 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnok, and today I'm going to talk about something crazy called Braired Watercolor, at least that's what I'm calling it. I have this painting on mineral paper, which is like Yupo. You can do the same thing on Yupo paper. And the painting came out terrible, so I rolled over it, because I had heard in the recesses of my mind from like ages ago that you could Brair paint onto paper. Now this is watercolor, and I'll show you in a little bit how the consistency works out when I do that in another layer, but I wanted to see what else I could do with this. This is one of those examples that I'm always telling you, don't throw the piece of paper away until you've learned things from it. So there is a mountain scene underneath of all that paint somewhere that's never going to be seen again, but it's covered in beautiful red paint, so I let it dry. And when you Brair the watercolor, by the way, it does not take forever to dry, because you're not putting much moisture at all in it. But I decided what I wanted to try was to stamp into this paint. This is watercolor paint, so I have the stamp set that has generic shapes in it, and I wanted to see if I could make a beautiful pattern in it, and then cut it up to use it on carts, because I'm trying to do some, a couple of mass production type of designs this year. I usually do a lot of one-offs, but I am just so swamped with things to do and stuff going on that I want to see if I can make, you know, 8 to 10 to 12 of something here and there a couple of times. And if you missed my earlier video on making trees out of this mineral paper and using alcohol ink with it, I'll link you to that at the end of this video, because it's the same paper as I used there. It's mineral paper. Now I stamped in, so I stamped into the water, and then stamped that onto the paper. So I'm basically stamping that shape, and I wanted to see how it would work. And I didn't use enough water that first time. I tried to see what would happen if I painted into this shape with a brush and added more, and that got to be a little too much. So when I took a tissue to dab it off, it went to practically white. The whole thing about Yupo paper and mineral paper, all these kinds of surfaces, is that you can get it to almost white, depending on whether the color stains or not. And in this particular case, I wanted something more subtle than this. So I tried this time to put more water on the palette so that I was stamping more water in instead of painting it in. Maybe that would lift less and squish the stamp down. And these are just generic shapes that I'm using. It kind of looks like a piece of toast to me. I'm not really sure what it's supposed to be. And it did lift it up, yes. But what I thought I'd try is instead of just doing the stamping, I would do some rolling over it, some braying. I still had some ink left on my brayer. And I wish I had left the whole palette full of it, because I'm going to need more color. So what I decided to do was start to stamp and see how a pattern was going to work out. The reason that you didn't get to see the very first part of braying over this sheet of painted paper at the beginning was because I was just going to play with it and see what happened. But as this started looking really cool with that red on the background, I decided it was about time to turn the camera on. So we did miss that first portion. But you can see what happens when you start to brayer over top of the stamped images that are on here. You get a really soft and subtle kind of look to it. And what I've done is mixed a couple of different colors. I've got some Oriolan yellow, some, let's see, that was anthraquinoid scarlet and alizarin crimson. And so I mixed a color just on that palette to use with my brayer to go over top of it. So I decided I would just do half of this and just get the whole half done rather than braying and then adding more and then braying and adding more. So then I'll mix the color up and just start to brayer over top of it. And there is very little, if any, water in that braying, in that puddle over there. That is just paint squeezed out onto, you know, you can use a palette, a butcher tray, you can use whatever you want. I'm using a tile from Home Depot and just brayer over top of this paint with more paint and do it with the same colors and you get darker underneath. So all the areas that didn't get stamped are darker. And then the ones that did get stamped are mid tones. And then you can add more to it. I mean, you can do a ton of different things with this, but this was a fun way to use some flowers to make this happen. Now I have gone ahead and stamped the other side of it. I thought you might enjoy the braying of this. The colors that I've used here were the anthraquinoid scarlet with the Oriolan, just the two of them. And I realized, oh, I needed more of the Alizarin crimson because this was turning into a very light kind of red, as opposed to Alizarin crimson would give me a little richer of a color. So I was debating whether I wanted to use this for Thanksgiving cards or whether I wanted to use it for Christmas cards. And I think I wanted to use it for Christmas cards. So I decided I should push it a little bit further more toward a deeper potential red. And now you can see, I tried a couple of ways of filming this because once this whole paper got saturated, it was really hard to catch the color correctly. And so I got my phone out and tried to do some angled shots so you can see it better. But what I ended up doing in between the stamping was to paint in some berries and some stems and then turn some of these shapes that were just blobs, turn them into flowers by putting a stem on them or painting a little center into the middle of them. You can adjust the shape of them, that sort of thing. Just be aware that if you start putting a lot of water on and you dab it off, you're going to go back to white. And I didn't want to go back to white. So I just left the water sitting on there by itself. And wherever the water sat on top of it, sometimes I would get a lighter color. And if I did it over top of a light color, sometimes I'd get a darker color. You can also paint right into this to paint in veins in some of the leaves with whatever stamps that you've got. Lots of different fun things that you can try to add more manual detail to something like this. And it gives you the opportunity to paint something in between the stamp areas. So if you have tons of stamps and you want to stamp the whole thing, then that's fine. But you can also just do it with a paintbrush really easily. Just be aware about like here, I'm going back and forth over some of these parts quite a bit and they're going to end up being real pops of light color. And I wanted something that was really, really subtle for the card that I was thinking about making for a background piece. And I changed the shapes of some of the leaves that didn't stamp well because they were blobs and turned them into leaves. So you can just add a point onto one of those blobs that I had there. But see how that the water on the edge on that tip of that leaf, that's going to end up looking really bright white when it's all done. So there's some repair work you may need to do. So again, as I said before, I should never have wiped off the color from that original puddle of paint for my brayer because I was going to use more of it. So I mixed up yet a little more and then went over some of the areas where I had super bright drops of the color. And it came out so incredibly gorgeous. I was just tickled with this and I was almost wishing that I had a giant project to put it on, like a big scrapbook page or something so the whole thing could stay intact. But nonetheless, I cut it down. And since my sheet was 11 by 14, 14 divided by four gives me three and a half inch wide pieces and then I got two pieces the other direction. So that gave me a total of eight cards out of this one sheet. And then I cut some three and a half inch wide pieces that I cut little snow across the top. You could use a die for that or just use a pair of scissors. And then I just punched out a bunch of circles with a bunch of circle punches. You can also use dies for your circles to make a snowman. You could make a three-circle snowman, a two-circle snowman. I love the fact that the snowman is so tiny on this compared to the rest of the beautiful background because it gives that background a place to sing while it also adds some fun on the front of it. You could leave the snowman blank. You could cut out a hat for them if you have a die that would work, that sort of thing, whatever you'd like to do on your version. Stamp a sentiment. This is one from Colorado Craft Company that I put on the inside panel for each one and they are done. Do not try to emboss on top of this by the way because this paper does warp if you hit it with heat enough to emboss it. You can kind of hit it with heat from a distance but don't do that. But the paper is half the price of you, Poe. And I think I could say by now that it's worth it. All right, I'll see you guys later. Take care, bye.