 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Alnok with a crafty hack, Masking Stamps for Complex Scenes. And this one is a much requested video. Lots of you want to know how I make all of these complex scenes with so many stamps in them. And this would be a video that I'll point you back to if you ask that question in the future. So I'm going to use a mice day to celebrate and start out with eclipse tape. This is a big role of basically post-it note is what it is. It has about that amount of stickiness. I put it in the MISTI, which I use for all my stamping. I am incapable now of stamping anything except an art impression stamp without screwing it up when I'm using blocks. That's just the way my life is. I fully admit to it that I am terrible at stamping, but the MISTI saves my bacon. I arranged them on here so that everything fits as much as possible. And some of the stamps I don't necessarily mask out. If I think they're really easy, like in this stamp set, there's ones that are boxes. They're just squares. So there's no need to do that. I can just use a sticky note when I'm doing any masking with that. I'm stamping it with a dye ink. Because if you stamp it with a pigment ink, you'll get it all over your fingers unless you let it dry and blah, blah, blah. So just use yourself a nice dye ink that dries quickly. And then I use my detail scissors for this. These are my EK Success Stick Scissors, if I can even speak now, and chop them up into smaller pieces because it makes the fussy cutting easier. And I find that I do best if I leave the scissors kind of in the same orientation and move the paper to meet up with it. And I also don't worry about being perfect in the fussy cutting. I just get close enough because I can always fix a little tiny bit somewhere with a pen if I really need to. And each one of these then turns into a little sticker to use for the whole project. None of them has any tails left, notice. And I didn't cut out the inside of the chair legs. I didn't cut out the inside of elbows, that kind of stuff. It's not worth that kind of effort. And the balloons I cut out separately entirely. And some of this I won't use for this card. I'll just save them in my stamp storage and be able to use them another time. So next up is placing the images and trying to figure out what scene I want to use. And where I want each of the critters to be. When you're using just this sticky note, you can change your mind. You can peel one up and put it back down. You can decide whether you want one to be in front of the other, so you can put them in visual order. I don't usually do that. I'm not doing that here. So this little mouse is going to be behind the mouse who's in front of him. The one in front is licking the frosting. This guy is just party animal. And he's going to be standing on a stack of boxes. And the stack of boxes is going to be meaning to be masked out behind the little guy licking the frosting. And he's going to be standing on a chair because none of these mice are tall enough to reach the cupcake on their own. So in the stamp set, there's chairs, there's stools. There's these little boxes like that one. And for this one, I didn't mask these two pieces out, but I checked to make sure that I could stack up a box and a stool and still make it look right. And it was going to work, so I didn't bother using masks for that portion for placing it. So next, figure out what the frontmost image is. Who's standing in front of the cupcake? And that's this little guy on the floor holding the candle. And I don't know why he's holding a candle. The light is already on the other candle. Maybe he feels like somebody needs a second birthday candle, but whatever, he's arriving late to the party with a candle. Then you put in your finished paper, whatever you're going to do the final artwork on, and use whatever paper and ink that you would need for that. This is going to be a Copic-friendly paper and a Copic-friendly ink. If this was a watercolor card, I'd use watercolor paper and watercolor-friendly ink. I'll list some options for those inks and stuff and papers in the doodly-doo down below. Next up is finding out another image to stamp in here. And so this guy is kind of floating in space, this little dude who's holding the cherry. And then the other side, I wanted to have the guy who's licking the frosting in front of the cupcake so that his little face shows, because otherwise the cupcake will be in front of his face and his head will be behind, which would be a little weird. And then the chair that's underneath of him. And I could fit both of those stamps on there. So I'm going to stamp all three of those at once. You can do these one at a time or you can figure out different groupings of them that are going to work together. So add it on now to the first one that has the mask already in place over that little guy. Nothing's touching him, so the mask doesn't need to be there at this moment. But it's ready for the later step in this masking. So then I'll stamp these guys and I'll have four stamps added onto the finished card stock and ready to roll. So I'm going to take the masks off of the original layout and place them then onto the card itself. Just move them over. Remember, I'm going to be drawing some pillows above that chair. So I'm going to be adding that later as I get this thing finished. And next though, I'm going to add the cupcake. That's going to be the next stamp that we'll go in here. I'm going to place that according to my layout on the first piece, put the second piece in. And since I have all those masks in place, that cupcake should fit just perfectly in that open area in the center and be masked out by all of those masks that are on the paper. So God willing, and the creek don't rise, this should work just perfect, right? And it does. Now sometimes you'll need to stamp a little harder or a couple times extra using your MISTI because you've now got the layer of paper that is lifting up higher than the paper. The layer of the masking was lifting up higher than the paper so you've got an extra paper layer in there. So you may have a little area around the stamps that you need to fix with a pen. We'll talk about that a little bit too. So this is the last guy added to this, the last mouse. And he's behind the other mouse, remember? So he goes last. So you're masking from, or stamping from forward to back. And you want the masks added on that way. So here I'm adding in the stamp of that little box. Remember I told you the box is just a square. So I can take a scrap off of the masking paper that I'd already cut or you could use a sticky note. So I'm going to mask off the top of the box and then I can place the little stool as high or low as I need it to be because it's going to get masked off where the box starts. Now remember we have this little floating mouse who couldn't reach the cupcake if he didn't have pillows on his chair. So I'm going to draw in some floppy ovals basically to indicate pillows. But since I don't have a stamp that I can stamp and cut out a mask for, I have to figure out another way to mask that. So I'm just going to take some of my scrap pieces that have a point to them and cover up basically most of the pillows and the point on the edge. Because the part that's going to be stamped in that center section right there is the boxes that are going to be the thing that the mouse in the back, the guy with the balloon, he needs something to stand on so he's not floating in space. So I'm going to stamp these boxes in there. You could just draw the boxes real easily yourself, but since there's a stamp, why bother doing that? And as I peel these off, you'll notice that the opening in the chair that I didn't end up cutting out when I did my mask, I'm going to need to draw those little corners of the boxes back in. But that's real easy to do. So if you plan strategically which areas that you're going to be placing your stamps, you can cover up areas that you don't want to have to do any drawing in. So if I wanted to stamp something in front of that chair on top of it so that I didn't have anything to draw in there, I could do that. You could put a pile of birthday boxes in there and then not have to worry about this drawing in of a stamp in behind there. So this is the finished card that's going to be over on MFT's channel today. With any luck, there will be a link to that in the doobly-doo and at the end of the video and over on the blog, et cetera. I'm not always really great at follow up with that really quickly. But I'm also going to be doing Facebook Live tonight. You can go to the MFT blog to pick up the free download of the image and the list of colors to bring and join me for that. There's also a video you might be interested in that is on different line widths for different size pens that you might need for repairing images and drawing in little bits. So I will link that one as well. And I think that's it. I think I've talked enough for today. So go see these other videos linked in the doobly-doo and I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.