 Hi there, it's Sandy and today I thought I'd talk a little bit about basic masking. This is masking for stamping and I did a tiny tutorial on social media recently and lots of people really liked it and said the analogy works so I'm going to try to put that here on YouTube as well. So pretend there's some emojis that are lining up for a group photo. Those represent your stamps, which one is in the front and you need to figure out who's in the front and that is the first one that you're going to stamp. And then for the successive stamps, you need to mask that one out and find out which stamps are going to be right behind it, which are the next ones in line. And then you stamp those and then you mask those out and you stamp anything else that's behind it. And in this case it's silly emojis but consider this being stamps if you have a whole group of stamps that are trying to take a group photo and then one by one, when you peel off all those masks, you should end up, knock on wood, with something that looks right. Even though while all those masks are on, it looks kind of crazy and everything stamped over top of each other, this is how it should go. So make sure you're going from the front to the back. We all know how to set up a group photo. The tiniest kids are in the front, the tallest kids are in the back and everybody else is in the middle. Everybody's face needs to be showing so think about that when you're setting up your stamping for doing masking. Now I'm going to be using this stamp set coloring it over on the MFT channel but I thought I'd show you how I got it to this stage. I first lined everything up in the misty and what I tend to do is put the stamps on top of each other. If I want to do some layering, I layer it so I can see which stamp is in the front. The cat's going to be in the front. It's the smaller one. If I were to do in a group photo, it would be in the front row. So I'm going to peel off the dog and set it aside. You may want to check the alignment of the cat to make sure it didn't get kittywampus when it was laying on top of another stamp but you at least have the placement and you have room saved for the dog. So now we've got the girl and the cat lined up where we want them. So we need to create a mask because you're basically protecting the smallest kid in the group photo. Protecting them from anybody else, sticking their arm in front of their face. You can use a couple different methods for that. You can use a sticky note and if you're using a sticky note and then trimming it out, make sure that you use the sticky part on the stamp itself so that it sticks. The other way to do it is to use masking paper and I like this masking paper. It's about the stickiness of a sticky note, the whole sheet. I just tear off a sheet that's big enough for the image that I'm going to be stamping, put it over top and since everything's already in the misty, I can re-stamp in the same position and then I have my cat that I can trim out. On an image like this, you can fussy cut to your heart's content around those antlers. However, that is not actually required. You don't have to fussy cut every little detail. I'm just going to cut around in a general shape, leaving more of the white paper around the edge of those antlers because I didn't feel like fussy cutting them. That's not worth it in this particular instance and if you've got an image that is only going to touch part of it, say it's only going to touch the tail end of the cat, then just trim out the tail end. You don't need to detailedly fussy cut the rest of it, but for the sake of this one, I've got part of the dog coming out on one side, part of the dog coming out on the other, so I've got the cat fully cut out with just more white space around the outside edge of the antlers and I'll show you why that's okay. Now I'm going to line the dog up and making sure the dog's face shows just like any group photo and make sure it's not covered by the cat that is in front of it and then line it up, put the ink on it and stamp away and it looks messy when you do this. I realize that and confuses people, but it's just stamping over top of it. The cat is protected by the mask. So you can see here that the dog now appears to be behind the cat because it didn't stamp on top of there. This little edge right where the antlers are can be fixed easy with the line of a pen and when you've got a little edge like that, it's much easier to use a pen to fix it than it is to fussy cut all that kind of detail so don't make life harder on yourself. Now I decided I'm going to color this using colors from Beata's card that was sent in earlier this summer so you can see all of that coloring over on MFT's channel and I also want to let you know that there are a whole bunch of masking videos that are collected over on my blog. I'll put a link to that in the doobly-doo so you can check it out because I wanted to put all that into one location. All right, I will see you over on MFT's channel. Links for supplies here in the doobly-doo and I will see you again next time. Bye bye.