 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Almak and today I'm going to be working on a little realistic rainy watercolor. Something I realized recently when going through all of my videos and starting to break down my playlist because they had gotten out of control, I realized I hardly have any advanced watercolor videos. So this is going to be that. And I'm going to use this Avery Elle stamp set with this really sweet little bunny and the little bunny has a beautiful umbrella to walk under and I'm going to paint a gorgeous slimline card with it. And first I wanted an epic sky. I wanted something that felt very rainy, very wet. And when you're looking out at a sky, you don't see just this little cards width of it. I love when you can see the whole giant sky up above. So I painted a bunch of water onto the surface and then I'm going to add some paint blue gray mixed with a little bit of French ultramarine blue. Just move the color around, leaving some white areas, leaving a white section because I want to add a rainbow up there. And then indicating just real loosely and quickly a path for the bunny to walk in because anything in the shadows will either be white or it'll reflect the sky colors. And since this will draw really light, I figured I'll just let it be really light and then add it in just a little bit of very wet yellow ochre because that's going to give it more of a stormy feel rather than just there's a blue sky with blue clouds in it. And while it's all wet, I'm going to go in and add in as well some sap green for the grass because this is going to bleed. And while some people freak out when it bleeds, if you are one of my watercolor students who's been doing watercolor and getting looser, practice that wet and wet stuff because it's a heck of a lot of fun. So I'm going to take some of that really wet sap green and let it start traveling up so I have a line of trees and just kind of let that all start to dry. But I wanted to add a little tiny bit of the sap green into the road first. I did just a tiny touch down there on that right hand side so I get a little feel of reflection of the whole thing. Then dry it really nicely and then start really mixing that darker green. And it's a combination of a couple different greens, whatever kind of dark things you have to mix your dark greens. Go for it. I've got some green appetite, a little bit of perline green, a little bit of Payne's blue gray. And then I'm going to add the tree line and I want it to feel dark and rich and rainy. You know, rainy means everything is mushy. It means nothing is going to be really super clear. So I don't want a whole lot of really fresh clean edges. I want a whole lot of blended edges. I want rough edges, that sort of thing. So the whole bottom section will be filled in first with a mix of the dark colors and I'll add in a mix of some of the sap green above it so that the color goes from dark to light to dark to light. And just kind of dancing the brush around the whole thing. I have some classes on trees and I didn't get into the detail of painting these trees the way that I do in those advanced classes, but you can certainly check those out. There's links in the doobly-do to that. But I'm going to add in a little bit more detail. Just a tiny bit here and there in a few spots and give it a couple of pine trees in among all these other trees and letting some of that just fall wet into wet into the color that's already there. You could do this step while the sky is wet, but you won't get any of those hard edges at the top and I want a few of them. But not very much because the more you put in there, the more you're going to take away attention from the little bunny at the bottom. And the bunny is supposed to be the focal point in this whole scene. So I want him to have, I want him to be able to steal the stage. So I've kind of got my trees settled nice and dark and rich. They feel very realistic and instead of cartoony, which I wanted to see what would happen if I did a more realistic background behind a cartoony stamp. My brush at this point is really dry and I'm skipping over the top of the paper as lightly as possible to give it that really dry brush sort of look up at the top. Now I'm going to add a little shape of a shadow underneath them, a little shadow reflection and with some of the blues and greens and paints blue-gray color in it just so that there's a little something coming down from there, I'm going to add in a little bit of the paints blue-gray as well right around the edges of the sidewalk that he's walking down. But I don't want a whole outlined sidewalk. I just want a few places that are clear and indicated that it's a sidewalk and letting a lot of that be messy and be wet and be wet into wet. That whole area on the left, I don't even want to clear that up because it's so beautiful the way that those greens disappear. I'm just working on the side on the right. You might find the way your paint lays that the side on the left is going to be the one that you want to fix and leave the one on the right. It just depends on how your paint comes out. If I were to paint this again a second time, it wouldn't come out this way. I'm going to add in a little bit of extra detail. I darken the color at the bottom and then I'm going to put a little bit of detail into and this is just barely any, a little bit of bricks on the little part that outlines the sidewalk, so that little curb. And then strengthen up that one edge, that one far edge. But what I was realizing is that now looks like a green wall back there and I had to start thinking about what am I going to do to fix that green wall? Well, I didn't want that sharp edge from the bottom of the trees to the start of the grass. So I started putting in some blues into the trees because I knew I wanted to pull some color down from there, but I needed to have that area wet. It was already dry. So I'm going to add in some of the Pains Blue Gray in the top section or in the bottom section of the trees, but touching where the grass is going to be. And then just go over the grass once more with my green. So it pulls some of that color down and I start getting a softer edge. And then that becomes less distracting. So I've got that edge as one type of edge on the left. I've got all that vanished area where all that detail just kind of washed into the paint and the contrast between soft edges and hard edges is what makes watercolor so beautiful. So now I want you to watch what happens. And I didn't really see this till I started editing the video. I was a little nervous about how a cute little stamp was going to work in a realistic scene like this. And until the last step, I kept thinking, I'm not sure this is going to go. I'm not sure this is going to go. But I started by adding, of course, yellow. It's my favorite color. So I had to throw in some new Gamboge just to be fun. And depending on how thick you use your new Gamboge, if you use it straight out of the pan, it's going to be a darker yellow and it'll be a little lighter if you mix it with water. And then I threw in a little bit of pink to give it a tiny bit of shadow, just a little bit. And in order to not have that bleed together, I dried it in between and didn't include that little piece of footage. But I dried it so that the pink won't bleed into the yellow terribly. It wouldn't matter a whole lot if it did, but in order to try to keep the purity of the stamp a little bit, I thought it would be nice to have something be a little more OK and not bleeding all over the place. And for the underside of the umbrella, now sometimes you get light coming through it so that you get really bright colors under there. But in this case, I wanted to darken it. So I mixed up a color with a little bit of the Payne's Blue-Grey and the pinks and reds and stuff in order to make a darker color. And that helped to kind of tone everything down a little bit. And then comes the bunny itself, trying to figure out what color to make the bunny. It's still very jarring. You can still see those lines. So I definitely wanted to get rid of that, so I mixed a dark brown to paint the bunny first. And did the little paws and the tummy and everything. And this whole time I was thinking, I don't know if this is going to work. I don't know if this is going to work because I still, my eye was immediately drawn to the white area of the chin of the bunny. And it just didn't feel like it fit in the whole painting. And granted, it's a card. I know it doesn't have to be like a fine art thing. But for me, I was trying to figure out how to make that work. Well, I remembered I had used a little bit of that yellow ochre up in the sky, so I pulled in a little yellow ochre that I dirtied up a little bit, just pulled in some other color so that it wouldn't be this pure bright yellow ochre. And all of a sudden, the bunny seemed like he fit. To do a real quick rainbow, all of that area in that upper right corner is now dry. So how do you get a really soft rainbow? Well, I painted a wider strip of water than I was going to want for the rainbow. And then just started dropping color in. Now, I went back and forth a few times dabbing off color with a baby wipe in order to soften it and then put color back in, because I softened it too much. And you can play around with it, but give yourself just a tiny hint at a rainbow. Most of the time, they're super soft and you don't see a lot of them. So for the sentiment, I punched two circles, one in black and one in the watercolor paper with the sentiment on it and added the same colors that were in the sky behind it. So it almost looked like that was a continuation of the sky. Opted not to put the trees in there. I thought about painting them in there and then decided that would be a little too much. So there is my finished sweet little card with this little bunny. And I hope some of you who are ready to tackle something more advanced might give it a shot. And I will see you again very, very soon. I hope you go paint something lovely and maybe grab some bunny stamps to do something like this with, because Easter's coming. Just thought you should know. I'll see you guys later. Bye.