 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to paint some very loose Holly I'm gonna make this a super quick video because we are all busy with the holidays coming But I wanted to make a little quick video. We're celebrating one more time this week Ellen Hudson's anniversary and Thought I would share a little bit of painting this Holly stamp I really love this all of her mondo flowers of all sorts But this Holly one is particularly gorgeous It's me using some Distress Oxides on watercolor paper And I loosely put the green on and now I'm kind of loosely tapping in the red even putting some red on the edges of a few of the Branches and one of the cool things about red and green is that they are complementary colors So they're gonna go well together in terms of one dulling the other out so that you're if you're familiar with my Theories my color theory stuff that I teach in Copic markers and colored pencil a lot of times You can use red to shade green and green to shade red And I thought let's play around with this and do something really loose and see what the two of them do together So you can see I've got just loose spots of both colors all over the entire stamp not super even So some of them just have a tip of red some of them have a little bit more red in them Others are all green and the the mix between all of it is really nice I'm just painting them with water just plain water rinse the brush if my if I start spreading around too much color and now with clean water I'm painting outside of the stamp to do the background and I'm trying to get it good and puddley so that it moves really nicely And I don't end up with weird edges and I want to get most of the paper pretty wet You could spray it but then again you could break down all that distress oxide ink and it could just totally disappear and go to mush So I find it's a little easier control it with a brush I am using a number 8 size brush You could do this with probably easier with a number 12 but I decided I was going to try to stick with one brush and not switch out in between and I'm adding in a little bit of sap green From my Daniel Smith watercolor palette as well because I wanted to kind of do some more splashy things get some more color on here And I didn't really want to get out more of the distress oxide ink You could do it as well with with that if you wanted to but I just wanted to add some more color to the background and Keep those edges moving and nice and wet While I'm here and painting away I thought I'd say one more congratulations to Ellen Hudson on her anniversary This week we've been celebrating all over social media and everything and I am so proud to be Associated with a company like Ellen's She runs it with such integrity. Her whole team does they're super people I love their customer service and how well they take care of people and they're all about education Which if you know me, you know, I'm all about teaching and that's really important to me Not to just have good products in your hands, but to have a partner in doing that They make sure they get good quality stuff that I can point you to that. I know I can trust the products I can trust that they're going to arrive at your house in an appropriate fashion And you're going to be taken care of and we're all going to be able to learn together What I'm doing here is painting with water first and then dropping in some purel scarlet because the color from the distress Ink was just softer than I wanted I let it dry and Then I'm going to go back in and add some lost and found edges by that I mean some edges are going to be really hard and some are going to soften and kind of melt into each other if You just do what I what I just did here I'm going to have to fuss with that a little bit in order to make it look a little better If you just go around the outside edges of every single leaf Then it's going to look like it's pasted on you're going to be adding shadow But look how much nicer that one looks then the one that I did a minute ago Where I have that that hard edge around it you just want to pick a few Areas where you want to put that that harder edge that darker shadow And it's going to let parts of it look like it's melting into the paper and parts of it Look like it's lifting up and that's what's going to give this the feel of that loose watercolor and and just make it super spectacular So that's that's my advice to you when you try to to fake these things There are people who can paint like this just right off the bat without having to do any of this fussy Edge creation that I end up having to do Because I'm not that good at it yet and figure out how to do that in one fell swoop But I am getting better at the fixes So I'm able to go back in on something like this and just add some dark areas Choose a few spots where there's dark shadows in between some leaves, but not letting it take over entirely I don't want this to look like it's glued on and Have a solid outline around anything just kind of take my brush with a little little damp water on it and Move some of that color around until it softens and looks like it's kind of melting in and just leave a few spots a very dark color Because that's going to draw more attention contrast as we've talked about many times here on my YouTube channel contrast is what draws our attention and Makes us stop and look at something So adding a little more of the sap green onto some of the leaves because I wanted a time where that background color into the Leaf itself and just kind of going back and forth between adding some of the Daniel Smith watercolor to what was already there From the distress oxide ink that I had stamped in the first place Now if you do something like this and you're like, oh man My whole leaf just completely washed away if you have it in your misty and you can reink it Just stamp a portion of it right over top But I didn't feel like that was necessary here because I was kind of getting that loose look that I wanted For the berries I mixed up a little bit of purple Into the pierce scarlet and now I'm just going to drop some of it on a few places In between some of the berries so I can create some of those really deeper shadows those darker edges To make them look a little bit more dimensional And to finish off my card I just added some layers of cardstock and a stamp sentiment and Called it done very loosely painted holly Just to give you a heads up in the month of December. I'm going to cut back a little bit on the video making I'll do one card video a week and then I might do some fine art videos here and there without voiceovers, but I'll be back in January a hundred percent with Monday Wednesday Friday videos So have no fear things will restore to normal, but I needed a little rest break So I thought December would be a good time since you're busy, and I'm busy. I'll just take it easy I'll see you soon. Bye. Bye