 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olmalk, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to be painting rich watercolor. And by that I mean highly pigmented looking watercolor. A lot of times when we use our watercolors we end up with a very soft look and that's a great look for watercolor but then you can also make them highly pigmented by glazing and adding a bunch of layers to something. So I'm going to do a background panel and then my stamped images panel and I'm doing them separately. You'll see how they fit together by the end of the video. I've painted water across the whole thing first because I'm going to have three colors on this background and if I painted this just by itself and didn't put the water down first the edge of that blue might harden and dry and then I'll end up with a crisp edge prior to getting my quinacridone pink ready. If I have the paper basically wet down not puddled but wet down then sometimes that color will just stay active a little bit longer. I have a little more time to work with it. Now one thing you're seeing here is that there's blooming going different directions. That's just what happens watercolor kind of travels along the direction of where the water is carrying it and that's okay. I'm going to be adding other layers to this so I'm okay with some of this blooming going on but I will start working into some of it. Next I wanted to add some yellow down here at the bottom this permanent yellow deep and I'm using a pretty heavy pigmented yellow. The way that I mixed it was not with a whole lot of water just because I wanted a really strong yellow and I wanted to be able to move it a lot because I knew the colors above even though I had fairly highly pigmented ones they softened really quickly you can tell. So now I've got the color all along the bottom edge. You can go back in and rework some of this but be very careful when you take your brush over to the paper again that you don't have a mixture that is really heavily filled with water. You want more pigment than water and here what I noticed was that right away my brush had picked up some of that blue and I wanted to add more of the pink so I rinsed the brush added more pink pigment but as you touch the brush to the blue it's going to then make purple so you need to be a little bit careful as you're doing your mixing. And one of the things I started noticing as I was working on this part was that I'm getting this sort of lumpy top to it. You can see it almost looks like an M shape so I was you know as I was pondering this and trying to figure out okay I'm gonna add a little bit more yellow at the bottom so I keep that pink moving down. How do I then push back a little bit of the pink traveling into the blue up toward the top. I didn't worry about it a whole ton I don't need it to be exactly perfect but I wanted to push some of that color down. So I just added some more blue at the top moved it around with my brush and I am using a rather large brush. If you have maybe a 10 or 12 that is a really good size brush to work with backgrounds and I find that if I try to use my small brushes I just can't pick up enough pigment to do a really rich background. But this is only the first layer so hang tight there are there's more to come with this. Now again I touched the blue so you see I picked up some pink there. I can dry my brush and then pull that pink back out or that purple back out so that then I can go back in and add more straight up pink. And I'm starting to get a little bit better of a blend I'm just fussing with it. I'm playing around with how these colors are mixing and watching them as they go. This is a process that takes quite a while to figure out that's one of the reasons why when I did this I did the background on one panel and I'll do the animals that I'm going to watercolor on another panel because you don't want to do all that stamping and masking just to end up realizing that the watercolor didn't do what you wanted. So I'm getting a little closer to to happy on this. I'm gonna pull off some of the water on that pigment on the outside because one of the things I realized was that every time my brush started picking up some purple it was probably picking it up from all that stuff that was pulled on the tape. So now I'm going to smooth that a little bit more of my yellow and the stuff at the bottom I'm not really worried about how it's gonna look because that part is going to actually be covered by the animals that are going to be on my my card because they're gonna be on a panel above. I'm gonna dab off a little bit of that pigment that's inside of the lamp itself and then heat set it. What I find when I heat set is that the pigment will stop moving so I pick a strategic point at which I want to get things set. I'm not really worried again about the stuff at the bottom so I'm gonna get a little bit of a bloom down there but I'm more concerned about making sure the paper is so dry that it flattens out again. If your paper ends up warped at this point keep drying it because once it's really dry it should flatten out completely. I'm using the arches cold press paper for this and if you're using that you should be able to flatten it out really nicely by the time it's really dry. So if it's still warped keep going or let it sit there and continue to dry. Now I'm going to add another layer. This time I'm gonna paint my clean water over all of it except for on the lantern portion which I could have done previously it was just easier to paint over the whole thing and I'm gonna add another layer of pigment over top and if you try this without putting the water there again you're going to end up with a hard edge. If you want that hard edge right there for the end of the blue then go ahead and not put the water down first but I found that putting the water down first really did help. So I'm going to paint this color on. I'm alternating between a wide brush and a large round brush depending on how much of the pigment I'm trying to move across the paper so you can use a round brush for all of it. I just find that when I'm doing large areas sometimes it's just easier to grab the big flat brush in order to do that. All the supplies by the way are listed in the doobly-doo down below if you would like to go and get any of those for yourself. So now it's all dry. All of the the rest of that background is dry so I do have an ability to add more color now onto this. I can paint my green right over top of the yellow and what it's going to do is glaze it so if you have another color if you were to make that bottom section pink then you wouldn't be able to do the green there. Unfortunately that would be a problem but the the red is also going to cover right over. It's transparent pure orange but it actually looks like a good red. I'm kind of liking that color lately. So set that aside to dry and now I'm just gonna work on the animals and I'm gonna do the same concept kind of a thing which is to put multiple layers of the colors on each of the animals that's going to enrich them. As you can see how light this lunar black is when I start painting it with a lot of water in it and if I go over it again and this is damp paint that I'm I'm using here or the paper is damp still it's not completely dry then the the color will move out into it. I can keep going back into it a little bit more with richer and richer black color in order to add more to it so you can make it as dark and rich as you want. You could do this by just really doing heavily solided pigment on the paper. I find that's really hard because you can't recover from it as easily. Doing multiple layers just allows you the flexibility of slowly getting toward the place where you have really dark colors. A lot of folks I know comment on my YouTube videos that I do really strong contrast and they're just not brave enough to do that. This is a way to slowly work into that. I'm also leaving a little highlight on a bunch of these animals that's pointing toward the light so I'm just doing a little bit on the the bear's head his ears and stuff and I'll do a little bit on some of the other animals. Not being really super critical fancy about the lighting I could highlight all those in yellow because it's more of a yellow color in the sky background behind them but a white is going to work just fine here. I'm also using the same lunar black for both my gray bunny and my black bear so you don't have to always go really dark with every color. Each color has the ability to use a variety of shades so you can do things in light colors or in dark colors. Whatever you feel like doing. I'm gonna grab some sepia and paint my owl just a little bit here and I thought maybe I could darken up a little bit of my fox with the sepia since I had it on my brush I figured I would give that a shot and give myself a little bit of dimension by adding some dark color at the base of his tail and leave a little bit of a highlight on his leg. I'll drop a little more of the sepia into my owl and then grab a little bit of the permanent yellow deep for for some of the the little owl's highlights and here's that transparent peeral orange. I saw somebody use this color on something and I cannot remember what it was but it was really cool because if you paint it really really light with just a little tiny bit of pigment and a lot of water it's a very orangey color and if you use it heavily pigmented like this it's a really interesting tomato red which I kind of like so you may see that more in the future. I decided on using some of the colors that were in that background so I'm using that same phthalo blue in a couple of different shades so I'm using it really watered down here but the bird was heavily pigmented so you can alternate with your the same colors you already have and give them a different look based on how much water you put in with them. There I had a little issue with some bleeding so I had to go fuss around with it just a tiny bit because that's what happens when you don't wait for things to dry that are next to each other. Alright next I'm going to finish off some of these other critters here. The papers that they're reading, the sheet music that they're reading, I left just a little bit of highlight on the top so that it looks like the light might be casting on top of the papers just on the edges and let the rest just be a solid blue. Just that really light pigmented blue. I messed around a little more with that fox and he's getting you know really richly pigmented now and then I decided a little light sepia on the face of that owl would be nice. Now to add watercolor paper onto a card I like to use a couple of different things a couple of different adhesives and this B creative tape works really well. It's super sticky and you can get the paper to be really flat so if you have watercolor paper that's not getting flat try this glue on it. For the piece that I fussy cut out and I just made the bottom solid a solid brick of snow I'm using extreme tabs on them so the extreme tabs are dimensional but they're super sticky as well and they work great on watercolor paper. The little bird the reason I had stamped him before is now I can see through I can cut out just his body and I can see through to his little feet so stamping them both on the paper background as well as then over on my image I can just fussy cut out that one little animal. Next I decided to add some snow so I got out my white gel pen and I'm putting snow on the tops of the music notes and on the tops of the letters so it almost looks like this snow landed on top of them and then I went over to the other items in the background like this lantern and I'm making some of the snow drip down the side so sometimes if you just make one little icicle hang down it just makes it look a little extra cold and then a few little bits of snow on the tops of the wreath so that it looks like the snow has been caught by some of that wreath and look at how fun this came out I just really love the rich strong colors in here and it's going to be a happy card to send to somebody this Christmas. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you would like to see more videos please feel free to stroll around on my YouTube channel. I also have a new playlist that I started which is a holiday backgrounds playlist and you can check that out and see a lot of different holiday backgrounds that I have come up with and I'm going to continue the series throughout the fall and winter. Alright I will see you guys later be sure to hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet and I'll see you next time. Bye bye!