 Well, hi there. My name is Sandy Allnok. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm gonna bring you a bunch of things today. Watercolor pencils, drawing a tulip and the cutest little bunny butt you've ever seen. This little guy is so adorable from Art Impressions. He's gonna be great for Easter cards, but also for kids cards year-round. I don't know if you've ever seen a little kid play this peek-a-boo game underneath of their legs, but I think this bunny is adorable in the way that he's doing it. So I'm coloring it with watercolor pencils on Arches Rough Paper. If you've ever been unhappy with your watercolor pencils, try it on this paper because what I found is I like them best on this one. Now, I do like a lot of watercolor best on this one, but there's something about how the color melts because what happens with watercolor pencil is that it sits on top of the texture and then sinks into the texture as you hit it with water. So I think you're getting, and I'm not sure the science of it, but I'm thinking that you're you're getting a different kind of blend than you would on other kinds of paper on smoother papers. So I'm wetting it with my brush. I've got a number 8, I believe, silver brush. And I'm trying to use, and I'm trying as a general rule from what I've discovered recently to use as large a brush as I can comfortably color and image with because the larger brush you have, the less fussy your details will be. So you can do bigger, smoother strokes, that sort of thing. And I'm trying to manage my water here by wiping it off on a paper towel or getting clean water so that I can stay light in that light area. So if you think about it as you're picking up color, you're picking up some of that blue pencil is turning into paint on my brush. And if I go into the highlight right now to spread color, I'm going to be moving that color into the highlight, and then I'm going to lose my highlight. So if you want to maintain those highlights, make sure you manage that carefully so that you have less color on the tip of your brush when you get to your highlight areas. So I've always got my clean water and my dirty water next to me. I rinse first in the dirty water and then drop it in the clean water just so I have really good fresh water every time I'm putting the brush onto the paper and I'm not taking residual paint and reapplying it somewhere where I wasn't really expecting to do that. And you'll notice that I have two blues in here, these blue green colors, because when I do my water coloring with watercolor pencils, what I'm finding now is that if I put the range of colors down first and do that while I have the pencil work, I can take my time doing it. I can think through my shading and if I end up putting a layer on with my shading later, then it's possible to get blues into the color that's already there. Blooms are when you drop water in and it just starts to spooge and then you have it out of control and you're trying to get the blending down and it just gets all funky. So that's what I try to do now to manage that. So I've got three colors that I'm using for the bunny's fur, a yellowish color for the highlights, this more warmish brown and then I'll add some really dark shading as well. And when you're adding your water to something like this, you want to make sure that you keep your highlights. And like I said before, you want to keep that paint that the pencil turns into off of the tip of your brush. When you hit those highlights, well, you have to make sure that on something like this, if I want to maintain that yellowish color that I work from the yellow color down into the brown color, because otherwise I'm going to be pushing the brown color up into the yellow if I go the other direction. So there's different mediums where you would start from the dark to the light or the light to the dark. And this is one where it seems to work better if you go from the light and then push down into the dark because then you can control when you pull the dark into the light area, because you want to make sure when you touch that yellow that you're not picking up old color from the other foot that you just painted. So rinse your brush in between every time you start with a new section and a new highlight. So you can see there at the top of this foot is nice and yellow. And then I'm in control of how much of that darker brown that I can push up into there. But if I went the other direction, then I'd have to kind of re-rinse my brush or remember to rinse my brush before I hit the top of the foot. So now I'm going to do just a little bit of color in the ears and that sort of thing. Do a little finishing off work on the bunny here and just blend that out with some nice clean water. The pencils that I'm using by the way, I guess I should talk about that, these are the art grip pencils from Faber Castell and it's their craft line of pencils. I got these because I love their artist line, their Albert Durer line of pencils and I was curious to see what was up with these guys because they're less expensive and I thought well let's see if you can get the same kind of beautiful effects with these as you can from the fancy ones. And right here I wanted to mention I'm going in and adding lines to this and I'm adding lines that are kind of around the contour of his body but I'm not doing them straight lines and I also did it after it was all dry. You'll get a different effect sometimes if you try to draw on top of wet paint. But anyway the difference between these pencils and the others seems to be only that these come in less colors than the artist line as well as they are a thinner pencil which means they have less lead so they're less expensive. So that's a good thing right? You get the same kind of quality same light fastness but in a less expensive pencil. So I've got my stamp there just so I remember to save space for the sentiment that I'm going to have on the card and now I'm sketching in a tulip because I wanted just a single tulip next to him to add a little spring flavor to it and you could do this this tulip yourself on other cards and not even have to do bunny with it but it's cute hanging a little little tulip over the bunny's head and what I've done is taken an oval and I'm sandwiching it between two other squished ovals basically. I'm making mine uneven because with tulips they're never going to be perfectly symmetrical so Mother Nature doesn't do that why should we have to worry about it if you're trying to make them symmetrical it's just going to be more work for you to make sure even but when you're sketching with pencil with a watercolor pencil you can adjust things like if your your oval doesn't come out right just make a petal a little bit bigger and adjust that shape a little bit. When you're doing it with watercolor pencil you have the option to fix that. If you were trying to draw this with a plain old black pen or something and color it in it would be much more difficult to get it all even and get the petals looking the way you want. So here I'm also taking the green pencil to make some leaves sketch those in as well and I can sketch them in I can change my mind about how fat I want that leaf to be I can I can just all I have all kinds of freedom because I'm doing it in watercolor pencil. If you do other things like the paint alongs that I did recently here on YouTube where I gave you a sketch and you traced the sketch onto the paper and then painted it if you painted if you did the sketch in watercolor pencil first and it doesn't even matter what color as long as you do a really light sketch then that color will melt out into your painting. So if you're wondering why would I want watercolor pencils if I've already got watercolors sometimes you just need a few colors if you got yourself one of the little packs these art grip pencils come in packs of nine so if you got you know just the pack of neutrals or got a pack of blues or something depending on what kind of colors you normally would draw with then you can have just a couple in your stash so that when you're going to draw something like this even if you only drawing the outside edge and then you're going to fill it in with your regular watercolors you could at least have the option to start by drawing with a watercolor pencil instead of something else. So I'm painting water into all the greens to soften all those out I'm going to jump into the petals on the leaf on the the flower and what I want is for each one of those petals to have those little striations I was looking at some two lips online as I was trying to decide what kind of coloring I wanted to do on it and I had I saw something had just pink that melted down into white at the bottom so I wanted that that kind of linear look so I'm using my water as I'm pulling the paint down from the top as I'm pulling that pencil down trying to melt some of the pencil line away I went a little too far I had too much down there so I took a dry brush which I rinsed my brush really clearly in clear water and then wiped it off so it was good and dry and it kind of sucked up some of that color and moisture that I had painted in the area that I didn't want to so I had a little softer transition from the top the petal down to the bottom of the petal now I'm just going to continue going around all of the rest of them and adjusting as needed so that I get the right shape for my my little two look petals and then get that bottom line in there and as I was looking at this I was thinking you know it's not really looking like it fits with the bunny it it just didn't have what I thought in my head what I figured this was going to work so as I'm doing this I'm thinking well how can I adjust this and wait a minute a line would look great because this would match the width of my little bunny so I'm using a sharpie pen it's always good to have a couple different pen widths in your stash so if you're using a really thin stamp you can make that line match if it looks like they belong together but since I already did the watercoloring all I have to do is go around the outside edges and it's much easier to do than it would be if you were trying to draw it first in pen and then try to color right up to that edge with the watercolor pencil I was able to let the flower develop and adjust the petals if I needed adjust the leaves if I needed and only add in my my black line afterward which gave me a lot of freedom to be able to fiddle around with my petals before kind of having to commit to that with a black line and now I'm going to add some shading because I decided I really would like to both change the color a little bit on these leaves because they were very olivey and I wanted something a little more intense so I'm going with more of a blue-green color in here adding shading around just a couple of spots not really worried too much about where the light source is I'm just trying to get some different colors in there so I have multi tones to my tulip and this is one of those places where I'll need to manage the amount of water that I'm putting down because I don't want greens going out into that olivey green as I add water for the more tealish blueish green color just painting through each one of those full details add a little bit to the other leaf to make all of that match together nicely and this is again you know drawing a tulip like this is another reason why you would want pencils in your stash and especially this detail here so I'm going over with another layer of pink so that I can have a little little darker tips and reiterate those striations if I were trying for this level of detail with just the watercolor and not with the watercolor pencil it'd be a lot harder to get this kind of fine detail I'd be using a super tiny brush and trying to do it with successive glazes of watercolor to get those kind of details so sometimes a watercolor pencil will just be a little bit quicker for you to get some details now here's the interactive part this is an action wobble and it's meant to go under this entire oval so it's hole behind shakes but I wanted just the little tail to shake so since I couldn't trim down the the action wobble too small I wanted to make the tail a little bigger and since it's kind of a sketchy looking tail anyway I'm just going to extend it out and make it a little bit bigger than it than it is here in the stamp because normally you would color the outside of that blue like this fabric would be on his pants so it's hole behind shakes and so what I'm doing here is make a couple little lines with that sharpie and I'll add a little bit of shading the brown colors that are going to match the brown in my bunny and I'll add some really darks here as well at the very very bottom and watercolor that out with my brush and then all I have to do is fussy cut out that little tail and now I'm also fussy cutting out the edges of the action wobble I have to leave enough so I have some of that sticky back paper that will fit on here so I kind of kept measuring and chopping off little chunks so that I could put it on an action wobble it's a two-sided sticky thing and it has a little spring so his little tail wobbles so I hope this was a fun video for you guys that you learned something about watercolor pencils as well as drawing tulips and this little funny butt just makes me smile and I hope it does for you as well so I've got a couple other videos to share with you if you have not seen these yet it's a couple other different types of watercolor pencils on the left are some primas and the two on the right are ink pens and those have a little different properties than regular watercolor pencils you may be interested in that ink tents and these favorite castells that I use today are kind of the two that I find I like the best and all the products are linked in the description down below and on my blog of course so I will see you guys later have a fabulous day don't forget to hit that like button we'll see you later bye