 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnog, and I'm going to give you a tip to make any card 25% cuter than it might have been otherwise. Because we have some things that we do as crafters, as artists, that we kind of need to unlearn because we think the center of the page is the most important place. Well, I'm going to use this stamp set and another one from Colorado Craft Company to prove to you that the center is not where it's at. Because if you stamp an image, so it's partially off the page, it gives the viewer a little more engagement in their imagination when they look at it. They're wondering where are these characters coming from? Have they just walked on stage? Is there something else going on off to the right that I can't see? There's just a mystery to it that you don't get if you just stamp this thing in the center of the card. This one also has adult bunny and two little bunnies, one on either hand of the adult, and this allows you to just use part of the image without having to mask anything off from the other side, so you could choose to do that. Or you could even just have the adult bunny with the little bunny masked off entirely and just have part of the image coming in from the outside. I'm coloring this using some Tombow markers, these are water-based markers. You can do the same kind of thing with any brand. I've colored directly onto the watercolor paper here and I'm using rough, so it's giving me a lot of texture, a lot of really nice edges for the watercolor, and where I'm trying to blend it into a really light color, I'm just using a lot more water in those areas. And then I can do the same thing with the little baby bunny and adding water to the gray marker that I've already colored onto the paper. If you have markers that don't do this really well or they end up getting kind of stuck, you could always scribble some marker onto a piece of plastic, a CD case, a craft mat, that kind of thing, and pick it up and paint with it as you would with any other kind of watercolor. And then I'll just add a little tiny bit of grass at the bottom, just something to ground them and create a feeling of a scene without painting an entire scene. And this ends up being a clean and simple card. It takes hardly any time to do. It's really simple to do and you end up with a card that has a little more cuteness than if these were just plopped in the center of the card. So this other stamp set has these kitties on it and I thought the kitties would be cute to use with the bear. And I've stamped them all at the bottom. The bear, I just hung his little feet off the bottom. The kitties, I had to do one little post-it note worth of masking on either side of the kitty so that I could create one kitty at an angle and then the other one is lower and in between the first kitty and the bear. Very simple masking to do. But it collects all the images coming in off the bottom of the card and the bear looking up draws the attention upward to that little bug. But there's plenty of white space. You could certainly add a scene behind it and you would still get some of the mystery that you're getting as far as what's going on on the ground. Where would a bear and two cats be in the same scene? That kind of thing. But it still has that little bit of mystery and anchors the image down at the bottom. Imagine if you had them in the center of the card. You would not have that beautiful, clean and simple white space all around it. And I've talked about it a number of times in some design tutorials that I've done. When you work with the thirds of the card, the thirds of the layout, put things in the bottom third, the right third, the left third, dividing your whole surface into like a nine block and then choosing one of the outside ones rather than the center one to put your focal point. And these little images are great for that because they're down at the bottom. They're sticking off the bottom. The kitty has all kinds of scenery around it in the stamp that I didn't want to clutter up the card with. I wanted it to be really simple. And here I could use just the kitties without having to worry about drawing in feet or anything, trying to do crazy masking. It was just a little bit on the left and right to make it just the cat itself. And then when it comes to the coloring of each of these images, you can get really complex. You can get really simple with it. It doesn't really matter at all. It's even more fun sometimes if you have really beautiful complex coloring in the image and then leave all that white space. And it draws such attention to the coloring that you've done in that little section that it just adds a cuteness factor. I just I can't tell you how much it means to have something off center like this rather than plopped dead in the middle of the card, which is a lot of what I see. It's a very natural place to put things. We are built in our brains, in our modern world to try to be symmetrical, make everything even and measure from left to right so we get directly in the center, et cetera. That's not what's going to work artistically. Here it left me room for the sentiment off to one side of the flower, drawing attention to the flower with that color and the bear looking up at it. I mean, there's just a lot of things to be said for a card like that. This one is also from the little pond set that the kiddies came from has this little duck laying on his back chilling out, which is what I would love to be doing right now laying in some sunshine. And I'm going to paint this one with straight up watercolors and adding some orangey color, some Aussie red gold to my new Gamboge. And then I'm going to mix a little bit more of the the red with it. This is a cool red, a quinacridone rose to put in there so that I end up with a little bit darker orange for the feet and then use some nickel azo for the beak. And then a bunch of sap green for the leaves and things that he's laying on top of and then creating a really simple background underneath. But again, this one peaks off the left side. It's not plopped right in the center. And I don't have to make a whole scene out of it. I can make just a little vignette here at the bottom by putting a little bit of light color down here and then using a lot of water to soften it out. It has the nice sentiment drawing attention right there, a little pop of that orange for the bug. And I've got a clean and simple card that has a really interesting focus. And it's just going to be a lot cuter than if that duck were right in the center of the card. So whatever medium you color with, you can do this with colored pencils with whatever. Consider doing some cards where whatever the main image is is only partially on the page and see what that does for you. Maybe even stamp one in the middle and then one off center and see if you can visually sense the difference. All right, that is it for me today. I hope that was helpful information. I will talk to you again very soon because, you know, I'll be back with another video in just a couple of days. Take care. Thanks for subscribing and for hitting the like button. I'll talk to you later.