 Well, hey there, it's Sandy and today I'm going to make a water-colored Kwanzaa card. You could do this for other seasons as well, other different kinds of scenes in it, but I'm going to use the Hot Mess Lady along with the Love and Light sentiment set that has other than Christmas types of holidays. I don't celebrate those, but it doesn't mean you don't, and it doesn't mean you don't have friends who you could send one to who do celebrate it, and I'm going to give away this card, so stay tuned to the end to hear about how I'm going to do that. And let's get started. So I'm setting it up in my mini-misty, you could also do this in a regular misty. With my stamp at the angle, I want her to be peeking in from the doorway and kind of looking outside to check the snow, she's going to be holding the coffee mug, so I stamped the mug first since it's going to be out in front and used a little bit of eclipse tape to make that mask, and I'm trying to figure out what is the right placement. She has her hand against her head, and I need to make sure I block that hand off. I want to not stamp that hand, because we're going to imagine her hand is actually holding the mug, and she does not have three hands, so you have to be careful of that one. And what I'm doing is checking and double checking and double double checking the placement for my sticky notes. And if I put a row of sticky notes down here, I can see that I happen to have it so that it's exactly at three and a half inches on mine. And depending on your placement, your number will be different, so don't think you have to do the three and a half inches necessarily. So I'm going to double check again after I've got my sticky notes in place, because nothing like getting to the finished end and finding out you totally screwed something up by not checking. So double check that the hand was not going to stamp, and then inked it up with VersaFine Onyx Black ink, because I'm going to watercolor it. I'm doing this on Arches Cold Press Paper. And you can see I've got this nice line now that's masked off that she will not be stamped in that area. And then I drew a line with a pencil, I drew it a little bit further over from where the stamped lines end. I can always finish those lines off, but I want to leave myself room for the hand and for the siding that's going to be on the house. I'll show you how I make the siding. You could make a straight wall and save yourself a lot of effort, but this is overachiever me doing this. The slats in the siding, when they're all in one place, they're going to be the same distance from each other. And I picked half an inch, you could make them any size you want. And then I'm making a little angle for each one, so they look like they're kind of coming out from the building, you know how slats are out a little bit further. And then they attach at the place that's closer to the building and then they hang out. So this little zigzag gives it that sort of a look. And then I'm pretending I have a vanishing point in the distance. And a vanishing point is where things in perspective line up with. So if that vanishing point is out here, if I put my little pencil marking, then each one of these lines will point to the vanishing point. That's how this particular side of the building looks like you're getting a view like your head is right alongside it, you're standing at the side of the house. And it's just going to keep going on all of the slats. And it's going to mostly keep them even, they're going to be roughly even with each other if it's done this way because I measured out those first ones along the edge and then added these long vertical lines. They're vertical now, they'll be horizontal when I turn the guard sideways. And I'm using a fountain pen, you could also use a Sharpie to do any drawing that you want to do, or you could not even do the lines at all, you could just leave it in pencil and start doing your painting. The slats that are on the top, if your view is from the center, you're going to see the underside of them a little bit. So I'm drawing an underside of each one of the pieces of siding. And I did get a little bit off kilter up there, but you know, it's a card, no one's going to care. I'm also not worrying about making this with a ruler because it's a card. So remember that when you try to do things like this. The ones on the bottom half, if you're looking at it and then you're looking down at the siding, you're not going to see the bottom edge. So I'm only putting the bottom edge on the top half of the siding and not on the bottom. And that may be confusing, but there you go. It's what perspective does. It's one of the reasons why I have drawing classes that talk about perspective. Because even if you want to do something like this and we're doing it kind of loose, it's helpful to have some idea what one point perspective is or two point perspective. And it's just really going to help you in creating stuff like this. So finished off her lines, and then I am going to start my painting. And one of the things too I didn't mention the ink that I'm using for my fountain pen on this one is a waterproof ink. It's by a company called Platinum. It's called Carbon Ink, and you can do watercolor with it. So that's one of the reasons that I keep it in my pens, because then I always have the option to do watercolor if I want to. And if whatever pen you use in something like this, you want to make sure it's waterproof. So you could use a micron or a Sharpie, that kind of thing. And I'm going to paint her with the highlights coming from inside the house. So she's peeking out from inside the house, and the light is hitting her cheek. And since this is Kwanzaa, I thought I'd give her some darker skin, so I'm adding a second layer after the first layer is dry. And putting the color in, rinsing the brush, and then just feathering out that edge and pushing the heavier color toward the right hand side a little bit, just lifting up on the lighter side and pushing that color. You could, of course, adapt this if you want to put different hair on her. You could mask out the hair, and then paint your own hair in, or draw it in with a pen, and then paint that, whatever you would like to do. But she's going to just have the hair that she was given in the stamp set. And I'm using a number eight silver black velvet brush. I kind of giggle because I get asked what brush I'm using all the time, and I try for the most part. I don't do it in this video entirely, but I try for the most part to use my silver black velvet brushes because for crafters, they're a decent synthetic brush and they're good enough for cards because you're not painting giant things for the most part. You're painting small things, so you don't need huge, big, sable brushes, which is what I love to paint with. That's my favorite thing to paint with. But with cards, I am working on learning how to color scenes with watercolor more because I want to do that. It's a challenge to me to be able to make a scene that's really small. I typically paint large. I paint on a 11 by 15, you know, big painting with, you know, big trees and big buildings and big flowers and big whatever I'm painting. And then when I go back to painting a card, I feel like I'm doing this like little tiny miniature thing. And I like big brushes where I'm holding my hand far back on the far end. And this just doesn't doesn't really do the same thing for me. Just painting little tiny, tiny, tiny, stampy things. But I'm trying and I am working on coming up with a class painting some watercolor backgrounds for stamps. So stay tuned for that. It'll be coming hopefully in the next month or two. Now for the building, I decided to make a red building with red siding. And I mixed up a secondary red and added a little bit of black to it. The first red was actually a mixture of a couple different reds that I have in my palette. You can decide whatever whatever kind of hues you want on the building. But if it's nighttime, make sure you make it nice and dark because what's going to make it look like the lighting's coming from inside the house is the darkness of everything else except that highlight along her cheek and along that coffee cup. So I'm going to kind of blend out the colors a little bit. I've added some shadows underneath each one of the slats. So they look a little bit dimensional and then taking my brush and painting some of the the regular red in between. Now I did use a different brush for part of this. I'm going to use it again in a few minutes. And it's one of my sable brushes, one of my nice ones. And then I switched back to my silver brush because I'm trying to get in some of these little areas like the little edges where the siding ends. And that big brush is a little challenging to get into these tiny areas. Again, it's hard to do with watercolor. So if you struggle in trying to paint watercolor cards, that would be why it's not an easy thing to do. All right, so now I'm going to paint the scene in the background. And you can paint whatever scene you want back there. If you want it to be just a blue sky and that's it, you could just do a blue sky and you could do a night sky. You could use like brush out powders or any kind of, you know, watercolor powders and make a fancy sky with all different kinds of hues in it and whatever you want. You could do it go crazy with it. In any way you want, I'm going to do a really simple indication of a forest. So I'm putting the snow at the bottom, just a little kind of curvy line. And again, I'm using my big sable brush. You can see how much ground I can cover with a big brush. It's one of the reasons why I like to paint big. And when I have a big area on a card, I'm like, you know, I finally get to use a big brush. And then I'm going to try to paint around the stamp. Not real easy with a big brush. And this is not actually, it looks like a big brush, but it's not actually a big, big brush. It's a size 10 and it's like any other item that you want to buy. Every company sizes things differently. And this 10 is much bigger than a 10 in the silver brush brand. So there you go. This is a size eight and it doesn't look like it's just one step down from that 10 or two steps down. But it gives me a little more control in painting right around the stamp itself. And getting color into all the little crevasses, which you want to do while it's still wet. You want this whole area to stay wet while you're working on it. And I'm very aware of exactly how wet my paper is as I'm working. I'm trying to work quickly enough that I can go in and put a second coat of the blue paint in there. This is indian thrown blue. I can put a second coat in and have it all blend because the paper is still wet. If it starts to dry, you'll get hard edges. And one of the things that's going to happen here and it happens whenever you're using stamps, it's one of the reasons that I don't always use stamps and watercolor all that much together, especially when you're using dark colors like this, is that it collects around the edges. You know, watercolor just kind of tends to pool around the outside edges, but it also pulls around the stamp itself. Do you see the the blue that's collected around her arm? That's because that's what watercolor does. And I'm like working on trying to figure out how to develop techniques that avoid that. The technique I'm using here is to hide it a little bit. I'm adding more trees in the background so that it's not as obvious that I have this what feels to me like a big blue outline around her hand because that's where the paint collected. I was successful when I tipped the paper in keeping it from pooling along the snow line, but it just collects along that stamp line. And there's not a whole lot you can do about it as far as I know. If anybody's got any great videos you've seen on the topic, please leave me a link. I would love to know how to do that. But in the meantime, I keep trying. So while all this was wet, I used some very watered down paint and my number eight brush to create some branches. And I'm just doing light indications. I'm not trying to make anyone a deliberate tree branch here because that's just not going to look realistic. But I'm going to be putting snow over it. I just want it to feel more like trees. And that's what putting some branches in is going to do. So I peeled off my tape and it's all good and dry so I can add snow using my white uniball Signo Pen. And you can put it over any of the places where you ended up with weird areas collecting paint. You know, if you have some spots that didn't quite work out right, didn't quite blend right, put some snow over it. It's one of my favorite things about winter Christmas. And now Kwanzaa cards for anything in the winter season. You can just add snow and it'll be just fine. Now, I told you I was going to give away this card at the end of the video. So let's do that. I would love for any of you who celebrate Kwanzaa to leave a comment in the doobly-doo and let me know how your family celebrates the holiday because I don't know anything about Kwanzaa. And I would like to learn. So I would love to hear your family traditions around that holiday. And then when I send out my cards, I might send it to you. So there you go. I also want to remind you that we are less than two weeks away from Election Day. And I have taken political advertising off this channel. I just wanted to remind you to get your butt out there and vote because we need you. We need to hear from everybody. So please do make your voice heard. And I'll see you guys again very soon. Take care. Bye. Bye.