 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to show you what I do with some of my practice watercolor paintings Because I paint a lot and lots of people don't practice because they are worried about what they're gonna do with the painting afterward If they don't like it and they're gonna waste a lot of paper and this is a couple of paintings that I wasn't really thrilled with I was trying to do some kind of crazy sky stuff. I got a lot of weird Bleeds and things and blooms and yeah There's some beautiful areas in there But as a whole painting it didn't work and I do a lot of paintings that I'm never gonna frame This was something I did for Earth Day recently and like what am I gonna do with that? So let's turn it into something else and then here's one where I was practicing painting the tulip fields and a beautiful big sky But I did this again later and it came out much more beautiful. So what am I gonna do with this one? Well, let's do something else with it. So I started cutting them down into bookmark size pieces and I could either use just the top section. I could use the bottom section I could cut them in half and use both sections really depends on what you see in each little section of your whatever your piece is and This one is part of that globe and I'm gonna leave that white So I have that really stark difference between all that color and all the white and I'm hitting this with a little powder bag So that my embossing powder doesn't stick and I'm gonna stamp a sentiment in some Versa mark And I'll show you in a little bit the stamp sets forgot to do that when I was filming this section But I've got it in my misty so I can stamp over again in the same spot And I'm going to stamp this sentiment this little phrase and it's the sentiments are in these two inch columns they work great for two inch type of bookmarks and And after it's all stamped in this Versa mark, which is basically an invisible ink I'm gonna throw some embossing powder on it. This is white embossing powder I have bought a couple of these little jars of it so I could put it in a container like this Spoon it on and since I use white more than anything else. It's made sense I'll show you how I do my other embossing powders for those who don't know So flick off the excess and then I'll grab my heat gun And the heat gun will melt that embossing powder and it gets more intense more bright If you don't use that powder bag in the first place, you'll get little stray bits all over the place So it's helpful to do that because it kind of gets rid of the static on the page before you do your embossing So that one was really cool and then here's a I'll show you a couple of these others while I'm doing the stamping portions And I was trying to see which sections I liked most in them Did I like the the part with the yellow on it on this painting the yellow came out kind of weak I wanted something a little more intense That sort of thing But there's some beautiful areas that I could do some Embossing of sentiments in you could stamp flowers and all sorts of things all over these But I want to show you some really specific tricks that I came up with For some of these this one is cut into two and a two and a quarter inch strips They were a little wider I ended up cutting them down eventually But you can see how each one will have a whole different flavor To it depending on what exactly you decide to use from them And this is the two sentiment sets. These are both from penny black and they're meant for bible journaling But I use them for bookmarks because they work really well They're like I said, they would fit well on a two inch Column like you would get in a bible if you were doing bible journaling But for these I'm going to do a whole bunch of them and save them for my church for fundraiser later on in the year So now I'll line one up again In the misty get it all set up the way I want it And ink it up with plain black ink You can do all different kinds of ink colors and again I love the misty because you can reink it and stamp it again and get it all lined up And perfect, which is great You can align your sentiments in an area that's dark so that the color will show up And on this one I was thinking that I was going to use white and I decided to use gold So I'm going to use some gold. Wow embossing powder And some colors you want Light color behind them and some you think can handle dark On this particular one. It's going to be a little harder to see Once it's embossed When it's on dark and this is one of those places to experiment with that and find out how dark can you go How light can you go for making each one of them look great? But this wow embossing powder this gold is really pretty And becomes really beautiful and shiny And it will be really elegant on the finished bookmark So heat that baby up And it will be ready to go and I am going to alter these After all of the embossing is done So hang with me if you're just not somebody who's been wanting to learn how to emboss So I'm going to paint over top of these I wanted stronger color So I'm just going to do another layer on top because I used ink that Is uh waterproof If you don't use ink that's waterproof then you might not want to paint over top of them But I used ink that's waterproof and I'm just going to layer other colors on top And I'll experiment with how dark or how light I want to get it And I cut them longer in some cases than I needed them to be Because I wanted to have room to decide do I want it To be a really tall one do I want it to be a short one? Do I want to cut off certain areas that kind of thing? But I'm just kind of playing around now this one has Uh really lightish purple behind all of this white embossing and I wanted some real strong contrast So I just put some strong colors underneath of it and paint right over top of what's there So if you have some paintings that weren't all that great This is a great way to take just those sections that might have been okay or even a section that was Really looked terrible on your actual painting And add some color to it on top so you really can't see anything underneath of it All you get is this beautiful wash of color underneath And you could also practice with what colors blend well into others which ones layer well on top of others It's a great time to experiment And here's that gold one And I'm going to add a whole lot more color on there to try to make that gold show up more And spread out some purple colors some pinkish colors Play around with it. You can use a lot of different techniques on these This one the color came out really soft And you can do really soft color you can do really strong color really doesn't matter at all depends on what your preference is And just add add some fun to them and add some other color And trim off any areas that come out funky because there's no requirement for the size of a bookmark You can make them short. You can make them tall Now this one was the most interesting because this particular this little part of the globe There were some white spots and white areas That it made the words a little difficult to write so I or to read So I put some color over them and then took a dry brush Around the edges to smooth that out so it didn't look like I had big globs of color Because I didn't want to interrupt the reading of the words so just put some darker color around those to finish that off and then There are some colors some paints that are They're staining and then others that are not staining and I wanted a test to see if These greens that I had used were staining or not by soaking it in water because there's sometimes when you can Soak a piece of paper in water and get almost every bit of color out of it So I threw it in the thing of water just to see what would happen And the other one I'm just painting some phthalo blue over top of it And look how beautiful that comes out. It softens the painting underneath And makes it a really good background for the sentiments that's there Now this one clearly was staining those colors didn't come off at all So I'm going to again add the blue right on top of them And let it soften out the image in the background and see how that works with the Gold in the sentiment that I have there so that we can see whether or not that's going to be readable If that's not readable then all we do is toss it And since I wasn't going to do anything with the painting anyway, none of this is a loss It's a learning experiment to see what happens when I layer colors over top of each other What's going to soften what's not on these guys from this this painting? Look at that pretty one with all the glitter in the embossing powder I decided I didn't want those buildings in there That was the only thing I didn't like about these so I just painted over the buildings with a couple different greens And moved the color around until you know, I kind of smoothed it out So I didn't have any hard edges that showed that there used to be a building in there And just fluff around it With the dark green and then put some water around the edges to smooth it out so it would blend Into the scene that was already there and not be funky and weird Line it up get it up there with my trees and kind of in the same color add a little more dark green if it didn't fully disappear And that's really all I had to do so each one of these I added a black layer and then a color layer and then another black layer And on one of them I actually just cut the whole scene in two parts just to see what that would do to have two sections On one one bookmark I think they all have come out really beautiful But you can see you can leave extra space at the bottom extra space at the top You could stamp a flower on some of these You could add other things to them. There's a ton you could do And these three I think are my absolute favorites out of all of them because look at how beautiful They came out and that was just from a painting that I did on earth day just to put something onto instagram And here I was able to use it for a project So I hope this gives you some ideas for what you can do with some of your paintings that you tried things. They didn't work out Might give you some encouragement to practice if you know you can do something else with that painting after it's all done Thank you so much. Click on my face to subscribe. There's more to see here in classes in the doobly-doo and I'll see you next time