 Hi there. I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to work on a Hobbit neighborhood card using Art Impressions watercolor. The Art Impressions watercolor stamp sets come in little groupings. This one has two Hobbit houses in it and it gives you an example on the cover sheet how to stamp some of those things and then I'm gonna use a selection of a bunch of the different flowers that I have. The way that I store the stamps that I've purchased over the years, because I have a lot of them, I'm kind of an addict. I put things like houses and bird houses and things in one and I have like 12 of these different ones broken into categories. I have all my little flowers from a lot of the little different stamp sets. So I've broken them all up. I know that makes some people apoplectic but there you go. I also use these little Art Impressions acrylic blocks a lot so if you're looking for where to get tiny ones like that they used to come with all those dollar stamps. I don't even know if they make those dollar stamps anymore but I had a bunch of those left over from years ago as well and they work great. So I'm gonna stamp both of the houses and I'm using my Tombow markers to just scribble a couple of colors onto the stamp itself. If it waits too long and it kind of dries out then you can huff on it meaning just go with your breath and let some of that hot breath kind of rewet the ink a little bit. It doesn't matter if it dries on the paper because you'll see how this is gonna work after I get some of the stamping done. The reason that I do the houses first even though the greenery that I'm stamping right now is gonna be in the background is because I want to be sure that I reserve the right places for the main image. So if you're gonna do a light house or if you're gonna do a bird house or something then stamp that first then do your background layers. So I'm starting by just doing some very light background layers of a few greeneries and this whole thing is gonna be covered eventually so this is just kind of getting a start at it and figuring out where all these clumps of bushes are gonna be because I picture these little houses being like in the movie and the little hobbits in the shire that they have their little houses built into the hillsides next to each other. So these two are gonna be two little neighbor houses on the same particular piece of paper and with these stamps once you have the ink down and a lot of different markers will work once you have the ink down you take your wet brush and you just go over top of the ink and you can use a lot of water and really wash out that line a lot you can use a little water and leave the line more intact. I tend to leave some of them intact and get real washy with others because I really love with watercolor that lost and found kind of a look and letting some be really soft some be a little bit harder edged and now I switch to a different green and I'm just gonna add more of these greens on top the ones that are already there I have some damp paper underneath and you may have noticed that some of those when I stamped them splooched out a little bit right when I stamped them that's gonna give me more ink moving around the page. I shouldn't say ink I'm not sure what's in these markers in any of the watercolor markers it's not actually watercolor but we call them watercolor because it moves with water so then I'm gonna kind of move the move the water around the whole thing and then add more greenery this was a green I didn't like a whole lot but since I had started I didn't want to have only one splooge of it so I did a couple of them here and there switch to another one and you can see it doesn't matter a whole lot which one of the greens you use as long as it's some sort of a branch if you use the grasses that won't work quite as well for this kind of a hillside full of ivy and just a tangled thick brush that there that is on the whole full hillside but any of those others will work so if you have any the other stamp sets because some of them come with you know say a bird and a bunch of flowers or a bench and a bunch of flowers you can use any of those kind of flowers for this and now I want to start building in some richness of color because you can just stamp all over it make an all over pattern but I want to make it look like it's actually these these doors are carved into a hillside which means I need some darker color so I'm gonna put I put some color on a block itself I just scribbled with a marker and then I'm picking that color up with my brush and adding some of it in there my darkest colors gonna be right around the doors because if you picture all of those greens they're gonna be hanging out in front of the door so we need to create some space behind them and underneath each one of those branches and some depth right around the doors themselves so that they kind of sink in and then the door itself kind of pops so as I add layers of this and I'll keep adding more and more you'll see how this develops I love how it develops when you're doing speed coloring because you almost get the idea faster otherwise you kinda lose track on when that transformation started to happen so on a card like this you can certainly allow just this swash of color and then start working on the houses because I'm gonna start working on them a little bit more and put more into the doors but I decided I wanted to do the whole thing because I had somebody recently asked me how you do like a whole hillside whole mountainside full of trees if you're water coloring they weren't asking specifically about art impressions watercolor but hopefully she'll see this video I know that this is the same kind of an idea you would take all kinds of greens and just keep layering them like this and make little clumps of things so as I'm adding my darks I wanna add a few areas that define some of the places where those greens cascade into shadow and then let some of the rest of it stay in the bright front the light so they're gonna be lighter colors but I'm mushing all of it I'm just gonna soften all of it and as I put layers on top of each other the ones that are on top may get a little less water which means there's gonna be more detail on them and it's gonna give it that more lacy look I'm gonna add a darker color now and the color that I'd already painted right around those doors is dry and when I'm painting on top of dry I'm gonna have a little better success with getting a richer color so look how much those doors just kind of got carved into the wall behind them into that dirt wall by just adding that rich color right around part of it and I'm not adding it evenly notice there's different shapes so it's not an outline around it it's you know there's one part that is more like a triangle one that's more like a rectangle and then it stops it breaks up into a light area and then goes back into a dark that's gonna make it look much more natural like it's it's going in and out and there's some branches that are sticking out in front of the door and some that are receding behind so now I'm gonna take a break on the greenery and go to the doors and I've taken a couple of the browns and scribbled a little bit of them on the surface so I can have two different brown doors one is gonna be a solid brown door that I'll add detail on to later and the other I'm just gonna add the wood panels on the front of the door right now you can do those in any kind of order play around with them have lots of fun you can make them bright colors if you want if your hobbits are bright colored little hobbits but I'm kinda thinking these guys are gonna be trying to hide in the hillside having the little houses built in each one of these comes with these little rock stair things that come out from the front and I'm gonna add a few more of them just by adding shapes because I want them to kind of travel out to the same space and then I'm gonna add grasses all along the front as well and a lot of that is wet so I'm kind of having some struggles here with trying to get them to be on there and stay grass looking and you can see where some of them when they touch the water they end up just looking a little bit blurry and then the sharper edges are the ones that are stamped on the dryer paper all of this by the way is on Arches rough which for some people drives them bonkers in trying to create something like this I love the rough watercolor paper you can also use the hot press or you can use the cold press those are less bumpy and the hot press is the least bumpy of all but on something like this it really doesn't matter because I'm trying to create all of these layers and layers of grasses and brush and everything so that these two little houses are are pushed inside of the scene and now just gonna take more of that dark color and start to create more shadows in a few spots and those are the places that are going to draw your attention if you notice when you look at something like this the eye is drawn to the places where there's contrast that's why in lots of my stuff I'm always trying to find ways to add more contrast and trying to mix colors to create deeper shades and all those kind of things because that's what draws the eye in that's what draws you into the picture itself so don't be afraid to and remember that it's just paper so even if you spent a while on the piece of paper this is one of those designs that's really helpful to do lots of practice because you're just gonna cover the whole thing unless of course you decide to stop earlier as I told you before but when you're covering the whole thing with just lots and lots of greens you have one focal point and the rest of it is just gonna be a whole garden of greens it gives you that freedom to practice the layering of colors and all that sort of thing without feeling like you know you're you're wrecking it or you can't get it to bleed out to white or anything this really allows you to play around with it have fun and create a whole little scene here I have no idea what's gonna be the sentiment for it lots of people ask what my sentiments are on my cards lots of don't have sentiments at all because I just write a note inside I don't bother to stamp anything because it doesn't always need something like that I can put thinking of you or I can write a congratulations message or any kind of thing on a card like this doesn't necessarily have to be even a neighbor card or anything like that so I've die-cut my panel added it to another die-cut panel and called it done kept it really simple design-wise thank you so much for joining me I will see you for more of World Watercolor Month on my social media because I'm doing a little treat for you every day as well as I'll be back here in just a couple of days thank you much have a great day bye bye