 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube with a beautiful pink amaryllis in watercolor pencil. First let's look at the Elbrecht Durer watercolor pencils. I like how these work and I do recommend them for crafters. There are inktense pencils which are a little more expensive than these, but these are an artist grade pencil. They come in a bunch of different sizes, but I just talked to Ellen Hudson into carry the full set and the 60 and I'll explain a little bit of why I've recommended she carry both. First is because full set people like me need the full set. It's just the way we roll, you know. These are inexpensive when you take into account the fact that you get all these colors, you have the full set and it's going to last you a long time. You can see the full range of colors here. I swatched these out on squares of watercolor paper and put them into the plastic pages that Ellen carries and they work really well that way. I don't do hex charts for anything with watercolor because you can't print on watercolor paper and you can't print with waterproofing so I just kind of don't do that. But swatching this way works. I did pull out the 60 so you could see what the 60 set looks like. It gives you a really good range. You get everything across the rainbow. You get some darks and some lights and that sort of thing. So this is certainly an adequate type of set to get if you just want to dabble and you're not a full set person by all means. And what I'm going to try to do and we'll see how this works out is to try to use the colors that are in the 60 set more here especially on YouTube and potentially in a hint hint watercolor jump start class that I'm working on that's upcoming sometime maybe in the next month or so. And I want to be able to empower those who are just going to get the smaller set to still be able to do something. And if I end up finding a color in the main set that I'm like man you just got to have this color then I'll tell you what that color is and that it's not in the 60 set. But overall watercolor pencils are really good by especially for those who haven't gone into coloring because you don't want to invest in Copics. You don't want to do the whole big learning curve that is the whole watercolor thing. This is a really good intermediate step. And for those who like watercolor but you want some areas of control you can also pair them with some watercolor pencil work and I'm going to talk about that a bit in the watercolor jump start class when I get that going. But what I'm doing here is putting the color down first and you could sit and color these all day long and they'll sit and wait for you to add water to them. So if you're one of those people that likes to do things in stages you certainly can do that. The flowers that I saw online that I wanted to color these as have a kind of a dark pink almost a muted pink to them and it's pink on the tip and then it goes to a light pink very very very pale pink almost a white in the center and then have these white stripes on them in the center of each petal. They were so pretty that I thought I wanted to color them that way. And with watercolor pencil you can put down color. You can see I didn't worry about trying to make really smooth blends when I did the scribbling with the color but I did put more color on the outside edges. And with watercolor pencil when you add the water I recommend in general try to take the water from the lightest place and then push it into the darker areas because that's going to help to keep your lighter areas lighter. Sometimes I don't do that and I just start diving into the color and then I have to go backwards and add water but then you're starting to deal with the adding too much water and the creating blossoms and blooms and all that and it's just easier if you go that way. And especially if you're trying to go from a light to a dark then push the brush into the dark areas that's going to deposit any extra color that's left on your brush in the darks as opposed to letting it flow out as much into the light areas. And of course depending on how much water you have in the section it may have less or more in terms of of water there for it to to move around in but everything is a learning curve. That's just the way life is and with flowers like this though they're really forgiving because nobody really knows what this particular flower looks like unless they have purchased this particular amaryllis and even then I'm sure they would give you grace for whether or not it goes all the way to a light pink or all the way to white either or but this stamp was in Ellen Hudson's release last month and it was really pretty but I knew everybody else was going to be doing videos with it so I decided not to bother since the whole world would be using the set and then I realized I couldn't resist. I still wanted to use this set on YouTube because it is so daggone beautiful and actually I did film two videos with this. The other one I don't really have a lot of explanation for because it didn't necessarily work out as well as I would have liked it to. It's an orange amaryllis. I'll show you a sneak peek of that at the end here but I'm going to put that over on Instagram TV and if you've missed the announcement over on my blog post I've mentioned it here and there I'm trying something new with Instagram and you don't have to have an Instagram account to watch them. On Instagram they have this Instagram TV and it actually promotes Instagram TV above everything else like it's Instagram's favorite thing in its whatever algorithm that it tends to show things to people and I've actually gotten more views on Instagram TV than I get here in the first couple days on YouTube which is weird. It's really really weird. Here is where you get the full tutorials. Over there is where you just get a speed video. No voiceover. I am not getting into having a second channel so this is the place to get tutorials where I talk about things. Over there is where you get to just watch and enjoy and I keep them really short because generally people on Instagram are like on their phones. They're busy. They're not going to watch a 10-minute video over there whereas when you sit down to YouTube I'm assuming you sit down to learn so that's that's my mental philosophy on that but anyway that video will be over there. You can see with the two greens that I colored for the greenery at the bottom it definitely creates a difference in the color and you blend them really easily with a brush super simple. The silver brushes are what I recommend for this for crafters because they're inexpensive brushes. If you're going to get just one get an eight probably an eight round is a good one to get and the link to all that of course is in the doobly-doo as always. You can layer these on top of each other. I did add some little dark to the center of the flowers and I added a little bit of gold pen highlights that's a uniball Signo gold pen and put some layers on it and that's it kept it nice and flat for mailing and simple. I don't tend to use many embellishments which a lot of people tell me is probably not good for my business. I could sell a lot of products if I chose to but I really choose to sell the art and sell you on the idea of making beautiful cards by doing your own coloring. So this is a sneak peek at what's going to be over on Instagram TV. Later today I will try to put a link in the YouTube description as well so you can go see that card even if you're not catching it right when it's all going out and that's about it. I will see you guys later on have a really great day. Go color something beautiful. Pick up some watercolor pencils if you want to try them and I will see you again and in another video very very soon. You know it won't be long. Have a great day. Bye bye.