 Well, hey there everybody. It's Sandy and I've got some vintage storybook watercolor cards for you today. And I want to start off by introducing you to Anita, if you have not ever seen her book. It's one of my favorite little books, great little illustrations in them that she's done. And she has a brand new book, Will You Be My Friend? And again, great illustrations, love her style. It's so loose. And she is now making stamps with Colorado Craft Company. That is so exciting. I can hardly tell you how I squeed when I saw an email with the stamps in it. There's a little care package I got that started off with an enamel pin. Then we've got Wishing You Happiness. It has pups. It has mice. It has paint brushes. What could be better, right? So I painted this little card. I made my own easel by painting a background and just leaving the panel for their painting and added a couple of little legs for the stand of the easel. Very simple to do as far as creating a scene without creating a scene. And then I did one with just a simple background, blue on the bottom, black down to gray on the top with a little passage of light going through the middle. These are so easy to make cards with. You're going to be delighted with them. Snow Happy has both the bunny feeding the deer and the bunny feeding the snowball to whatever you want him to lift the snowball up to. The sentiment or something would be cute. And I painted the background and then the branches and then the deer. And after I had all that done, I put snow on with a pen onto the surfaces that would catch snow and some spots on the deer and falling snow. And the sentiment I'll put on the inside on this one. Ice Cream Day has cats in it. There's two cats that are already merged together in one stamp and then there's two separate cats. And you can use them together or separately. But ice cream. Ice cream and cats. I had a cat once who loved ice cream above all other human food. So this is an ode to my old cat. I used to love Double Fudge Chocolate Brownie. I think I've talked about him on YouTube before. But I merged all the stamps together so I could put them all in one picture and painted them. Next up is kittens and mittens. The kitty on the right hand side in the threesome is the same as the separate kitty all by itself. And there's snow if you want to stamp your snow. But I love to draw my own snow. So I did that and painted my kitties with a pink background. A pink sky and yellow mittens and scarves and boots. Because they're so cute. Christmas Tree Cat. This one I had a challenge with. I couldn't get a background to work with it for some reason. I just didn't like any of the ones I tried. So I did it without a background. And I stamped it to completely different. I used Distress Oxides and did some layering with it. And it was really complex. I finally got it to where I liked it. But I'm going to have to practice with this one more. But I had the peeled paint underneath and then some black on top in certain places. It was yeah. It was one of those misty kind of cards where I had to leave it in the misty and keep painting and then adding ink and then painting and adding ink to it. Next up. Birthday Wishing. Two different sets of little birthday images. This one has the bunny and there's a little friend you could put with them as well. Looking at the balloon and just wishing you a happy day. And also the ones that are doing the gift giving. There's I think it's two rats giving a gift to a mouse. And the mouse is separate. You can use something else there. But I decided to use it for a Christmas card that they are hiding a present from the mouse. They're going to surprise him. I'm not really sure what's going on. But I just added a stamped sentiment from one of the other sets in this collection. So easy to make that into a Christmas card too. A few stamps I didn't use are the stripes and dots and the this is us and wall words. The two sentiment sets here which I'm going to use because they're cute. I just didn't get around to it. I was too busy excited about the painting. And finally better together. This is the one I decided to paint for this particular video. Bunny, a fox, a hedgehog, a squirrel and a mouse. Really cute. Got little bugs in it. Really fun sentiments. It's all about being better together. And I love that. I love the unity theme of it. And I turned it into a Christmas card. You can do this of course as anything does not have to be a Christmas card. And I'm probably going to do a whole series of cards for my own stash with lots of different scenes in it. So I'm going to show you how to make a soft edged background. I didn't do that very much in the other cards that I showed you. So this one is going to be a little different than those. Just to give you an idea on how you can control some watercolor edges. I'm going to do just that sky in the background and I'm starting off by painting clean water first make sure it's clean water. If you use dirty water, you'll end up with a weird yellow haze around the outside edges, which is not particularly helpful when you're doing a blue sky. Don't ask me how I know that because yeah, I found that out the hard way. So I use just super clean water to start off with and I'm painting enough that there's almost a puddle here not a huge super thick puddle but I wanted enough water so that by the time I mixed up my color to put in here, all the the sheen will have worn down to just a sheen instead of puddles because you don't want puddles when you do this, but a good very wet sheen will really be helpful. So start about oh, I don't know quarter inch eighth inch inside of where the outside edge of the water is because that gives the watercolor a chance to bleed out into that area instead of trying to work its way all the way up to that area. If you go too close, then you'll end up with hard edges like I did on those other cards. Now you may want that and totally that would be a great way to go as well. Painting the water first just helps everything to move better. So if you have trouble getting your color to move, that might help. Also, once this is really wet, if you need to tilt the paper back and forth to try to get things to even out, you can certainly do that and it'll go right up to that wet edge. Now I'm taking a baby wipe and dabbing off where that water area is because I want to make sure that I don't get super hard edges on this. I will get some because as soon as that water, the paint travels to the edge of wherever it's wet, it's going to stop, but I can control a little bit of that. And depending on the color you're using, which here I used iridescent electric blue, depending on the color, if it lifts, you can also lift some up after you get it all done and dry. You can kind of scrub it off with a baby wipe just a little bit and soften an edge or two to clean that up. But I've got a really nice, soft background now. I wanted that to just sort of disappear so that everything else is in focus. While I had the blue paint in the palette, I just made a little bit of shadow underneath of the critters and also added some footprints for them because they all have to walk up to wherever they're standing. So having a little bit of must-up snow is certainly appropriate. Next, to paint the animals. The one to pay the most attention to is the big bunny because if you nail the bunny, you could just put a flood of color in the others and it'll be just fine. And I decided to mix up my own brown because I'm not really thrilled with the browns that I have in my palette anymore. I'm kind of trying to figure out if I'm going to throw them to the curb or if I'm just going to mix my own. But I just grabbed a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of Aussie red gold, a little burnt sienna, a little bit of neutral tint, a little bit of anthracanoid scarlet and I just made a color. This is probably thicker than you might want to use. If you're trying to do this for the first time, make it a little thinner of a wash because that'll scare you less. But I wanted this to be good and strong so that I could illustrate for you the way to do lifting, which is when you remove paint that you've already put down. So I'm trying to put down a nice heavy coat of this and if you want a lighter bunny, obviously you need to do lighter color for that. But what I'm going to do after I finish this, while it's still wet, you need to make sure you do this while it's wet, is rinse my brush really well and then wipe it off on a paper towel and push the color back into the area that you just painted. And I'm doing that with the brush. It's a dry brush that's clean so I'm not putting more color down. I'm not adding a ton of water but I'm lifting up that edge and I can create a softer edge for the bunny. So he looks a little softer and the colors blend a little bit more gently. I'm going to do a couple things here that you may or may not decide to do. I wanted to make him a little bit darker so I added a little bit of neutral tint, a little more of my burnt sienna because I wanted some darker areas and while it's wet I'm dropping in a little bit more color in a few spots. Not everywhere you don't want to line along his back but I put some color down. You can see how it's still moving in most of these areas because the paint's not dry yet. If you wait until it's dry you're going to be in trouble. Right there I used a dry brush to try to move things and that did not work. It started lifting color so I went back and picked up some very wet brown paint and then started painting back into this area because everything was drying really fast for whatever reason in my studio everything's drying but this allows me to illustrate for you that you can go back in again and lift things. So here I've got a much darker bunny than I started off with so if you want to adjust the color you can and you can go back in and light in some of those edges and lift up that color again. As long as you keep things wet you can still work with it but it's a matter of knowing how wet your paint is and you also want to keep an eyeball on it because if you end up you know overdoing it or something and then you can get a hard edge as it dries you might look back at it in you know two three minutes and be dissatisfied with it. The rest of the animals I'm just going to throw some paint in and you could start with just one coat of paint. I'm using the same mix of colors that I used to make that initial brown so that everything would feel kind of related. I didn't want to have like totally different crazy colors in it so I'm using variations in combinations of different colors to make the different animals and while they're still wet I'm painting fairly quickly while they're still wet I can add a little bit of darker color into each one of them. Now I'm quick enough at painting that I'm going to get all the animals in here and then add some darker color. You may find it more helpful to do that and one animal at a time if you're not used to painting with watercolor very much because that might help you more but I'm you know adding in I added a little water onto the squirrel so that I could soften his edges and that sort of thing. I'm just doing different kinds of browns in each one of these and different amounts of water and different amounts of pigment so that they'll all look a little bit different even though they're related but here I'm adding the thicker pigment in order to make shadows on the back sides of my animals and you can see how as long as it's wet the color will move you just need to decide you know is it wet enough and if you start in and it's not wet enough then you need to start figuring out what you're going to do to recover from that because sometimes that can be a challenge but a second layer while it's wet gives you kind of a nice soft edge but you can also do without that if you nail the bunny then feel free to just do one coat on any of these animals and you'll probably be just fine so next up I wanted to paint a little bit of a background and I'm going to do some trees in the background I'm going to take some water and just mix what's left in my palette juice down to a little wash a very very light wash this is actually darker than I wanted it to be and I'll show you how to fix that in just a minute but I'm going to paint just some tree trunks and some of them will be a little thicker some of them will be a little thinner going to make them a little uneven because trees don't grow in perfect order or anything and I can take a baby wipe and just dab off some of that color so I end up getting something soft and light and then in order to get a more fine point on my number eight silver black velvet round brush I'm drying off the brush and then picking up paint just on the edge of it because I want just barely any lines there for some of these tiny branches and if it gets too thick and blobby just dab it off and if you're using really pale color and it's not a staining color like if you use a phthalo blue you're going to end up with some staining on there but a color like this will lift quite nicely and you can make them just bare minimum trees in the background so I'm going to do the same thing on the other side and then add another layer for a couple of the trees after this is dry in order to add a little bit of depth to the trees themselves but what I want to talk to you about before we go is I want you to tell me in comments here and or on the blog I want you to vote for which one of the other stamps that you would like to see painted in a video because I want to do another one of these because they're so much fun and I want to be challenged to start making some watercolor scenes in general watercolor offers a lot of challenges to us when we're making cards because I don't know this the the stamps are not always designed in a way that lends themselves to a soft background like this and the images like they're so hard-edged hurt any dis images are just so soft and beautiful I really like what she brings to them and it affords this kind of style to work really well and I want to play with more tiny watercolor scenes it's just really hard to do tiny ones on cards I'm used to doing big paintings so let me know which one you would like me to do in the future because I'm going to keep these stamps these are not going in my stash of surprise giveaway stamps because I like them so I'm keeping them there's not many stamps that end up in my forever stash but these are going to be some of them so once I got all my trees done and happily the way that I wanted them I just added snow using my uniball signal white gel pen and called it done for Christmas card so pictures of all of the cards if you want to just look at them individually and make your decision about which one you want me to do in a future video you can go look on the blog and see the individual pictures and then use them for your inspiration as well see if you can achieve a background like I did on them and vote for which one you want to see now I may not do that exact card I might do a version of it I might do something with a different scene or different colors but I'd like to know which stamp set you would like to see all right I will talk to you guys later have a great day go make something beautiful and I'll see you again soon bye