 Hi there, it's Sandy Almak and today I'm going to show you some custom gift wrapping that I made for a wedding gift, as well as a card that I made to go with it. And some of you who have been in the circumstance I've been in will relate to the stories I have to tell about how this came about, so let's get started. This project started out as many craft projects do because I couldn't find in a store what I wanted. I had this gift for the happy couple and it is huge. Let's just say it's large. It has wood around the outside edges glass across the middle paper behind it. Yes, it's a painting and it's a large painting. It's like a half sheet watercolor painting and it was going to need to be transported. I was going to be driving it, but it needed to be transported and I needed good wrapping. So I needed something hefty. And I wanted something that, you know, that would be forest themed because the wedding is in the forest and everything and the painting is actually a forest. So I thought it would be nice if it all matched. I couldn't find anything. All I could find was like, you know, white and silver and gold happy wedding wrapping and that just didn't seem to go. So I wanted to do something special and this is for a relative. It's for my niece and I thought she might appreciate a little handmade wrapping. This paper is a roll. I mean, it was a roll. I guess it's still a roll. There's still a little bit left, but it was a roll that was donated to me when an art store closed. I happened to be there shopping there 80% off on the day they were closing and they said, Hey, do you want this roll of paper? Like somebody bought this a long time ago and it's been sitting here in a corner forever. You know, you draw when I use this and it's a drawing paper. A very heavy drawing paper, but it was so tightly wrapped that it was impossible to use for drawing. I kind of got it to flatten out enough to use for this gift wrap, but it just wasn't going to work for actual drawing. And I thought this is perfect for this use because it's really sturdy. I wrapped it around some bubble wraps. There's bubble wrap inside and I did test the ink. This is a platinum forest black ink and I tested it to make sure it wasn't going to go through a little bit may go through. With the amount of ink that I'm putting on here, but I'm not too worried about it because it's just going to discolor the bubble wrap, if anything. So everything inside is very safe. I decided for the wrapping, I was just going to do kind of a swoosh across the gift instead of doing every square inch of it. So there's some nice white space. And then for some of the edges around the tree branches, I just did some spattering. Most of that is with lighter type of water. Ink, I didn't, I mixed it with a lot of water, so it wouldn't be like really, really black blobs. You kind of see here, it's still wet, but I put it in the other room so it will dry out before I pack everything up to go in the car. And then I realized I had not made a wedding card yet. And at this point, I was running out of time. I was like completely out of time. I didn't even have time to go look in the stamps to see what I had. But I wanted something that also felt like it went with everything. So I decided to use the same kind of a technique for the branches that I used on the packaging itself, and you'll see it again in traditional watercolor on the painting that I'll show you on Friday. But here I'm using the ink, so it'll go with the outside wrapping. And I first did very light ink for the branches and just kind of danced around with my brush to make some light like branches. If you want to do something like this on a Christmas card, it would be great. And then I took the ink itself out of the bottle and dropped some of that darker ink into some of these areas. So it just kind of move around and play because that was kind of the technique that I did on the outside of the packaging. So why not make the two of them go together? You know, think about the bride and groom when you're doing gifts or even birthday gifts or Christmas gifts. Is there something that you can draw or paint easily that can kind of reflect that person and something that shows that you thought about them? And that's what I thought this did. I've also had trees on the brain, by the way, if you had not noticed in last week's videos and when I was talking about the clean and simple trees class over at Art Venture, this one is not clean and simple, but you can see how quickly it's getting done. This is all real time right here, and I got it done in just a few minutes. The only thing that I'm not going to include is the drying time because ink takes a little longer to dry. But I did end up using my heat gun on it. And ink changes color in the same kinds of ways as watercolor does. Look at those blooms and blossoms. I mean, they are just gorgeous. When ink does that, it's different than when watercolor does it. And I just love it. So if you're interested in clean and simple trees, link us in the doobly-doo or you could just try this one. Just spatter on some branches. And that is it for me. I will see you on Friday with the actual painting that I made for the happy couple. See you then. Bye bye.