 Hi there, I'm Sandy Onok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to color some watercolor bokeh cherry blossoms with a stamp set from Technique Tuesday. This stamp set has a little branch of them and if you're going to float this in the middle of your card then you might want to block off that edge when you start doing your stamping and mask that off a little bit. I'm doing this video because I did it recently with Mondo Secura in Copic Marker and I wanted to try it in watercolor since I have another set of cherry blossom stamps so I will link you at the end to the Copic video so you can go see that one and see how it differs from this one. I tested out a little bit of my red and pink colors and I decided instead of using the quinacridone pink at the bottom I wanted to use the quinacridone coral. I'm only going to use two watercolors throughout this whole thing. It's going to be the quinacridone coral and some sepia and I keep it pretty simple and straightforward but I'm going to use a lot of the same principles from the Copic one because I wanted to create that same kind of deep dark rich background. In order to stamp them, I've stamped them on watercolor paper using some, let's see this was distress picked raspberry ink and when I put it in my misty so I could stamp the branch three times to make my little tree branches here, I pounced the ink on using my my little ink pouncer thing, that little ranger thing with the little foam pads on it, I will link them in the description down below. I didn't think to film that portion when I was doing this because I've done it a couple times before but I wanted to let you know that that's how I got that light pink so you can do that with any of your ink colors that are distress inks because they'll work really well with your watercolors and with your Copics as well. You can make yourself some very very pale inks so that you don't have a big heavy black outline all the time when you're doing your coloring. So I am taking the paint and I'm just painting around the flowers first. That's my first step in this and as I've gone around I've tried to work quickly. This is sped up twice but I've tried to work quickly because I don't want that leading edge to dry. Low-eating edge is the last part that I've put down. I want to keep it wet so that I don't get a hard edge on that leading edge. And now I've mixed it with some of the sepia. There's no science to how much I'm mixing here. I'm just going to do what's working visually and mix paint as I go and I'm not going to put it down absolutely everywhere but I do need to fill in in some of the places in between with some lighter color if I want it to be smooth across the whole thing. In the last bouquet thing that I did I noticed that when I had some really strong contrast was when the flowers really popped forward. So that's what I'm looking for here is to create some real strong contrast with the background. There's that middle area that's got that hard edge now so watch what happens in a few minutes when I go back and add a little bit of brushwork to it and a little bit of paint because I'm trying again to keep those leading edges wet and sort of trying to decide whether or not I want them soft or hard. You may decide you want a hard edge but I wanted it to be all soft edges everywhere in the background. Some of it is still wet from the first painting so this actually did happen really quickly. The whole card itself took about 30 minutes including the dry time in between when I was waiting for the background to dry a little bit in order to put the flowers in. So the technique doesn't take all that long but you have to be decisive and you have to put color down and not pussy foot around. I'm using a number eight brush because I've got all these little fussy bits right around the flowers but if you use a smaller brush or you use a different brand than these silver brushes you may not have enough water or paint being pushed out onto the paper to get this really nice soft blending. So that's one of the reasons why I always recommend the silver brushes not just because I want you to spend money. I wouldn't do that to you but I want you to have enough color coming off of your brush that you actually have some chance at success here. So I'm going to start my first pass at the flowers and what I'm trying to do is create just the centers of them a little bit and break a few of those edges and let a little bit of that background color work into a few spots. Don't do it everywhere or you'll lose the outline of your flowers entirely but just put some of that color inside the center of the flower because that's a place where it's going to be darkest and drop that color way deep into the center of the flower. Notice that it's very light because these are going to be whitish, light pinkish flowers so I'm not letting my color be really heavy quite yet because I'm going to add more in the next layer after this is all dry but I'm trying to create something where it starts to feel like it's part of that original painting and it doesn't feel like these are glued on top because right now some of them do look like they're just cut out on top of the surface and I want them to feel like they're part of the painting itself. I'm adding just a little bit of color in there and on some of them I'm letting them wash out into the background entirely that one at the top kind of bled in nicely which was great and now I'm going to go in with just a little bit more I'm going to make a few more of the petals bleed into the background and just soften them out a little bit more just kind of push them into the background because what's going to really make these look like they're in the sunshine is leaving some super white tips on that far right hand side and then I decided I was going to be bold and try to start with my my stems my branches and I realized this was all too wet to continue going any further so I'm going to just let that much be dark and then I'll come back when it's dry and just let it air dry. I didn't want to push it too much with heat setting it but you can see how much the color lightens that just is natural that's just what happens to watercolor and then I mixed some thicker paint same two colors still the quinacridone rose with the sepia and then I'm going to paint the inside of the flowers these flowers have you know a whole bunch of the little what are they called the statement the little things that have little things on the edges of them and so I'm going to put a bunch of them in there and now I'm getting a little of the hard edges I can go in with if it's too hard I can go in with a damp brush and kind of soften some of that out but I want to allow some of that detail to sparkle forward now because these are these are the things that are in the foreground and I want some of that detail in the foreground to start popping out so I'm going to make all of my branches now a nice really rich chocolate brown sepia color and create some extra branches outside of it as well and just using my brush to create them they're not in the stamp and it's okay you can add to the stamp it's legal nobody's going to shoot you for doing that so now I've got my branches in there and you can see that things are starting to pop it's starting to really create that difference between the background and the foreground because I've got all that soft mushy in the background if I had hard edges on some of those background shapes the foreground ones wouldn't pop out nearly as much and now when I add some really dark into the cherry blossoms themselves it's making a huge difference as well and giving them that depth and roundness and volume adding a little bit more of that brown in there too because I'm really liking the super deep contrast between the the lighter color and the darker color and on this one I'm using the dark brown color to make my little dots for all the other little bits in the flowers if you were doing this in Copic marker what I had done was used green because they actually are green but here I didn't want to introduce another color I wanted this whole thing to feel like it was all very unified and depending on what cherry blossom photos you're looking at you may find somewhere they look darker or they look a different kind of color I don't know if it's a different type of cherry blossom flower or if it's just the nature of what kind of lighting is is showing on them and that sort of thing I did decide I wanted another branch down here at the bottom because it felt like I was having the same repeat flower and I wanted to make sure this one down at the bottom didn't feel like a repeat and I also decided I was going to knock some more of the petals of flowers back and look how beautiful it dried isn't that gorgeous I was really excited by this and the the real color in real life actually is better than the video color so you can see it is a little bit richer even though it's dried back from what it was originally when I was looking at it and painting it myself I wish video lighting was the same as good studio photography lighting so I hope this was helpful and that you'll be able to try some bokeh cherry blossoms yourself and on the screen is the other video if you want to watch it in Copic marker and I'll see you guys later take care and have a great day supplies are all in the description