 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to paint this cute little tomboy mouse and show you a little masking that I did. I stamped the May Mouse stamp set using some Eclipse tape to do masking. So first I stamped the outfit. I stamped it onto the sticky back Eclipse tape and placed it on so that I could line up my mouse itself and see if it was going to work. And I stamped it first onto some acetate, just a piece of scrap that I had to make sure it lined up where I wanted it so that the hands look like they're going in the pockets. And of course I had to add glasses on because I wear glasses and any little mouse that wears glasses wins my heart. I'm going to use my Earth palette from Daniel Smith and they have these little tiny palettes that have six colors in them and the other colors are ones that I've added. So if you missed the video a while back, I will put a link to it at the end of this video. It's got a whole bunch of different palettes and why I put each of the color sets together. I may decide that I want different colors in there, but for now these are the ones I'm going to play with. And I'm starting with bronzite. Bronzite has a lot of sparkle in it and I thought it would be fun to have a sparkly mouse. But bronzite is a pale kind of color unless you start really putting in a lot of pigment. So I decided to add some other colors to it to change the color but keep the sparkle. So my little mouse will be sparkly and it's one of those ways that you can add some sparkle to whatever else you have. There's also a pearlescent shimmer that was in my previous palette and you can add that to anything as well. Just paint them and drop the color in so they mix together and that sparkle should stay. It will be a little less prominent than if I was only painting with the bronzite but there is still going to be sparkle. So I'm just dropping color wet into wet and notice that I'm not mixing any color on a palette. I'm going straight direct to my paper from the palette itself. And that is recently kind of my preferred way to paint. I'd rather see the paint mix on the paper than else wise. And that seems to make me happier than trying to figure out how to mix colors on a palette and worry about a lot of the trying to make my own custom colors. I let the paint decide what the color is going to be when it gets onto the paper. One of the problems with that is the water management issue. You have to know your brushes well enough to know how much water you're picking up versus how much pigment you're picking up and be prepared to fix that. So if you end up accidentally picking up more pigment than expected or a loop of water comes out you need to be ready to recover from that if indeed that happens to you. Because until you know your brushes really well and that only comes from experience. I can't tell you dip this many times and the brush will be so and so wet. But I know my brushes really well after doing a lot of painting and that's why I kind of know how to do this. But it saves you having a bigger palette that has to have mixing wells in it and stuff. So that is kind of how I'm rolling with these little palettes since they don't really have mixing wells anyway. For the little outfit I thought it would be fun to make some denim of my own. So I started with Amazonite and dropped in some Payne's Blue Gray for shading and then just let the colors mix together. Because the Payne's Blue Gray might be kind of a I guess a stonewashed denim on its own but it has a little bit of extra fun to the color because it's got some Amazonite in it and it let me make that pocket a little bit lighter so it ends up looking a little bit different and stands out on the outfit. For the little leaves just add some green onto the stems for each of the strawberries. And by the way when I did the masking for the strawberries I did the ones that were in front and then just kept going behind them. I kept blocking off masking the stamp in front and then stamping the one behind it. That's just the basic process for doing any kind of masking. And throughout this card the whole time I was pretty aware of how wet or dry everything was and even though I've cut out the drying time in there I did let some things dry for a while so that I wasn't painting colors right next to each other and risking bleeding them into each other. For the chocolate on these I could have gone straight for the sepia that I've put in the palette but I wanted to play around with mixing some colors to make a more fun chocolatey color because the sepia looks like a nice dark chocolate but if I wanted something that looks a little bit I guess happier on a card I thought it'd be better to have some reds and browns in there first and then drop in the sepia as the kind of base color that's going to give it the shading. And I am a total chocoholic if you haven't noticed that from some of the videos I've done in the past so any stamp set that has chocolate in it makes me happy. This particular stamp set has a lot of things that this little mouse can hold in her hands and if you don't have the little denim on there then her hands will stick out. You can also do some crazy masking to make the hands in front of the outfit but I didn't have the wherewithal to do that because it takes a little bit more thinking than I was prepared to do when I was making this card but maybe at some point I will do that on Instagram at least and show you how it could look if you figure out how to do that. It is quite the complex procedure and as I was doing this I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted my chocolate to be shiny because it almost started taking away attention from the mouse itself because the mouse is supposed to be the important thing here not necessarily all the chocolate despite my love for chocolate so I was kind of toying around with do I get rid of those do I not and once all the chocolate was painted I kind of thought through it and I said I'm going to try something different I'm going to use a little bit of buff titanium and just put a drop of that in those highlights so that they ended up knocked back a little bit so there's a little highlight there but it's not super important. Next up is the background and this is something that you might try just for fun and if you don't want to wreck an image that you've already painted and had a really good time with and you can always try this on just a plain background that you're going to put a sentiment on or something on a card but I'm just putting color down. I'm just going to see what happens I'm playing with my Rossiana light and a little bit of Quinn Deep Gold and seeing how they mix do they do anything interesting playing with this is how I find different color combinations that I like colors that work well together some colors will burst into each other and blend and do really interesting kind of textures and things spidery fingers that go into one another like nickel azo does some colors just sit there like a bump on a log and until you actually play with them yourself it's hard to know I mean I can show you as much as I can but knowing the colors that you have in your palette and what they do together is one of the most important things that you can learn as a water colorist discover how they react to each other and here I was trying I'm speeding it way up because this goes on forever I was trying to add some darker colors in here and just see what I could make happen and just kept adding and adding until I was done and once it was mostly dry not completely 100% dry but like 90% dry then I took my dropper from my water bottle my spray bottle and just started dropping little drops of water on this just to make it interesting water blue texture thing to see what would happen so again this is potentially going to ruin your card but I don't think it did I think it added some interest to it and made it sort of a fun background without being an important thing the mouse is still the most important thing in the picture which I really like and I've also left the sentiment off so I can stamp something else in there some point probably going to make it a thank you card at some point and I can change it up for whatever I need to send a card out for thank you so much for watching links to all the supplies are in the doobly do still pictures are on the blog etc and maybe I'll do a Copic version of this or something over on the blog or on Instagram later today I will see you guys later bye bye