 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter and I'm going to share with you some Copic ink backgrounds today using the Waffle Flower Bouquet Builder Stamp Set. Has just a bunch of flowers in it, all different kinds and I arranged them in my MISTI to make a background arrangement and had them all ready to go. And I've got my my big black craft assistant, which is what I'm going to use because I'm going to make a mess. I have a couple different sheets of the stamped images. My colorless blender and some reinkers. I had first picked all light ones and you'll see why I went and got some more eventually. So I had done one with an otter in it and I was making water and I had made one video previously that had a bunch of alcohol ink backgrounds and then I started playing with some Copic ink backgrounds and comparing them and what I found was really cool. You can use Nina cardstock and do these kind of crazy backgrounds. You don't have to buy specialty paper to use them with your Copic marker refills, which are called various ink refills. I don't know why that's called various ink. That doesn't make any sense. But since it's translated from the Japanese, that's probably why I have this thing flooded entirely with the colorless blender and then I put some drops on and you can see the drops are suspended in the colorless blender. I found that this was probably too much colorless blender because if you think about what colorless blender does, it waters down whatever ink is there. Waters down and erases, quote unquote, whatever color is there. So after I finished this one and I had all this beautiful pale color on there and didn't it look lovely, all that colorless blender was still on there even though I dripped it off and so it was really pale. So I thought, oh, I'll stick some more on there. Not thinking there's still colorless blender saturating this paper. So it's still going to have plenty of time to react with whatever color I do put on. But I thought, I'm going to try. I'm going to keep putting on more color. You may want gloves for this because the colorless blender is not sticky, but the various inks are kind of on the sticky side. And then I went and put it down in the puddle again. The puddle that is filled with colorless blender, so this paper is just unfortunately getting overly saturated. I thought, well, let me put some of the pink back in there and try that. And again, I was trying with really light colors because I wanted a nice pale background so that I could color the flowers on top of it. And wouldn't that be pretty? But it was just like the color would seem to disappear into this piece of paper. But it did end up really smooth around everything because I kept moving it. And if you keep moving it, you're going to get smoother edges as long as it's good and saturated. If the paper dries and you put a blob of ink on it, it's going to stay there and you're going to end up with hard edges. So it really depends on what you want, what kind of look you want to get from it. But I was trying to find a way to create a nice almost airbrush-looking background with a couple different colors. And what I found was then my thumbprint was on there and then I put more ink on there. Yeah, this paper is just overly saturated. So I just kind of played around with it and threw on a little bit more ink just to see if I could make it a little bit richer and then set it aside to dry. Now to set it aside to dry, I waited until I was pretty sure my inks were not going to create hard edges. So if you have some puddles that are appearing and that sort of thing, you may want to tip it around if you want to try to keep that relatively smooth look, kind of hang on to it until it starts to look less shiny and then let it sit and dry. And you may also want it to sit and dry with a paper towel at the edge so that any of those drips that kind of catch along the edge of the paper can have something to puddle off into. But I'm kind of just tipping it back and forth to try to keep that ink on the paper and keep it kind of smooth and then I set it aside. Next up I thought I'd try a different technique that I see people do with alcohol inks and see how it's going to work with my Copic inks by putting some different kinds of pigments, different colors, stronger colors this time along with some colorless blender onto the craft assistant itself, the 12 by 12 piece of metal. And I like it better than those craft mats because it doesn't curl, it doesn't crinkle and it's super easy to clean up. But you can see I'm just kind of dabbing the colors and the purple kind of disappeared entirely into the pinkishness and I only put a little bit of the colorless blender. The other one got so wet that I decided that was too much and put a little bit of the colorless blender on and now I'm going to add more of the purple, the V04 color and then start smooshing them around again. Again, I recommend tweezers or gloves because my fingers did end up sticky from this, but I'm trying to only put enough colorless blender to actually make the color move as opposed to full on crazy saturation wildness that I did in the first one and to see if I can retain more of that color by the time it's all dried. And again, I didn't, you know, silly me. I was trying to adjust my tweezers and ended up touching it and got sticky again. Yeah, so much fun. Learning and playing is a good thing, though, I have to say. So this was an adventure in just making messes and seeing what would happen and what it would take to move the color. And I recommend you do the same. You might choose some colors that you don't normally use as refills. If you got any colors and you're like, I never use up this marker. I never ever do. This is a great use for that makes some great backgrounds out of it by just putting the color onto your background image. You can make a background image without stamped images on it as well. You could just make a beautiful colored background. But it's kind of fun because I'm going to show you a little bit about how I color on top of some of these as well at the end. I set that one aside to dry and now I'm going to try one more thing. And that is to not get my paper so saturated. So this time I put a few drops of the color that Splendor on trying to let gravity do its work to pull the moisture around the whole piece of paper. So it's good and wet and ended up having to put a little bit more over on one end because it wasn't the moisture wasn't moving enough. Just to fill it all up to make sure that I don't get any distinct blobs that I can't delete from it. And then I started putting in some colors. I just randomly picked some of my colors that I may not use as much and decided to put a couple drops of each one on. And just to play with it and see what happens. And let the colors mix on their own a little bit more instead of picking the paper up and forcing it to move as much as I did previously. I thought, let's see what happens if I just throw the color on in and of itself. And just play with it. This is something that I encourage you to just play. Just have fun, throw color in there, see what happens. And you're going to learn more by doing that. And maybe you'll come up with a whole new technique as well that you can share with all of your friends. And if you do use it, then make sure you post something somewhere and tag me in it so I can see what you're making with the techniques that I've started you off on. So here I decided to even go for a really nice dark blue and move it just enough to make sure I don't have hard edges on things. But I want to retain some of those distinct color areas and see what happens there. Again, I'm going to watch it as it's drying to see if there's any areas that I want to add to. I noticed that some of them started pulling away from the edges and then there were some areas in the middle that I wanted more yellow. And I thought, let me see what happens. Is it going to push out some color if I add more yellow in the middle? And just play. Just play and have fun and goof around with it and see what comes out. And then let it air dry. I think you can probably heat set these, heat dry them, but I just let them air dry myself. So now let's take a nice close-up look at each one of them. You can see they each have a little bit of texture to them because of all that color in this blender and how the inks blend on the Neenah cardstock. So it's kind of fun to see that sort of thing develop in the drying of it. And this one was really cool. It retains some of those lighter areas and differentiated colors that I really liked when I created the piece. And then I thought I'm going to throw a little bit of color in. I'll show you a little bit of that. The lighter colors, you're going to have more success in coloring with nearly true to color because it's light color. This ink will push out the ink that's there to some extent because it's light and it'll move out of the way easier so that your greens will remain green, your pinks can become pink and just take over some of that purple and a bunch of different colors will work fine. So if you use colors that are in the colorway of the background, they work really well, but even a little bit of a yellow shows up in something like that. It's a little different when you have more color that's down there. So the green ended up looking a little texturized and not quite the pure green that it was, but it's still very pretty. I used some colorless blender on the flowers and you could use colorless blender first and then put colors in if you want to try that because it'll lighten some of that color first. But this one was the one that was really fun. I didn't worry about coloring everything to try to make it look like it was floating on top. I liked the idea of all the different flowers kind of blending in, some of them having some color to lift them out and other ones just kind of mushing into this beautiful, gorgeous background that I had. Really fun technique to play with and it's gonna come out different every single time so you're always gonna have a unique card. So here are the finished cards. What I did was mount them onto a piece of black cardstock that's sticking out a little bit so that I could edge it with some Delicata Gold ink and then the hello sentiment, which is a die from Ellen Hudson. This one, I had to make my own exclamation point because I didn't center my hello right when I glued it down and the way that I adhered these was to put some B creative tape on the back of the black paper before I actually stuck them on, before I die cut them. So then when I stuck them on, they were stickers and the stickers stuck in the wrong place on that one so I needed an exclamation point because it wasn't quite centered, it wasn't quite not centered, but each one of them I also added some glossy accents on top of the die cut to make them shiny. And I thought that was a really cool look for these, makes the sentiment really pop on this beautiful, gorgeous background along with that gold trim, really pretty. So I hope you enjoyed this and it encourages you to get out your various ink, whatever reason they call it that, your refills and use them to make some beautiful backgrounds on your Neenah card stock. All the supplies are listed in the description down below. I will see you guys another time, have a wonderful day. Bye bye.