 Hi there. It's Sandy Alnok with an interactive art studio slimline card. There's a lot going on in this one. Two different stamp sets. Colorado Craft Company has a little artist who's going to be the visiting professor. And the art students are all pand bears from Heffy Doodle. I thought that would be a really cute combination. And I did not film all of the masking, but I took a picture of one of the mid stages. So I started by stamping one of the easels, the one on the left, and a little bear in the middle. And then I kind of laid out masks and stamps so I could line up and space out three easels. The two bears on the right are both in front of the easel. So they get stamped first and the easels get stamped behind. The one on the left, there's no stamp showing there, but there's a bear behind that easel. If you don't want to deal with all the masking, just get the dies and cut out the panda bears to put on top. And you'll see what I mean later by that. But I thought I would at least explain this much of it. And you can measure and get your easels equally spaced out if you want, whatever you'd like to do. I'm doing this on arches, watercolor paper, by the way, and this is in Zig Clean Color Markers. This first one, I completely just shut down my brain, apparently, because I was trying to blend a mid type of gray or warm gray with a light warm gray and tried to blend them out to white, forgetting that arches and zig markers don't really get along all that well, not when the paper's not wet first. So I was fighting with it, trying to get it to soften the edge. And I ended up going in with the mid tone marker a second time in order to put more color in there and just carry that shading in the white part of the panda a little higher up using the brush. So that one was kind of a hot mess. The other ones worked out a little bit better. You can see I put water down and this is the middle color. When you put water down first, it makes it much lighter. So I'm going to have to go with a couple of coats over and over to get it as dark as that first one. So that's one of the differences that you'll need to do if you use your zigs on Arches watercolor paper. Lots of the water based markers don't work really well on this paper. So next was to color all of the black parts of the bears and I decided not to make those parts look dimensional. I just colored them straight up in black because if you can convince the eye that you've got lots of really great dimension in the white part, nobody's going to care about the black part. It's just not going to make any difference at all. So why spend all that time doing that? This is going to give it a really nice crisp look which is what I wanted. I wanted to have the contrast of the floor that I had in my head which we'll get to, the paintings on their easels and just the whole thing. I wanted to have very distinctive types of coloring. So the easels again are going to be really crisp coloring. I put a dark reddish brown kind of color at the bottom and then used a yellowish color, a sort of desaturated yellow to blend out from there. And I used the same color combination for the mouse. Again, I forgot to put the water down first so I had a little struggles trying to get it to blend and the mouse ended up yellower than I wanted but he was fine by the time I was done. I don't think he was at all unhappy with it. I should say she. I suppose it could be a girl mouse coming to the studio to teach the panda kids how to paint. So the panda kids apparently have already painted though because they are going to have some paint on their easels by the time this card is all said and done. This is one of the places where I started running into trouble. So there's going to be a big section of oh my gosh mess that those of you who love to see me screw up are going to be delighted with because I was trying to make a little bit more gray in the portfolio and used water to do that and then it started bleeding out the edges and I should have known at this point that I was making a mess for myself coming up but I just proceeded anyway because that's how I roll. So then I took a piece of tape and I've used this artist tape before. I'll have it linked in the supplies because it's really good stuff. It's going to peel up really nicely and not rip the paper or not do anything to it and it's got a slick surface so I can color the different colors that I want on the floor just throw the color onto that and use it as a palette. Well again forgetting what I was doing zig markers and even any of the water based markers like to run that's just the way they work. So if you touch water to the edge of one of these they're going to start bleeding all over the place and I'm going to have all kinds of trouble here. I had put a couple different colors in that tape. I wanted a couple sort of a muddy kind of look so I guess I got a muddy kind of look in the long run. I didn't exactly mean it to come out from the bear's feet and that kind of thing and the easel and pulling all the color from what I'd already colored but there you go. Sometimes you just screw up and you have to deal with it. So I was dealing with a lot trying to figure out how to keep all of this color that kept bleeding out from the feet to look natural to make the floor look decent and I just kept going with it. Now some people would throw this away and go oh my gosh I got to start all over. My recommendation if you want to do this is to color the floor first just color it first get it completely dry and then when you start going in with the rest of the colors you're going to have a lot less trouble. So that's my advice to you but one of the things this did do was force me to then put in more colors. So I took a little bit of the gray and threw it in there. Another thing about these markers is that they change color when water hits them. It's why I would much prefer to watercolor with watercolor paints because they don't do this but watercolor markers do and this is supposed to be a gray and it's kind of purple and that's just how it is. So I had to deal with that got it all dried and then had to figure out like what else am I going to do this floor to try to recover this because it was still just bleeding all over the place kind of mess and how do you fix that? Well I started by putting shadows underneath the easels and the bears themselves just with a warm gray color and put a little bit underneath of my bleeding all over the place instructor as well just kept trying to think okay what if I use some water to try to soften the edges and then I thought okay I'm just going to go for it with the floor. The floor is just going to be a bigger part of this than I thought it was going to be and I started sketching in the perspective lines. So if there were tiles on the floor that's what I was picturing here and everything's going back to a vanishing point. Now if you need to know anything about vanishing points in perspective I have a whole class on that but for now all of these lines are going to go back toward one point in the distance and then all the horizontals are just horizontal and I'm using one of the gray markers so that it's not really standing out all that much. I mean it's it's definitely a bigger part of this card than I thought it was going to be but at least it's a softer gray so it's not going to be as obtrusive as it might be if I tried to do this with a black pen. I'm also not trying to make it really straight and perfect because if I was trying to do that and any of them were off at all it would be obvious. So dried it all completely and then figured okay now I'm going to get on to the construction of this which was really my whole idea behind doing this anyway. So I used a die from Trinity to die cut it and then got my fingertip knife to cut out each of the easels. Now this is the place where if you were to die cut the panda bears and stick them on afterward it would be a lot easier to cut because these are straight little lines. What I did with the other two was to cut most of it with the fingertip knife and then I got my scissors out just to cut around the bears so it was some detailed fussy cutting and you could do that easily just by die cutting everything or cutting the bears out by hand separately. Well I have a green layer underneath of this and then I wanted to put a panel behind all the easels so the bears paintings would be there and I wanted a very different texture so that it would be obvious that they had painted this. So I used the zigs on a super dry paper which gives an interesting texture to it so then when I put some adhesive on the back held it over hovering over the space where it was supposed to be and then glued it down once I put the card together that's going to peek through and it's going to look like they made these beautiful red yellow and blue paintings. Isn't that cute? So next is the construction. I cut a piece that was going to be way taller than I needed for the time being and then wide enough to cover all three easels and then I cut a little L shape or I guess T shape out of the ends of this because I need the tab that's going to pull out needs to catch on something so I have two tabs on either side and I'm going to put adhesive there so that those pieces don't slide out. On the back of this now I'm starting the construction. I need to have a horizontal piece where that green tab is going to stop because I don't want it to slide down into the card too far so it's going to stop at the bottom and then get stuck on those two pieces at the top it's not going to go left to right it's just going to have that one channel to move but that middle piece is going to remain sticky that one that the green tab leans up against so I put some powder in that the stuff that used for embossing. Well I had put all this together and all of the adhesive got transferred to the green and then I realized I needed to hole punch that circle at the top so the tab has somewhere you could grab so I pulled the front watercolor paper off left the adhesive down there did the hole punching and then reassembled so that I could then put this together and you can kind of see how this works now this is going to lift out I did have to fix that corner a little bit because I didn't have enough adhesive in there and then once I put the brad in the center for notification of the interactiveness for the person who gets the card I had to put a piece of tape over it so that that would not get stuck on the back when you open and close the card and then the sentiment I had to put in that little space that is right between the tippy tops of the easels and the bottom of that circle that's cut for the tab it had to fit right in that spot so it was a little tight and I probably should have thought it out a little bit more but nonetheless it still worked I still just can't stop opening and closing it and watching the little bears who are so proud of their artworks and showing them to their new mouse teacher it was just lots of fun to make this one so if you are interested in more of my crazy weird interactive cards there's a whole bunch of them wild things that I've tried in the past I've collected them all they're over on the blog and there's also a playlist but the blog is an easier way to scroll through them if you haven't subscribed yet make sure you do hit the bell so that you can click the word all which sends you notifications of all of my videos so you can never miss another thing all right thanks so much for watching this I will see you again very soon links to everything are in the doobly-doo I'll see you later bye bye