 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Alnok with a couple of cards from Purple Onion, but I really wanted to talk to you about using red rubber stamps without having to mount them. Earlier this year, like several months ago, Michelle from Purple Onion sent me two stamps, and I did not know what to do with them. It's this four by six, and there's also a six by six. She's like, oh, one is for your mini misty and one is for your big misty. And I was like, it's for what? I don't understand. And now that other people have started using them, now I'm like, oh my gosh, now I get it. So this is the stamp with the clear sheets on either side of it, and you can put it in your misty, you can put it on a block, you can do all kinds of things with it. But once you put this down, your stamps, your red rubber stamps are going to stick to it. You no longer need to get easy mount and all that to mount your stamps to it. You just press it down, and you can stamp away. It does make the stamp a little bit thicker the way that mounting makes the stamp thicker. So I took the pad out of the misty, and I'll just stamp straight into the misty with no pad there. But easily enough, you get a beautiful stamp. This is one of the new release background stamps. Isn't that fun? I'm going to show you two cards that I've made with it. One is coloring it like it's an inside scene. That little guy on the chair is part of last year's release. And these two little guys, which you can't see because they've got masking stuff over them, I wanted to put them in this scene and put them outside. So I'm going to show you how I do the stamping to make this one. I kind of just wanted to make sure that the one little guy at the bottom, his feet land on the porch. And then I marked with a sticky note where the horizontal line is across the whole picture so that I could block all that off. I wanted to make it snow and make the outside version of this one. And so I stamped it with just all of that blocked off with a sticky note. And look at that. I've got my little critters here and the one jumping up the air. His little feet are off the ground, so I'm going to put my shadow way down below and make that kind of a card. This one is going to be over on IGTV. I've been doing some of those IGTV speed videos, so if you want to watch that one being colored, that will post later today, if you're watching this right when this video comes up, or else as soon as it's done, I'm going to come back over here and put a link to it so you can see how I colored that one. So now I'm going to get to some actual tutorial portion here and I'm going to do a scene with some other stamps that are in this new release. And building the scene, I go from the back to the front. I just kind of lay the red rubber down so I can sort of get an idea of where everything goes. And I have the scene that goes across the back. There's a little guy in the front, a little bear who's fishing. That's his little penguin buddy who's got a net. There's a little hut in there. And I also decided I wanted to throw some other guys in behind there. They're sitting on a long drinking cocoa. And I just kind of arranged them so I can figure out which thing is in the front, which one's in the back. And then when I close the misty, the ones that are on the top are the first ones that I stamp. It's a real easy way to make a scene. Just pile them up and kind of let that be your guide. So now I'll make sure that they're straight by using the lines on the misty and add the ink and just stamp away. And that's going to give me my first layer. And of course, I had to stamp like five times to get to that little bit of magic because I am a terrible stamper. I don't know, maybe I'm a terrible inker. That might be my problem. Maybe I just don't ink well. But thank goodness for the misty to save my bacon. So I've got some Judy Kinn's eclipse tape, which is what I use for masking. And I'll stamp each one of these little guys. Fussy cut them out and stick them down. And since none of my image goes down to the bottom, I don't have to mask out the fish or the little ice hole or anything like that. I can just mask out the portions that are going to be stamped over. And look how easy that little block works. I'm so excited by that. That little thing is just genius. I don't know who figured out that a big clear block would do that. But if you use any brand, you can get one of these big clear blocks. And any brand of red rubber stamps should work just fine with this. So now I've got my little coffee drinkers there and I'm going to put my little ice hut in here. Now granted, I can't see through anything when I'm setting this up because it's red rubber. And why do I want to use red rubber, you might ask? I like the way red rubber stamps, even though I'm still a bad stamper. I stamp better with red rubber. I get clearer images with red rubber than I ever do with clear. I like the clear because I can see through them, but there's just something about red rubber that makes me happy. So I just recommend trying it and seeing what you think about it. And of course, these are all Stacey Yakula stamps. Purple Onion does sell other people's art, but I just love Stacey so much. So that's what I use. Now, when I peeled all of my little bits and pieces off, I love the big reveal when you just start taking all the masks off and suddenly the picture arrives, I realized something happened. I got this little line on my scene and it lined up exactly at the top of my hut. So as I do the coloring here, and I'm just going to do some super speed coloring, as I do the coloring, I'm going to adapt the roof of that because having it line up exactly at the horizon just feels awkward to me. So I'm going to fix that as I go and just kind of change it up so I can make it taller. And my bear is always, it seems I love to make my bears into little black bears with brown tummies and brown schnouts. That's just the way I color them because I don't know. It's just like my favorite little bear to do. I do sometimes polar bears, but most often they're little black bears. And it could be the history that I have living in Montana for a while and I used to see black bears all the time. So that's possible. The color scheme that I'm using, I'm keeping the colors kind of the same across the image in terms of not adding crazy colors for each little critter's outfit, making one pink and one green and one orange and all that. I wanted to keep the Christmas colors across all of their scarves and hats. So you'll notice the same colors replicating there. That'll just bring a little calmness to the image because there's a lot going on here. And one of the things that happens when you have an image like this with a lot going on, look how all of a sudden the roof looks better kind of peeking up past the horizon line there. But when your image starts to feel a little bit out of control because you've got so many pictures, you need to look at the contrast in between each one of the shapes and look for which colors might mean to calm down a little bit more. When there's something that's in front, I try to make the colors more intense so that little black bear really pops forward in front of the mouse that's behind him. So that's just something to take into consideration. So I'm throwing all of the kind of couple different blues in there all over the ice and the snow, just adding a bunch of colors. The colors, marker colors that I'm using for each one of the cards I've shown you today are over on my blog. So I do have pictures of those if you wanna figure out which colors I used. But this video was really about the magic of those big clear blocks rather than being coloring videos. So the tutorial portion of the coloring is just watching some magic happen and I love making it snow. Look at that. I don't get snow much where I live so I can make it snow in pictures, which is kind of fun. And look at the little fish down at the bottom. I put the shadow down below him so there's little space in between him that makes him look like he's jumping. So if you would like to head over to my Instagram later on today, you should be able to see the video with the extra coloring on it and that's about it for today. Thank you so much. Go check out the new release at Purple Onion, links in the doobly-doo, and I'll see you next time.