 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to do two sets of cards, one fall themed and one Christmas themed all from three sets of big and bold stamps from Colorado Craft Company. These huge stamps really lend themselves to watercolor so I decided to make one big watercolor background out of all of them together because there's three different sets and they work for fall and winter as well. So I thought I'd use them all together and you can see I've laid out the big ones. I'm going to use the smaller ones to fill in and all of this is stamped in Distress Oxide ink and I'll show you the magic of that shortly. I'm just going to use the stamps, there's a couple smaller stamps, use them to fill in the empty spots all the way around and create a big beautiful background and this is a 6x9, it's half a sheet of the 9x12 so I'm going to get a bunch of cards out of it which is always fun to be able to do something once and get a bunch of cards made, especially when we're in this busy season and I'm going to turn them into both fall and winter cards so whichever ones it is that you need, you could make a whole bunch all at once. So I've got it all stamped and it doesn't matter that some things are layered over top of things, I did bare minimum masking, you saw me pull out a sticky note one time just to keep one leaf protected and then I'm spritzing with water, not heavy water, don't let it puddle up like crazy but just soften up a few of those areas around the whole piece and let the color bleed and get soft and then I'm going to take a couple of different colors, I started out with some yellow ochre which is kind of a dullish yellow because it seemed to match the ink that I was using and whatever ink you use, find a color that's going to work along with it and you might need to play along with it. I started out here playing with the yellow ochre and then I decided to jump in and add something brighter so I added Aussie Red Gold so you can add other colors to it but keep it really simple if you can as soon as you start trying to paint in every leaf and every pine cone and every berry, you're going to get into oh my gosh now how do I bleed out one thing so that it looks okay bleeding into the other, keep the colors really simple so I'm literally sticking with these yellow colors so that I can have a really soft uniform almost background and you could of course cut this into two and make two cards, I'm going to cut it down smaller and make more cards out of it so I'm not really worried about any piece of it in particular looking spectacular because they're going to be small strips and I'm going to have other things put over top of them. I just want it to feel like almost like a patterned paper but a handmade beautiful patterned paper and it will be impressive to whoever you send it to they will think that you have become an amazing watercolorist when really all you've done is add a little color. I'm picking out a few leaves here and there, what I did was squint along the way so I was looking for places where I could have a leaf sort of pop to the front by adding a little color underneath of it or a pine cone or a berry or something so pick a few spots where those things can lift up if you get too many hard edges just spritz a little bit more water on them just don't again get it sopping, sopping wet. So here's the finished result I mean it's not a very tight painting at all but it's going to work really well for what I'm doing. I chose a couple of card based colors and each of my panels is on some dimensional adhesive with just a little strip of scrap color that I've stuck onto the bottom of them and then I'm just making sure that they're going to show up on each of the colors that they're on so I don't want to put the orange on the orange and trading around so that they're all ready to roll and I can adhere them onto my card and what I decided to do could have done this earlier but ended up peeling up the bottom hello Vienna she's out there chasing squirrels I think this is going to be an ongoing issue but anyway I peeled up the bottom of the panel and just ran some twine around it a few times and then tied a knot I'm going to do the knot underneath of the strings so that they all kind of come together and they're not all just kind of splay it out all over the place because I wanted to make something that's going to feel like I've tied a tag on without tying a tag on because I don't like tying little tiny things on there I have enough trouble with just a bow so I'm going to get my bows kind of settled without having the thing that they're being attached with and tug it until it's the right size that I want trim off the outside edges but a boom but a bang these are going to be really beautiful clean and simple cards because all I'm going to do is take one of the sentiments this is from the oak leaf set and stamped it onto some little squares cut off the tops so that it would made little tags and then inserted it underneath of the bows and then it looks like they're hanging from the bows without hanging from the bows so all of that was done with a little bit of ink and two colors of watercolor now I've also stamped each one of these on a sheet of six by nine and this is going to go really fast just so you can get the gist of it this is not a super tutorial on this side but I'm going to show you how I created the pictures that I'm using for the Christmas cards on these I wanted a little more intense color so I'm using some of the new gambos a little bit of Aussie red gold I'm going to throw in some red some green some blue and just kind of have fun with it and play really loosely with it notice that I started out with spray of water and I just threw the color on there and I just let the color do what it wants to do I'm trying to guide it a little bit around some of the acorns so that I don't have everything kind of completely all over the place but I'm not stressing out about this very much I dried it after that first layer or let it dry and then came back and added another layer of color to it so if your color doesn't come out as strong as you like because watercolor always dries about 30 percent brighter or 30 percent shall I say lighter then it goes on so you'll want to add a little bit more color to it and that's what I'm going to do with these and I'm adding blues and greens and yellows all different kinds of fun colors this is a fall leaf that I want to push into being a little more of a Christmas card and if I have enough red and green in it even if it's not a leaf that's going to necessarily be around at Christmas time then it's going to work when you're playing with red yellow and blue a primary palette like this even if it's different reds different yellows and different blues be aware that all three colors together are going to make brown so if you want to have brown in it then you can put all three together in the same place otherwise make sure you are a little judicious with how you apply them the whole idea behind these the second set of cards by the way is based on the feedback that I got which was amazing on a video I did recently called playing with color it's for the Ellen Hudson release and I tried using a blue and a yellow in a lot of different ways just to make some different fall colors and it was really interesting it was fun to experiment and I'm doing the same thing here just with adding extra colors to it not just the the simple two colors that I used previously so I'm going to add some of the red to the pine cones and then the blue because red yellow and blue make brown and I want to let those colors mix and turn into some interesting kind of color combinations that may or may not be exactly brown but they're going to have that flavor to them and I'm just going to play with them and let them see what happens I'm going to sprinkle some color on there just letting the paint fly all over the place my whole table by the way when I get done doing this was a little on the crazy side however having paint all over the place is the sign of a well-used workspace so there you go next up is the holly and I'm going to do the same procedure surprise surprise and just throwing in some different colors in the leaves you can decide what color you want in the background of it if you want it to be more red put more red in if you want it to be blue add the blue to it blue in this case might feel more like snow this might feel like yellow snow don't really know I was debating whether or not these were just going to be either really large cards because they're really large stamps whether they'd be really big cards or I'd frame them and give them as gifts or something and by the time I was all done there were just some things that I wasn't super thrilled about in terms of framing them necessarily they were a great experiment and lots of great practice but what I ended up doing was trimming them down and adding them up to cards and you could trim them in sections and add them as small panels the way that I did on the first piece that I did or you can do what I'm going to do which is to cut each of them down into a card front size panel and just choosing the section that worked out the best because there's always going to be some section that you know the the splooging didn't work right or there was a bloom that appeared that you weren't happy with that sort of thing and this is what I ended up doing with them I added some paper layers and a sentiment across the bottom these sentiments in the Christmas sets oh my goodness they're so beautiful that Merry Christmas is going to be on my list of stamps I'm going to be pulling out on a regular basis so there are my two sets of beautiful cards some for fall and some for winter that you can all do from the same stamp sets which is a heck of a lot of fun to be able to get that much mileage out of them so I hope you enjoyed this video if you did click the like button if not then maybe I'll see you in another video go make something beautiful and I will see you again very soon in another video bye bye