 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm gonna continue my series in the watercolor flower series number 22, believe it or not, with some loose watercolor flower cards. Ellen Hudson and Honey Bee Stamps are partnering for this United We Flourish set called Sending Sunshine and it's stamps and dies together. They're available for a limited period of time. If you like doing sunshine and happy, really super happy sentiments, these pair up really well. They make some cute phrases and you can customize them in all kinds of different ways. And the dies come with that whole little set that you can put right in the same stamp envelope and store them all together. Now I have a watercolor flowers class on my art-classes.com website. The link is in the doobly-doo down below if you're interested in checking it out. But one of the things that I've, I didn't do in the class that I'm really practicing doing, I'm trying to get looser and what I find, this is my, my biggest two tips for you in this video are to use a big brush. I'm using a number 12. These are 5 by 7 cards, so they're nice and big, so I have lots of room to work. And I'm also working really fast. I challenge myself to just, this is sped up two times, but literally this is like the fastest painting I think I've ever done. And I'm really happy with the loose look that I'm getting when I work this quickly. I started doing a lot of that when I was working last month on World Watercolor Month and trying to just fill sketchbooks and trying to see how quickly I could paint something. And it really is making a difference in loosening me up. And of course a lot of practices as well. But using the large brush makes sure that I'm not going to get lost in little tiny details. These cards are nice and big, they're 5 by 7, so I have room to work. I'm not feeling like I'm stuck on a little 4 and a quarter by 5 and a half type of surface. And I played around with painting the roses in different kinds of sprays across both watercolor cards. These are 5 by 7 cards, so they're, they open on the inside and they go in an envelope. The envelopes come with them. They're on canson paper. They're not on arches, but they're on a student grade kind of paper, so they work really well for this. And I'm playing around with different kinds of layouts for the flowers on them. So you can do flowers all over every square inch of it, make a whole background. You can do just a spray of them. Lots of different ways. You can do that in the watercolor flowers class. We learned a couple different ways to use these roses, and I thought I'd share this so that people have taken that class can also see another way to do it. And one thing I did here, I was trying to figure out how not to get the green to always mix with the pink because green and pink together are going to make brown eventually. So I didn't want to mix them too much together, green and yellow work. But when you start getting the green and the pink together, they'll start making mush. It's just leaving a little white space in between them. So leaving that on the right hand side, that card with lots of white on it or filling the whole background, whatever you do with these, they're just happy cards. And it's really easy to make quick happy cards and practice your watercoloring, practice loosening up. This is one of the postcards, so it's going to be horizontal. And I'm going to put a different arrangement of the roses on them. I'm going to do them maybe off to the side a little bit. And as I'm doing this, I'm not really thinking too much. I'm trying not to say, I'm going to do a layout that's like this. As I'm trying to do my voiceover, I'm trying to recall what I was actually thinking. And there wasn't a whole lot that I was thinking other than I wanted some green for them to sit on. So there was kind of some ground underneath of them, some something for them to rest on. And then just throwing some happy color in up in the corner. And I liked on the earlier one where I had lots of white space instead of filling in the whole thing. So I'm going to leave a lot of this card just empty and not really stress out about putting more on it. This is the snapdragons that are also taught in the class. And this is another one is loose, free, quick, easy. Just let your brush dance around. Don't fuss over it. Don't stress because as soon as you start to, then they start getting very labored. And here I'm even getting like some crazy color mixing because I've got my pink and my yellow right next to each other. And I'm just letting it mix. I'm even putting more water down so it will mix even more. You can layer on a little bit more. And if there's some places where you want a few hard edges, you can let it dry first. But I challenge you to just let it be wet, let it be loose, let the color flow. You know, you love watching the color mix, so let yourself do it. Don't just say, I'll only watch when Sandy does that. Go try it yourself. That is what that's why I do this. I want you to go out and try it yourself. So pick up a pack of the postcards or the folded cards and try it. I just dare you to try it. And then you'll have these cards full of happy, beautiful color. Look at these postcards. Wouldn't you love to get that in the mail? Like seriously, those are just gorgeous. And for those who are wondering about these postcards and greeting cards and whether or not they actually work for other styles, well, check it out. I did these Facebook live videos during World Watercolor Month in July. I will have links for them on my blog if you want to watch any one of these four. And yeah, you can see other styles that you can paint on these cards. Well, thank you so much for joining me for this video. You can click on my face to subscribe. You can click there for the flowers class. You can watch some other videos, whatever you want to do. Go check out the other twenty one in the Watercolor Flower series. If you're really an insomniac, that's a really good thing to do. And I will see you guys later. Bye bye.