and that background stamp for this tree is a solid one so it makes it difficult anyway for me because I'm not really good with solid stamps and getting my inking done but as you know with this technique I'm just going to be slathering on color and water so I'm just spreading the water around on this and you can see it it's just looking immediately like a tree I'm going to do some heat setting so it stops everything and then just decorate really simply I've got some liquid pearls and some stickles and all kinds of fun stuff to put on here as garlands as little ornaments and just decorate it for Christmas you could just leave it blank if you wanted it for a summertime tree just put a sun or some clouds in the sky and I put some distress stickles in the background for snow super easy to do right right right right I hope you're thinking this is easy because it actually really is it is as easy as I'm showing you you're just going to add water after getting your stamping done with distress inks all right let's do a seam with trees this will be a little tougher it's harder of course when you do multiples of anything but I'm going to layer the four stamps and you don't need to layer all four stamps but I thought the four actually gave me a good variety of color when I hit it with water because if you do you can easily get away with doing less stamps than four on these but I wanted to make sure that I got good color in there now here's a place where my post-it note got overused and I had some ink that went through but look how easy you can clean up distress ink super simple just wet it with clean brush and dab it off all right now I created a little mini hillside with my post-it notes and I'm just going to stamp the top section of the tree background and throw some water on it to make it a hillside isn't that a simple hillside just a little swoosh and then throw some water in there and I'm adding just a little bit of trees in between kind of now my image for this in my head was to have that one tree out in front and the other trees I created kind of a hillside ish it didn't come out super clear in this but I think it still works in the long run because of some of the things I'm going to do to that tree that I wanted to make stand out and I wanted to add some water to this one as well but it's trees like this don't actually feather out nearly as much as the other kinds of trees so I'm trying not to go a little bit crazy I just wanted it a little softening of them with the spritz of water and I decided to heat set it real quickly so that it would stay and not keep running then I took some of the darkest green and put it on my block and I just added more detail into the middle tree because when you add all this water you start losing detail and I just went over a bunch of it with my water brush and some dark ink and then decorated it again with more stickles and all kinds of beautiful things to add some shine to it and then it makes it a Christmas tree but you could have the same kind of a scene without the decorations and use it anytime of year aren't these fun trees I hope you enjoyed this and my four little happy trees I feel like this is the Bob Ross of card making video so if you like Bob Ross leave a comment in the description and tell me a memory you have of Bob Ross and his happy little trees and in the meantime there are a couple more watercolor videos the one on the right hand side actually shows where I thought about this technique in the first place I did this with flowers in the very same way with layering stamps and it works with a lot of images like that all right thanks you guys thanks for watching talk to you later have an awesome day