 Well, hi there! I'm Sandy Olnok and I am going to show you a technique for stamping with watercolor that I've been sharing on my Bible journaling channel lately. For today's video, I'm going to show you a little technique that I've been using quite a bit lately in my Bible and I will show you how I'm going to do it on a card. I've got a piece of watercolor paper ready and I want to have a whole collection of all of these cactus together. So I kind of laid them down and I want to look for which one is going to be in the foreground. So this little guy is going to be in the foreground and I'm going to line my block up so I get his spacing right. I don't have to think about it later by lining the block up with the edge of the paper. To stamp with watercolor, you mix the pigment first so that it's thick enough that you can see your brush strokes. And the reason is because if you don't and you dip your stamp into it, you're going to get puddles inside the crevices in the stamp and then you're going to end up with bloops and you don't want bloops. It's going to be a lot easier to work with if you have lines rather than bloops. So I'm going to stamp first the little cactus head here. And while it's wet, if you work with it right away, then you can get a little of that color to move. And if you wait for it to dry first, then it doesn't dry completely permanent, but it dries fairly, fairly stiff, I should say. So that you will mush it out completely if you end up doing watercolor over it later. But I would recommend as you go to watercolor each little piece, unless you only want to add watercolor to it. Because if you're able to blend some of those edges a little bit, it's going to help to make it look a little bit more natural. So I'm going to clean off with a baby wipe my top portion and then stamp the bottom into this brownish color. And then since I've already lined up my block with the edge of my card here, I can just use that same alignment to get the little pot done correctly and get it put in here. And I'm going to just use a little bit of water and you can see how it moves just a little bit of the color using water while that paint is wet. So it's the same theory as what I've used before using markers, water-based markers to do the same kind of thing. But this will dry more permanently. It won't dry permanently, but it will dry more permanently than, say, a zig clean color marker or that sort of thing. So I've got my next stamp ready to go and I've got my colors for the top and the bottom. And I'm just going to use a shredded little post-it note because this is really easy masking to do, really simple. It doesn't need a whole lot of detail type of things in it because it's going to be loose watercolor by the time it's done anyway. And I'm going to stamp the top of this in here and I've got my, the bottom of my block is going to line up with the bottom of my paper so I know how high it'll be. And now I've got the top section of that all done. Make sure that my pot is, my little pot mask is there so that I just get that left corner of the next pot, which I technically it's just a little square, I wouldn't really have had to stamp that. And if you have easy stamps like this, you can draw some of those parts back in yourself. So for this one, I wanted to have the highlights on the right hand side and the color on the left so that each one of those sections of cactus. And I don't know if they're leaves or if they're petals or what you call them when they're cactus, but each one has a highlight on the right hand side gives it just a little bit of dimension and creates a little bit of realism there. And then the, the color in the bottom I could make as, as intense or as weak as I want, whatever color you want to paint your pot, you could go for it and do all kinds of crazy things with it and make sure it doesn't morph into the other pot. I want to make sure it doesn't bleed together at all, but give that one a nice yellow pot. Now I'm going to mix up another color for another one of my cacti. And if you add a lot of water, if your brush has a lot of water in it, you could bake your puddle really watery. So you want to keep mixing more color in until it gets thick enough that you can stamp in it. And if you're just struggling with it and you don't want to keep wasting paint by making a bigger and bigger puddle on your little tile or plate or whatever you're using to stamp, then you just let it sit there for a while. The air will evaporate some of that out and it will get thicker over time. So just give it a minute. So I've got my stamp ready to go. I'm going to use this tall one and stamp it once the pigment starts to thicken up over there a little bit. In the meantime, I'll just put my masks on there so I can get my top portion of my cacti ready to stamp in here. Just tap it in there. And you can also test it out on another sheet of paper to make sure that it's thick enough because you'll be able to tell right away if it gets rolling washy. So there's a little mushiness down there in the bottom of that cactus, but not too bad. And then I'm just going to do that little section on the left of the pot itself because, again, like I said earlier, with pots like that, you can get the shape by just painting them in yourself real easily. It's going to add some color in each one of those vertical, veiny type of areas and leaving some whites. When you're doing watercolor, it's always helpful to have some whites in it so that it just has that fresher look. If you try to fill every square into it in, it just starts to feel like you wanted to use Copics. And with watercolor using that light space and that water, that white paper, I can't even speak today. The white paper is going to really help. So here I decided just for fun, since I had a really boring pot next to it, I would add some interest to this other pot. You can add patterns to them and do all kinds of crazy things, make them all different kinds of beautiful pots, if you wish. I'm going to mix a little darker color then to drop into this cactus. And if I'm doing it while some of that green that's already down there is wet, then I'll get a little bit of blending and then a little bit of hard edge. So I get the benefit of both soft edges and hard edges and I can use a clean, damp brush to blend some of that out as well, just a little bit. But being careful to still leave some of that white area, so keeping it looking fresh. And with each one of these, you can paint them all different colors. You can do cactus in rainbow colors. You can do all different kinds of fun things. I will probably be stamping this one soon and coloring it just for fun on my social media in Copic or something because cactus are really fun shapes and can be really interesting in all different kinds of fun colors. Let's add a little bit of color now into the pot on this guy. Just leaving again a little bit of that white space, not really stressing out too much over it and trying to fill in everything. But this pot now needs needed a little more oomph to it because it started feeling weak next to the other ones. Next up, after all that's dry is stamping that last little one in there, that last guy. And I'm going to I've got my block all ready to go get my mask ready. And then it's a matter of figuring out what kinds of colors I'm going to want to put on that one. And for all of these using a varieties of blues and greens, all different colors from my palette. That's kind of why I haven't really showed you the palette because it doesn't matter what colors you use. You can do all kinds of things. And this technique allows you also to use colors that you might not have in inks or in markers. So if you're used to using water based markers to color on your stamps like this, this is a way you could do that and you don't have to have all those colors. You can make up whatever colors you wish by making a puddle of whatever that color is. And on this particular little cactus here, I wanted to do a few other things to it. So I'll make some adjustments as I go. I debated whether or not to try stamping in the pot on this one. And, you know, it was really easy to just draw the end of the pot. Notice that the pots in the back, the bases of them, the ground that they sit on is higher than the ones in the front. So it's going to make them look like they're going back in space. But now that I drew that in, it almost felt like I needed those little leaves from that cactus or the petals or whatever they are to stick out further on the right hand side. They needed to hang over more. And then I also decided to add little tips on each one of the leaves and make them a little more spiky. And that's, again, another fun thing you can do if you're not trying to rely just on the stamp, but let the stamp be that base guide for you and then adapt from there. So I'm going to add some color down here in the bottom just to give them something to sit on. It could be a window sill, could be, you know, the sand in the desert. Well, I guess you wouldn't have pots in the desert, but going to let some dry brush area be down there at the bottom to allow someone, that white paper to come through. And then right where my pots are, give them a little bit more color right underneath of them, because if the light is coming from that right hand side, all the shading is going to be off to the left. And I'm going to even add some more dark color just right in the area closest to the pots themselves, because that's where the deepest, darkest shadow is going to be, is right in those little sections right there. And then let that slowly blend out toward everything else, mixing up more of a mid-tone color by whenever is left on my palette and then spreading that out. So this technique is really fun. I will link you to the Bible Journey video using this stamp set so that you can see that one as well as the card, the finished card for this one, Paper Rose also has die cut sentiments. And I've used a thanks on this one. It will be one of my cards that I get to send out to my patrons because I love sending them cards. And here is the Bible Journey page that I thought you might be interested in seeing another way that you can use this stamp set for another use. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this was a fun video for you and that you learned something, got a little idea on a different way to do some stamping. And I'll see you guys again in the next video. Have a really great day. Go make something really beautiful and share it with another person. Bye bye.