 Hi there! I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and it's going to be Cats vs Dogs today in watercolor pencils. I did a video a while ago with Copic markers and the dogs from My Favorite Things and it was such a cute card. There's an inside to this one so you get to see the back of the dog that's hanging over. There's a link there if you want to go see that video and there will also be one at the end of the video and in the description down below. These are the kitties though. They're very different size so they're not apples to apples with the dogs but since it was a selection of kitties I thought I would do them in naturalistic colors the way I did the dogs and this time I'm going to show you the masking. I often just get my stamping done but I decided this time I'm going to show you how I do the masking for those who keep asking how you do simple masking. I've got my my template set up on the scratch paper and I've stamped the outside two cats though the ones that are going to be in the front. So you always need to think front to back when you do your masking and in the MISTI which is this tool that I'm using you set up your next layer of stamps so I'm going to figure out where exactly I want those line them up on my scratch piece close the lid which is acrylic and then I can pick up those stamps. That way they're going to land in the right place when I put my other piece of paper in there. So what I need to do now is take the masks which I accidentally stuck on that scratch piece of paper that I was doing my practice stuff on and I just need to place them over top of those two kitties. This is made out of some two inch tape this is post-it tape so it's got the stickiness of a post-it note so it's not over sticky but it's going to work perfectly to hold those in place so those areas where these two kitties that I'm going to stamp would normally go right over top of them they'll look like they're behind. So I've inked them up and all I have to do is press it down and my kitties are there. If I don't get the stamping perfect in this MISTI I can do it again just re-stamp in the same place. So now I have masks for the next two kitties and you'll also notice on these I've only cut out the areas that I cared about. I've only cut the inside areas I didn't cut the entire mask so you can save yourself some time that way and I'm stamping the center kitty just with a block I didn't need to use the MISTI for it and then I can peel it off and reveal the fact that these are all in the right place now and everything kind of goes from front to back. So that's how I do that and I have a number of videos that I do masking in but I just don't always show you so I apologize for that and decided I would show you this time. I'm going to be using my new Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils. These are some pretty nice quality pencils and I I know I have full set syndrome so I decided to just get the full set because I've wanted a full set of something in watercolor pencils and I'm going to do these in naturalistic looking colors. One of the things I noticed when I started coloring with these is the quality difference from some other pencils I've had. The I don't know it's just the way they go on it just feels different and if you want to get just one or two colors of some fancier pencils than when you might be using feel free to try them. Dickwick has singles on pretty much everything that you can buy so you can try out just one or two of something and see if you like them and on these I did notice the quality difference. I have some other pencils I'm going to be showing you eventually that are like way higher quality and I was just my mind was blown by them but I didn't get the full set of those because they're really expensive but this is a good mid-mid level type of set and seems to work really well. It's got a great selection of colors as you saw so I can do some real natural looking kitty cats and have lots of browns lots of grays lots of blacks and a whole range of colors the same way as I did with those dogs. The dogs were colored in Copic marker if you're wondering. I do a lot of Copic and watercolor work both and this one I only called it cats and dogs because I remembered that other card and I was just so enthralled with it that I decided I would just go ahead and do these in the same kinds of colorways that I did with the others. So I'm taking a brush this is a silver brush from their black velvet line I love their round brushes as you may know if you watch many of my videos and I'm just spreading water over top of this colored pencil. Wax based colored pencils don't do this they have to be watercolor pencils so that they'll break down with water because the regular colored pencils don't don't do this kind of thing and don't worry I did forget his tail for right now but I will go back and get that later. So on most of this I'm putting just a layer of the color down so that I can get a base layer I'm gonna add more detail to all of it as I get moving. Here I'm using two different browns to make this little little brown brownish looking kitty so I have some darker colors around the outside edge and I'm also doing this on some Kansan Arches rough watercolor cardstock. It's my favorite I think you know if I'm gonna go to my happy place the rough cardstock is just the one that I like the rough paper because I love this texture and with these pencils the really good thing is you don't have to worry about making the pencil super even because the water is gonna even it out so if you have trouble normally on the rough cardstock or the rough paper should call it cardstock the rough paper then the water smooths it right out which is great and I haven't taped to a hardboard and I haven't really mentioned that recently either but these are hardboards that will not warp so if you've had other things I I used to use a cutting board like a kitchen cutting board and I warped it so it was kind of causing issues because I use I did so much watercolor and heavy water spraying and stuff so it wasn't a very good one apparently. So I decided to get some of this hardboard and it seems to be staying really stable and I use either green green frog tape or yellow frog tape I haven't noticed a difference between them if you know that there is a difference between the two they're both for delicate services feel free to leave comments in the description down below in the comments because I have no idea. So I decided I was gonna make my wood more yellowish on these guys you know more of a blonde kind of wood for the base coat and then I was gonna put some browns over top of it so I'm basically just throwing some yellows on and smooshing around some water and I'm gonna add a lot more detail to the wood grain as we get further on with this and then I'm just gonna scribble some green look how easy it is to scribble with good watercolor pencils there are some of them that you may find the little lines won't break down and that's one of the things that I noticed about good watercolor pencils is it breaks down nicely and it retains a good bit of color because there are some pencils I've used in the past that like there was no color left once I added a bunch of water so these worked pretty well that way and if you're wondering as I'm thinking about it I'm not comparing to inktense pencils. Inktense are a different category in my mind for me even though they do watercolor-y types of stuff inktense pencils are permanent in this bottom layer so you wouldn't be able to move any of this color underneath with these pencils you can move the color underneath so if you end up adding more water to it you could lift color out of some of this even after it's dry but not with inktense pencils so I'm not comparing them to those but just some other I've gotten mostly inexpensive watercolor pencils so that's what I'm comparing it to and and I find with almost every supply and you know I know that this is something that we all know in our in our knower but I always seem to forget that if you actually pay decent prices for something you're gonna get decent quality supplies and these are quite nice pencils I do like so I'm going in and adding more detail in all of these so I've added the pencil lines and now I can I'm going in and adding the water with the brush you want to be careful of course as always when you're doing one color next to another and that's one one reason why I skipped every other kitty at the beginning because I was gonna be using a lot of water I'm not using as much water on the second layer of these so I can just go straight across and do kitties that are next to each other and perfectly fine this one looks a little bit like my punch he's got spots like this and I'm just adding extra dark details a lot of watercolor pencils just like watercolors and other mediums they'll lighten as you start working on them so you may notice the color changes and you want to go back in and add some more so I tend to try to go lighter at first and then start adding darker and especially with kitties like these if I'm going to add markings on them like I'm doing with a bunch of these it's easier to do them as you're adding later now there's that one dark spot on this kitty that you can see in his upper left side and that was because the paper was wet and with most watercolor pencils if the paper is wet you get a really dark line it's gonna be hard to blend that so if you're trying to make a soft blend out of that it's gonna be a little tougher if you color on it while it's wet but if you wait till it's dry you can pretty much move all that color around really good making a little kind of triangles of squiggles for that little kitty and now the kitties are done and I'm gonna start working on the fence I started just penciling in I wanted to get a general idea of where vertical is and so I was carefully paying attention and even though these aren't even it's not gonna matter I'm gonna add a lot of texture to it and these lines are kind of gonna disappear I'm just gonna tell you now so it wasn't like I was keeping these lines so that I could keep the boards separate but I wanted to have a vertical set because what I find is that when I'm doing a lot of line work like this I'll start kind of slowly slowly going off-kilter and that keeps me straight so now I've got my one inch wash brush and just a little bit of water on it and I'm just gonna run it quickly over top of all this pencil work and it's gonna soften what's there soften the pencil lines without losing the integrity of the lines because I didn't want to lose all that detail I just wanted to go over it quickly and look how quickly it dried back I did add a little bit more water to it but it dried back quite quickly so then I can even go back in and add more and it's damp so this particular pencil didn't like going over water some pencils do some colors do and other colors don't but you have to play around with whatever pencils you're using and see what they like to do and what I often do is just take a piece of scratch paper and just start testing before I use it on my paper so I know whether or not I'm gonna actually get color or if I'm gonna get like that blob of color I got on that kitty that's brown and that will help you to get to know your pencils a little bit better you could write it down and put a note in your case to tell you you know don't do this with this pencil or with this particular color or you can just do it as you get to know them and practice with your medium enough to really know it in in your gut and then when you grab that pencil you'll go oh I remember how to handle this one so I've added a bunch of grass lines and then just a bunch of water to soften it all out and then I decided I would add color to their colors because that will be just a little pop of color where everything else is in more natural colors and one of the things that these watercolor pencils did that I liked quite a bit was they allowed me to use more natural colors if I had used my intense pencils they would have been really bright really intense and here I got a really good soft look as well as a very natural look and I've beefed up a little bit of my lines now with a sharpie pen for their eyes and noses and now I'm adding in some sharper harder detail with darker green pencil and there's a lot of different things you can do here you could even going with a few intense pencils and strengthen some of the bright colors and mix them with your regular watercolor pencils so there's you know different mixing of mediums depending on what kinds of colors you're looking for as I said I was looking for really soft colors here and that's what I got now I'm using for the sky and the clouds some brand new dyes from MFT that just came out they're really cute and I made them as a topper above the fence on my card I think they came out really fun and I'm not sure if it's a rival to the other card but cats versus dogs leave your comments in the comments down below and tell me are you a cat person or are you a dog person and maybe it's dependent on whether you like the cat card the dog card more up to you and I'm gonna get going I will see you guys later make sure you subscribe if you haven't yet already there's more information on the blog still pictures and everything and I'm all over the place on social media as sandy on ox you can find me out there on the web I'll talk to you guys later take care and have a super day