 Well, hi there. I am Sandy Allnock of the Stuffy Nose Variety. I am going to bring you today some art impressions watercolor with soft and hard edges, because I don't just do haul videos, I show you things. So for each one of the new stamp sets that came out in early 2018, I'm going to show you what I've stamped onto some scrap watercolor paper. I used up a lot of scrap in this video, and I stamped each one using Tombow markers, and I'm painting only with water. So you haven't seen these stamps before. You color onto the stamp itself and stamp it, and then it's basically pigment that you can move around. And you can move it around a little bit. You can move it around a lot. You can create a little light cloud of color like I just did. I'm going to let that one dry, and then show you what happens when you stamp into that, because you can stamp layers onto this stuff as well. And you can paint into your flowers with water. And then I love to just add a few more branches, a few more little leaves of something so that it looks like each one of the flowers is fading off into the distance behind it, that sort of thing. But here's how you go, you stamp your images. You can do single generation or multi-generation stamping and stamp over top of things, re-watercolor, etc. to get the effects that you're looking for. These take a lot of practice to get used to them and how much water to use and as well how your markers react. I'm using the Tombows, those tend to be my favorite with these. I like my color selection and that sort of thing. But you can use Distress Markers, you can use the Zig Clean Color, you can use Twin-Tip Markers, you can use Marvy Markers. Lots of different kinds of water-based markers. Copics don't work. Just color on them with the marker itself. If you wait too long, you might need to huff on it a little bit to get that pigment reactivated so you can stamp with it. But notice that the stamping is not perfect. I'm stamping on some textured watercolor paper. This is Arches Cold Press. And you don't really have to worry about being perfect because the watercolor is going to be... You're going to get more soft and hard edges if you aren't stamping perfectly. That's what I tend to find. So that's why I kind of like this look because I'm a terrible stamper and stamping terribly allows me a lot of freedom when I'm working with something like this. But look how I'm creating little vignettes just by painting some color outside of each one of the stamps. I'm not worried about just making the stamp look beautiful, but what's around it? And creating those soft edges. And with some markers, you're going to end up with the marker really melting out fast. The Zig Clean Colors I don't use very often with this I end up really, really, really disappearing with the slightest bit of water. They love water. The Tombows, one of the reasons that I love these is that they're kind of in the middle of the road. They water out sometimes and they don't completely other times. So I get a little bit of both. The Distress Markers, it's hard to get them to water out at all sometimes. But it also may depend on your markers and how old they are and how old the pigment is. There's a lot of different factors. So take each stamp that you get and just practice on the little scraps with it. Stamp it a whole bunch of times and play around with different amounts of water. Because you can see I'm getting different looks from each one of these based on how much water I put with them. And am I giving them stems? Am I just painting on the blossoms themselves? I love the fact that they have these mini flowers and mini foliage sets that we can add to all of our other ones. And now we have mini critters as well. There are some stamps that they've had in the past that have, say, a whole group of dogs on them that are different sizes. These mini critters are all mini. They're little teeny tiny ones. They'll fit inside of a basket or sitting on a window sill or on a park bench. Lots of different types of things like that. And with some of these you may end up needing to draw the eyeballs back in depending on how much water you put over something and whether or not they totally disappear because that can happen with some of these. I'm sitting here trying to pull water out of my bunny because I over-watered my bunny. And again, this is a great way to just practice. Get some scrap paper and just stamp a whole bunch of each one of the images and practice with them so that when you get to making one on a card or on a bookmark, which is what I'm going to do, you'll have some practice under your belt. This is the dog set I was telling you about. So you see there's a bunch of different sizes of one dog or several dogs. And now they also have a new set of trees. So you have some small pine trees that you can use in the background of a scene. And there are different amounts of pigment that different ones put on. So there's a more solid one. There's one with more space in between each one of the branches. But you can create whatever look you want. With each one of these I've stamped multiple colors and I've done that with a lot of these along the way. I swiped a little bit of green. I swiped a little bit of blue. Swiped a little bit of purple in order to get a multi-colored stamped image. This little stamp, I'm curious to how I'm going to use it because I immediately see that this would be like the roots and then you'd have the tree up there and put your branches up on the top. You could also turn different ways. You can have it coming in from the side and basically a branch cascading in from somewhere else. A lot of different ways that you can use that. So I'm going to try that at some point. And then we have these two trees, which I like they have different sizes of them because depending on your scene, you may have need for a larger or smaller one. And I like to put my darker color on the lower part of the trunk and a lighter color in the top. Your lighter color is going to blend more easily with whatever you're stamping on the top for your branches. So you can use all different kinds of flower stamps or foliage stamps or things in order to create a cloud of whatever is in the tree above. This wishing well set is really cute. It's got two different sizes of these watering cans. And what I'll point out here is leaving some white when you do your watercoloring. Notice that I'm not trying to make everything perfect and fill it all in. I'm leaving some white there and just doing there's no rhyme or reason to why or how I'm just trying to make sure that I don't watercolor everything in your image will completely disappear if you watercolor every square inch of it. But leave yourself some white spots and that sort of thing. So the top of the wishing well just like the rest of this I've stamped in both a gray and a brown so I get different colors mixing in and if you're trying to do old wood it's helpful to have multiple colors that sort of thing to mix together as you're doing the ink work and the watercoloring. And with the wishing well you could also put that small watering can down in the ground on the bottom and with a lot of these I'll do some really rough masking. I don't get into like terribly detailed masking just because that's hard to do with these but you can watercolor the parts in between if you're masking it doesn't go perfectly. They have a couple of doors in the door set so if you like doing doors it's a great one. And here I'm just watercoloring sort of a almost a flat color for the front of the door. A few little spots of white I'm leaving there because I didn't want it to get too mushy but just to leave it a very pale type of wood. But this door I stamped in grays and blues and just swiped some colors across the stamp and then adding some water along. You can see I'm adding a lot of water in that one section I was nervous that I did but it actually worked out really pretty and I'm just going over each one of the lines a little tiny bit because I wanted this one to feel like a white door. But I wanted also something in those windows so I'm making some diagonal lines and just barely touching it in a few spots so I pull in a little bit of color but not everywhere and not a ton of color. They don't have to be all even and even pulling some of that excess color over to one of my other doors to make more windows. And just letting that be soft. Letting those white areas show, letting those soft versus hard edges be found. And this door has a little more of a rustic feel to it. It has those really big hinges across it and again it doesn't have wood slats on the door. It has a few cracks in this one and my window didn't stamp very well but look what happened right when I water colored it my window came right back even though it wasn't very visible in my stamping. And I'll just paint a few boards on here and allow just a little of the color to pull through to make more wooden boards. If you want them to be heavier color you can put some color on a block and pick that up to paint in there but I think having that really soft color is just gorgeous. The new windows are really cute. They have lots of space in there for putting something in the window like a little animal curled in the center of the window. You can also stamp the window box down below and put lots of flowers in there but look how gorgeous this comes out when I'm using grays and browns together. So rustic. It feels like magic when you look at these and I'm watching myself paint it and thinking that really is magic. I didn't do anything special there. I just put water over it and it's really quite amazing but the best way to get to learn how to do these is to stamp a whole bunch of whatever the image is that you're going to use and just save whatever scrap paper use the back side of something in order to do your practicing and just practice a whole bunch. Try it with different colors and I'm not putting colors on the screen for a reason because I want you to play with the markers you have and see how they work together because you'll find some of the blues will not work very well with browns and look kind of weird and creepy and that sort of thing so practice. These cobblestones are brand new which are really fun so it gives you something else to put on the ground in front of each of your images and there are different sizes and shapes of cobblestones and what I want to point out is the larger ones should be in the front in the foreground if you're one of my drawing students you'll know that and as you go into the distance they're going to get smaller. Notice this one that I'm painting right now is upside down so you have the the smaller ones in the very front and you can make that work so if you accidentally stamp it the wrong way then that's fine but generally having the larger ones in the front is going to be helpful. This little stamp here is actually stairs I think at least I think it's stairs because that's what worked for me it's either stairs or a pathway you can make it look like either one but it's important here to leave some white because watch what happens I'm going to color just a little bit of color on that right hand side but now I'm going to add some water to the left and look how the highlights pop out because you have color on both sides very cool isn't that and then there's another type of cobblestone and with each one of these I'm just putting a little bit along the bottom of each stone and not religiously but just enough to allow there to be a little bit of highlight on top of each one there's also this wall texture kind of cobblestones for the wall if you think of it that way same idea paint along the bottom of each one to allow some of that light to shine through on the top of each one of the cobblestones and you get a really beautiful effect that way and you can do a lot of different things with these you can fill in in between them and fill in some of that grout area you can add a little bit of light color around the outside edges to soften it because these are one of those places where you can add that ethereal nature to some of your art impressions watercolor stamping and on this particular one right here I didn't stamp the center particularly well big oops on that because I'm not a very good stamper I've told you that before but it allowed this to be very I guess natural it has a lost and found feel that's really beautiful and especially in the green and the brown together which is really an odd combination it worked well this little pair of purple stamps this is actually one stamp so that you get a little space in between and sometimes you want that space in between to do all of your flower stamping that sort of thing and this gray set is also one stamp these gray rocks but look what happens when I'm just I scribble some shapes that are similar to the other shapes that are there and it looks like you have this very beautiful lost and found kind of look and this long one I don't really know what this is I guess it's wood slats not really sure I'll have to experiment with that one and see what it comes out looking like now there's a mini truck set so if you like trucks then don't stamp it in light blue because I did not like this one at all in light blue I was glad it was on my test piece and not on my finished one because boy that came out really light blue and it was not I don't recall it being a light blue marker I was trying to pick a dark blue so I should have practiced and I used some black along the tires down there to add some different color to it and we can see there's a few other spots where I added a little black when I did my marker work this one also comes with a little farmhouse and this whole set reminded me of my trip I took recently to do some plenary painting and I would see all these great farms with great barns and great farmhouses and trucks out in the yard and paint in their field and I was too embarrassed to go ask anybody if I could paint in their field so there you go and with the fence I'm just painting along the bottom to allow that to feel like it's sinking into something the Hobbit door set is a blast I think it's going to be one of the real popular ones really cute and you paint things around it so it looks like these doors are set into a little hillside so you can do it into greens and I'll have some examples for you in just a second of what I did there's that little extra window there's the little lantern and a mailbox so you have other pieces that you can put with these that are sized to fit the little Hobbit house some of the floral stamps also the really tiny florals are small enough to work better with these than some of the larger floral or plant sets that you may already have in your collection of different Hobbit doors so much fun oh my goodness the genius that they have in the ideas for stamp sets over at our impressions are amazing so I made bookmarks out of my using old stamps from our daily bread designs for scriptures and here I've got one that has flowers inside the pot and I used the cobblestones down at the ground on the bottom and this one has the wishing well I had a big oops I had a big blob of green and felt like I ruined it but I waited till it was dry to put white pen dots over it to make it look like little Queen Anne's lace on it and saved that one from the heat bin this is one of the trees and I took one of the vine stamps and just made a whole bunch of blobby ones and water colored that and then I stamped into the wet pigment so I got both some edges that went off the wet pigment and then the mushy ones that merged into it to use these stamps and here's the hobbit doors oh my gosh so much fun I decided to put dark dirt right around the doors right around the center focal point and then cascading all of the greens around it and the one on the right came out even better it was more ethereal I left more white space in there and still had that dark right around the door so that that really makes it a focal point but I love that one that's probably my favorite one well maybe not my favorite one I've got a couple other favorites too goodness gracious they're all favorites but I couldn't do it the same thing twice that's the crazy thing with these there's the truck which came out in much better color I used browns or greys and blacks and I added just a little bit of the farm scene in behind so you see just a little bit of the the building there's one of the trails one of the little cobblestone rock patterns that I had to draw back into because I over watered it and then I put some greens around it just to cascade up the bookmark I think that came out really pretty painted some butterflies in there just with a few fluttery brush strokes to make something fly along there and for my deer I stamped the grass and water colored it in a light color and then I stamped a darker color and just kept working my way down until I got to the deer itself and I thought that came out really pretty for a nice peaceful little scene for the trees I used the ones in the back first water colored them then I did a row of the lighter green and the darker green and then I stamped the really dark green onto the wet dark green and just kept getting the color in the front darker and darker in the foreground this is probably this is probably my favorite one I love how how much white I kept in there and left so much of that those soft areas and oh I mean it's just this pretty just pretty here's one with the puppy dog in the window gotta be a small puppy dog not to knock that window down I even put some color inside so you get an idea you're looking into the window and it makes the blue in the glass that much brighter and this window wouldn't have fit on the bookmark so I just stamped half of it and then I added the greens down at the bottom and I put some of the the wall stamps all the way up the side so I have just a little color there so I'm gonna be giving away these 12 bookmarks to students in my brand new seeing the scriptures class so in a week I will pick winners and I'll post them over on the blog on art-classes.com the new class is more of a thinking class than an art class how to think through the scriptures and come up with visual images for them because I get that question a whole lot and you're welcome to go check out the class if you wish there's also another video on my other channel with my art testimony so you can go see that one and hear about how God brought me through my art journey to Bible journaling and also another playlist with all my art impressions watercolor so enjoy those and I will see you guys later take care