 Well, hello there, it's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to be showing you some creative ideas for using your tiniest stamps. Before we get started, I wanted to make sure that you heard last week about my peace, love, and art challenge that I am hosting. I am super excited about it for the next couple months. Stampers, fine artists, doodlers, journalists, everybody is invited for new classes, for prizes, for art challenges. All kinds of fun. There's going to be free downloadables like this one that you can color up yourself. Click on the link in the doobly-doo. Pause this video right now to go do that so you don't forget. And then come back and we'll get busy stamping. It is always a good idea to find new ways to use supplies we already have. And today I'm going to show you three different ideas for using itty-bitty stamps. Does not matter what kind of stamps or what brand of stamps or what medium you stamp them with. I'm just going to show you a couple of ideas that might inspire something for you. I have drawn a whale outline on a piece of drawing paper and you can use any kind of paper depending on what kind of ink you're going to stamp in etc. Make the drawing whatever size you want. You could trace something off the internet or if you have a stamp you want to use a large stamp like a whale like this and fill it in stamp it in a really light color so the outlines don't show. And I am using on top of it some masking film. I used this recently and had a few of you ask if this is appropriate for stampers as well for crafting projects or is it just for fine artists. It's a little more expensive but it works so well that I could definitely recommend it. What I have done here is put the masking film down and cut around the shape that I want to stamp into first and I'm just going to do part of it and then I'll open up the other parts later and I got out my collection of art impressions stamps and they are usually used for watercolor. You could watercolor the stamps after stamping them in here if you want. I'm not going to in this particular case but I'm applying color with markers. These are water based markers. This won't work with your alcohol markers but for water based markers just scribble onto the surface of the stamp and press it down. And again you can use any brand of stamps that you want for this. You can use any colors that you like. Obviously I have a rather large collection. I keep them in these DVD cases and I will put a link in the doobly-doo if you are a collector of itty-bitty stamps like I am and want them all in a section. I organize them by the way by the size of the flowers that are in them because art impressions puts out all different sizes so the bigger they are they go in a different case the teeny tiny ones go in a smaller case etc. But to make a pattern like this pick whichever one you want to be the focal one I would do that first and this one I kind of goofed on making one of the flower stamps so I had to go back in with the marker to repair that but then you want to use your biggest stamps early in the process and as you get further on you can start filling in with smaller stamps in between that's how you can build this without doing too much over stamping you know one image on top of the other and instead just fill the whole thing. You could do the same kind of an idea instead of using an animal like I'm doing here you could maybe trace a letter print out a really big letter from your computer trace the shape of it and put flowers in it and then give that as a gift to someone do their initials or you could do this as a wedding gift as a baby room gift in some sort of theme whatever the theme is for the child's room lots of different ways you can create a project like this that might be a little larger than some of the craft projects you use that you normally would think of small stamps as being appropriate for because this can be this can work well for a larger piece I've opened up the other tail section of this because I wanted to put some darker color right where the two sections of tail meet because I wanted just one of them to be a little bit darker than I wanted the second fin the one in the background to be a little lighter so I stamped it separately and then I opened up the rest of the areas this whale has a lighter belly underneath of it so I'm going to trim around the bottom section and peel that masking off and then I can use lighter inks and less of the stamps just a few of them to fill it in you want to fill in around the outside edges of the image so you get a nice crisp outline when you're all finished and then you get to start the magic of peeling off all of the masking that is the best part of doing any masking is seeing the magical reveal when you're all finished now I had masked out the eyeball and you could of course draw the eyeball over top of it if you want as well but I masked it out so I'd have a nice space to put the eye in with the pen and then just peel everything off and it comes out to be a beautiful floral whale isn't that cool I'm sure you're thinking of lots of ideas you could use this for so I hope you'll go try this one the second idea that I have for you is basically the opposite of what I just showed you instead of filling the main image you can fill the background with the small stamps and what I've done is taken a small accordion sketchbook which was made for me by someone and I wish I had written on a sticky note and put it inside the notebook who made it and sent it to me thank you for doing that it's been sitting around here literally for a couple years and I kept telling myself I'll get to it I'll use it eventually and it wasn't until now when I'm giving myself more space to do things other than just greeting cards all the time now I had a chance to actually use that sketchbook so I appreciate whoever it was that sent it to me thank you thank you so I have drawn animals in here and I'm using the masking film which I'm cutting around right now to mask out the animal itself I'll peel off the outside instead of the inside like I said the opposite of the previous project and then put some masking tape around the outside edges I like this artist tape this is white tape comes in different widths but I like it for two reasons one is that when you have a white tape it doesn't affect your view of the color of whatever it is that you're you're painting or drawing and it also doesn't tear paper nearly as easily as some of the masking tapes do even the ones that are supposed to be light touch but this is good heavy tape and allows you to be able to peel it back up easily so I am stamping in versifying onyx black ink and I'm doing so because I'm going to use a water-based marker to color the backgrounds with peel off the masking tape as well as the frisket film and both of these you want to peel low and slow to make sure that you don't tear anything unnecessarily if you pull straight upward you're more likely to destroy things and then color in the backgrounds each one of the backgrounds in this is stamped with different stamps I just thought it would be fun to do all the pages with different animals and different stamps giving them a little different feel for maybe the habitat that they live in etc each one of them being endangered species and you could choose if you want to download this to color in just the animals or you can stamp your own backgrounds because the backgrounds are not included in the pdf that you can download from my website if you want to do endangered species art and each one of these was really fun I did a bunch of kind of generalized research on the web looking for animals that are currently endangered as opposed to like if you look at something from 10 years ago it'll be a different list of animals because animals do come and go from the list and this one is a dodo bird now there are some websites that say there is a little dodo it's a relative of the dodo bird that they found is still out there and there are videos that purport to say that yes this bird does exist I included it because it was way too fun to draw to leave him out because it was just so funny I just can't tell you if he's still extinct because they went extinct like 300 years ago so it's probably not likely that this person who said they found one actually found a little dodo bird but who knows got turtles we've got bears this bear I used a Lawn Fawn stamp in the background that had sky and stars so you can use any different kind of brand that you've got of stamps and create whatever kinds of things you want lots of these though are art impressions because they have lots of stamps that are nature oriented lots of trees lots of leaves underbrush that sort of thing which works well for animals and this sketchbook of course has two sides to it so this is the backside and every accordion sketchbook has fewer pages on one side than it does on the other if it has a cover glued to the front of it so that is why there will be more on one side than there are on the other but each one of these was a lot of fun to draw and to simplify so that I'd have these nice black and white kinds of drawings that you can download in color for yourself nice and simple ones your kids could even do that might be a good thing to get the kids to do some research on endangered species and teach them about how to save animals next up I'm going to actually draw with the stamps themselves it's a little different project than the others I decided to do the panda and I'm going to use inks this time to do the stamping and I used a stamp set from Ellen Hudson because it has several hearts in it in different sizes and I knew I was going to need different sizes for this so I got basically a rainbow ish of colors from Catherine pooler inks to stamp into the ears and the eyes and the nose I'm overlaying them over top of each other so that I get some color mixing where they meet with each other be careful not to put too many colors over each other because when you mix something like a green with an orange you can end up with brown eventually because green has blue and yellow in it orange has red and yellow in it and whenever you get yellow red and blue in the same spot you can end up with a pretty neutral mix out of the three of them so being conscious of what they look like when they stamp over top of each other is helpful but after I got through the cycle of colors once I filled in the rest so that I could develop the rest of those ears the eyes by the way are masked with scraps from my frisket film so that the eyes would remain white while I'm stamping the patches around the eyes and stamping the hearts in different directions this time just to give it a little different flavor and I made sure I got it really filled in so I have a nice crisp outline around the eyes themselves because I wanted to leave a white space and then draw the eye in with a pen and I don't have the sketch for this on the website but you could easily just look up a panda and try to download a picture just trace the ears and the eye patches and the nose and you can create this picture for yourself as well mine is a little tilted off to one side I was debating doing something different with it so mine is a little bit kiddy wampus you might want a straighter view and I've got another scrap of the frisket film you could of course for this masking you could use a sticky note to create that and then I've carved off first the bottom part so I can get the smile in there and around the outside edges I'm going to use just the tips of the hearts a little bit of yellow around the outside orange in the middle and then red at the bottom and you'll see how that turns out when I'm all finished now I'm going to open up the area for the nose itself on this one I want a crisp edge on the others I didn't mask anything out because I don't need a crisp edge I'm fine with just floating hearts and seeing the edges of them but to fill this in I'm layering in the aqua teeny and the blue I don't remember which blue was that I used I'll put that on the blog if you're looking for what the colors are and layered some pink over it so it would turn a little purplish a little darker and then when I peel that off I've got the mouth showing as well as the hard outline around the nose so you can adjust as needed with whatever picture you've got but I'm looking forward to a week full of endangered species art over on my social media hope you'll join me there and on Friday I'll be back with stamping on this giant piece of paper yes tiny stamps on giant paper you won't want to miss it make sure you're subscribed hit the like button if you haven't yet already I'll see you Friday as well as over on social bye bye