 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm gonna be making some artist encouragement cards because I send out a lot of cards to crafters and artists and these two stamps that seem to go perfectly together. One has all of these beautiful sentiments in it, they're laid out beautifully and then some flowers to mix with them and the links for the supplies are of course in the description down below on YouTube or over on my blog as well. I've stamped them using VersaFine ink onto some watercolor paper, this is Arches Coal Press and I'm just kind of playing around with colors in my Daniel Smith palette. That was new Gamboge or Gamboge and then I'm gonna use a little sap green with it. This is a great way to test out different color combinations that you have especially if you have some new paints you don't know how they mix and blend just throw some onto the background of a card and with these sentiments and these flowers it's a really great way to do that. Notice that I'm just putting the color in the section with the flowers and then letting a little bit of it spill out over the rest of the card some of it with flicking paint but not really stressing out about putting paint in every square inch. That tends to be what we try to do, we want to paint the whole thing but leaving that white space, leaving that air in it is what makes watercolor really sing. So now I'm gonna mix some quinacridone pink with some new Gamboge and see how those two work together. With paints and any kind of pigments if you mix yellow blue and red together in equal parts you're gonna get brown and if you push color more toward one thing or another you're gonna get different kinds of grays or different shades of browns and with something like this when you're just testing out just pick colors that are gonna kind of go together like the pink and the yellow are not gonna have any blue content in them so they're not gonna make brown they're gonna mix nicely and I'm just kind of splashing some on by tapping the brush onto my paper or onto my finger to flip paint onto the paper and these silver brushes this is a silver brush number 12 round they work really well because they hold a lot of pigment in them. So I'm gonna go back to the sap green and then this is deep yellow and I'll add a little bit of Gamboge to it as well and just put lots of beautiful fun color in here. These are so easy to do even if you don't watercolor much get yourself a couple of colors and just have fun with them and play with them because you don't need to have a whole lot of equipment to do watercolor just a little bit and you can do these with a lot of different brands and it's a great way to test and see how they work and how they're gonna the colors are gonna work together. This one I wanted the sentiment kind of in the middle because it was centered in the way it was laid out so I did flowers all the way around it and with each one of these I tried to just figure out how I could lay out the sentiment versus the flowers in a way that would highlight both of them nicely and this one just seemed to cry out to be in the center and most of the time I don't put things dead center in my card so when I'm doing my background here I'm gonna be careful not to fill in all of the color evenly all the way around the edges. I don't want an even shape in the middle so I'm kind of leaving that part on the right hand side a little bit blank for the moment put some heavier color on the left and I'm using the Carbazole purple along with some phthalo blue for my my two colors and since they both have blue content in them and then the Carbazole has a little bit of red they're gonna blend perfectly and not make brown and if you add more water to something it's going to have less pigment in it so I'm wetting my brush and then I'm gonna move around some of the pigment that's there so I have just a really light area over on that right hand side not a whole lot of color on them so I get that variation from dark to light and you can heat set in between and I also don't have these glued down with anything they're just sitting on my my board here and just drying it so that I can then add some splatters to it if I were to add splatters while it's all wet it's all gonna mush in but since I have so much moisture on the paper I wanted to make sure I had it fairly dry at least somewhat dry before I start doing my splatters so zap it with a heat gun and then start in with the flicking of the paint to make different kinds of patterns and that sort of thing and you can choose to do one color both colors and I'm also not doing it evenly I'm not splattering absolutely everything the same way on the entire card front because that would just be too regular and art is not a regular thing so I'm gonna use a little bit of lemon yellow I'll mix in some new gambos and then a little bit of green with it and with this one the sentiment is centered but it has that creativity flowing out to the left and right that script and I wanted to have a whole garden of flowers surrounding it so each one of these I handled the flowers a little bit differently than on the others it's a fun way to test out your design skills and what's the best way to emphasize the sentiment emphasize the flowers that sort of thing in a way that they're gonna work well together and not just look like they're either slapped randomly on the card or one is gonna fight for dominance over the other but again I'm gonna leave some of that nice air at the top that empty space so not everything is completely filled in and then I'm gonna zap this a little bit because I wanted to do a little bit of splattering again but watch how the colors move around on there you can sort of control the blooms this way a lot of people wonder how what do you do with blooms in something like this you can actually push the bloom underneath one of the flowers so it's not as visible or you can push it out into the empty area if you like the bloom and so heat setting just a quick zap like that can sometimes help so I'll add just a few dots of the sap green just a little bit down here toward the bottom not necessarily all over the whole thing but I also knew I was gonna be trimming off the edges so not worried about the specific edges of every single one of these getting painted all the way out to the edge that was my dog picking up several bones at once in her mouth if you're wondering what that little noise was I was hoping she was gonna sleep while I was doing my voice ever but no she's not now this one was one of those where I was in a danger zone because turquoise has a little bit of yellow and blue in it and mixing that along with my quinacridone pink could be a challenge and a lot of times you can get a beautiful purple when you mix a pink with a turquoise of some sort but you want to be careful in how much of that you put in there I'm also getting a little concerned here because my turquoise is dark and I don't want to make the sentiment completely unreadable and that sort of thing so I'm gonna do a couple things to it as I go like taking out a wet brush and just smooshing it along there so I get a softer edge to the paint and kind of lighten it up and then I can even take a baby wipe or a tissue or a paper towel or something and dab up some of the larger blots you know blot up some of that extra color so that it doesn't have like super dark area types of things and then I can fill in a little bit more I didn't have enough rough edges there having those those kind of hard rough edges really makes the watercolor look beautiful I think and then I'll add some splatters on to it and being careful of course knowing that some of this is going to end up mushing into each other so I need to be careful where I'm splattering it and is it going to make brown where the pink and the turquoise mix so I dried it a little bit and then splattered on a little bit of my turquoise as well to give it a little more punch so that was kind of a fun exercise to play with and then dab off a little bit of extra color before I finish and then finish off the cards I've attached them to black card stock using some B creative tape and then put some dimensional adhesive on the back the B creative tape holds watercolor paper really well and then I'm using some delicata gold ink to just go around the outside edges before I attach it to my card and it's going to add a little touch of elegance to it and then I'll layer it onto the card base so I have this popped panel with this lovely gold edge around each one of them isn't that beautiful the way that that came out I really like these a lot and I think I might have to make quite a few of these set them up in your misty and mass produce some and send them out to a lot of people that you know who make cards and other beautiful things artists of all types I hope you enjoyed this video if you did click that like button share it with your friends try out the technique and I will talk to you guys later thanks so much bye