 Hi guys, it's Sandy Olav, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to do a reindeer under a pine tree in watercolor. A lot of folks want to learn how to do scenes, but they want to do some simple scenes. And there's a lot of reindeer stamps. This one's from Girdis Steiner, cute little reindeer with lots of lights entangled around his antlers. And I've stamped my sentiment kind of kitty wampus up there. And I'm going to do something that I did in the blue-footed booby card that I did earlier this summer, because it was a lot of fun. And it'll be a great way to do it as well on a Christmas card. It also is a way that you can use those stamp sets that have multiple words in the sentiment itself. But you don't really want to worry so much about getting everything perfectly straight. If you're not using a misty and you're just going to use your block to stamp them and you're not stamping them really straight, if you make them purposely a little bit kitty wampus and do the signage that I'm going to do with them, it's a great cheat. So there you go. I am just watercoloring my little guy here and just adding other colors to him, trying to decide how much of the darker brown versus how much of the Quinacridone burnt scarlet that I want to use in there, or burnt orange, sorry, and a sepia. And then I'm going to use whatever's left to make some signage. And I'm just scribbling over top of them. You could actually do that portion after drawing the lines on, which I'm going to do later. But I tend to like to do the watercolor portion first because then it gives me a little more control over where my lines are going to be when I'm drawing on a card, but I'll also show you another way to do it as well. Mix up some other colors to use for the antlers. I'm using some Quin, let's see, that was Quin Gold, which is no longer going to be made. Just so you know, Quinacridone Gold is out. There is no more pigment left. I'm very sad and heartbroken. However, there's going to be a replacement. I just have not seen the replacement yet. So hang tight if you are a Quin Gold lover. I think I have like eight tubes when I heard that they were not going to be making it anymore. I stockpiled, but there you go. So now I'm going to start coloring in all of the things that are hanging off of his little antlers. I'm just kind of spreading the colors around and leaving a little highlight, just a little white spot on each one of these. I'm not going to do major shading or anything on this because the focus is going to be on the fun tree and the scene that I'm going to be creating. I just want to give enough interest to each one of these little things that it's not going to be boring when you look at that portion. But there's just a little tiny bit of variance in color in my reindeer. And then I'm just going to leave these sparkle highlights. You could actually just paint them in and then draw a white highlight with a pen after it's fully dry. And that would be another way to approach something like this. Sometimes that's easier than trying to leave a little bit of a sliver of a highlight. I'm using a number eight brush, by the way. And I tend to use the eight and the twelve most. And when I'm doing little images like this, I can get that brush. Really, it's got a super fine point. So even though it might feel like a large brush, if you're used to a two or a four, it's going to give you enough to work with of a point. Now the snow that I put under there, the brown wasn't completely dry, so it started bleeding. So I wiped it off with a baby wipe. Thank you baby wipes for being able to do that. And switched over to working on the portion that was dry, which is the signage. And I'm taking a Sharpie, you can also use a micron pen, anything that's waterproof. And I drew lines around it. And then I started drawing the pine tree. Now a pine tree is really easy to draw just the trunk of a pine tree. You're going to draw vertical lines. And what I ran into here was that the vertical lines were running into the same place where the lines of the stamp were. So I started adding more lines in there so that I could move it away from being the edge of the tree, being at the edge of where that line is. Because I wanted that to not look weird. So when you're drawing something, think about what elements are around it so that you don't end up creating confusion in the image itself. So I'm just drawing random, squiggly lines. I've talked about when you color wood, if you use a dark color with it, you're really going to get rid of a lot of the squiggly lines, but it's going to give you enough texture to make it feel like it's wood. And that's going to be the same thing here, using a lot of sepia, which is a nice dark brown, and painting right around all that. Now if it hasn't dried yet, you don't want to paint this portion because you don't want all that brown seeping into your beautiful bright colored ornaments and lights on the reindeer. So just keep painting around each one of these edges and finish it off. And if you end up with a color that's not as dark or brown, you can always tap in some more color. You can add a little bit of maybe some black in there. The black in my palette is the leaner black. And now the reindeer is finally dry enough that I could put his nose in safely. I don't want his nose to bleed all over his face because that would be bad, right? And now I wanted to work on the pine tree portion that's going to hang down. And if you make the pine tree take up much more of the card than this, then you can actually add some snow over it. I opted not to add snow in this particular picture, snow coming down from the sky at least. I'm using the sap green pigment a little bit thicker for these first few branches. And I'm trying to have a few, you know, kind of fussy edges on a few of them. And it's possible to do as you can see with the number eight brush. Don't feel like you have to draw every single one of those pine needles. Just make a few of them enough to start feeling like you've got a little pine bough there. And then I added more water. So adding more water to it is going to give me a lighter color. So I'm going to have a two tone kind of tree going on here. And I'm going to carry it out a little bit further so that those branches in the front both get softer as well as they look like they're in the front. There looks like there's a difference between the colors. And I'm still going to try to have some of those fussy pine bough edges on the very bottom there, which will still look really cool. You could put the thicker, the heavier, darker pine boughs on top of the whole lighter area. You could do the reverse. I wanted them to be really soft and want them to be super hard. You can also draw them, draw some details in with a pen as well if you wanted. I decided I needed a little bit of color in the background. And I was mixing up some blue and realized that my blue had a little bit of green in it because I had not washed off my brush all the way. So we have a blue-green background, which, you know, sometimes life happens. That's just the way it goes. And I'm adding just a little bit of color from the snow line upward. And I'm pretending it's the forest back there instead of a blue sky since my color went AWOL on me. And I'm using a little Manganese blue to try to do this. And Manganese blue is very soft and the color can be very, very blue unless you touch it to green ink, or green ink, green paint. And then you end up with issues. So welcome to my world. I wanted a little bit more color, a little stronger pigment. So I touched a little bit of that puddle of phthalo blue. Phthalo blue is a really strong color, so be super careful if you use much of it because it will take over and it also is going to be hard to get rid of. But I'm just throwing a little tiny bit of that into my pool of Manganese. And so it made it just a little bit stronger blue. Gives it a nice contrast to my weird blue-green background. So just adding a little bit of snow down below. And just kind of tidying that up a little bit, trying to figure out exactly where I want my brush strokes to go to make shadows. Don't stress out about a lot of it because really if you're making a little bit of light blue down there at the bottom, people are going to read it as snow whether or not it looks like the place where the shadow really should be. But blue communicates like something cold to people. So you're going to be fine even if you don't put it in some kind of a perfect location. I wanted to add a little bit more intensity to the color on the signage. So I'm just adding some lines on there and letting some brush strokes show so that it feels a little more like wood. And using a couple of different colors because your different panels of wood can look like they're from different types of wood. And there we go with the finished card. All done and cute. I mounted it with some dimensional adhesive onto the card base and rounded off the corners at the bottom. And put some glossy accents which you can't really see there. But there's glossy accents on all the ornaments and on his little nose. Thank you so much for spending a couple minutes with me here on YouTube and I will see you next time. There's more videos you can watch. If you would like be sure to subscribe. If you haven't yet already and I will see you next time. Have an awesome day. Bye bye.