 Hi, I'm Sandy Allnog, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I have a happy accident card with lots of critters in my nativity scene. Every year I celebrate the purple onion sale, their annual sale today, and this is no different, and I've got the colors here for you that I'm going to be using on this particular card. And it was a giant fail in some ways, but a really interesting experiment. So I am doing a super speed because I don't think anybody's really going to be doing this card. So I'm going to let you watch it in full speed and I'll tell you what happened, how I wrecked it, and how I recovered from it and what I've learned, because it might be helpful for you as well. I was planning on this being, of course, on drawing paper. It's stamped onto Stonehenge, which is my favorite new drawing paper that I just think is pretty spectacular. And I grabbed a pack of pencils out of my drawer. I thought it was grabbing my Luminance pencils. I had forgotten that recently, well, not too recently, a couple of months ago, I guess that's why I forgot it because my brain doesn't hold things anymore like I used to. But I forgot that I had switched around some of my pencils in their cases and I just jumped in. I was in a hurry and I just started coloring because I had stamped this like a week or two before and was waiting to get to it. I was excited to color this one because I really wanted to draw the manger in the center and teach you how to draw a little manger. And I did not look at the pencils and I actually have watercolor pencils in my hand instead of regular pencils. Now you can use watercolor pencils in a pencil type of way. And that's what I started doing, even though I realized, oh, my gosh, I've totally screwed this up and I'm not using my regular pencils. These are the Museum Accorals. I'm doing my techniques the way I would do if I were coloring this in regular pencils, where I try to do some of that blending ahead of time before I get out any blending stump because I love that pencil texture. I love keeping some of that. So I often will decide whether or not I'm going to add more blending and stuff later. But I was trying to keep my pencil kind of working really nicely right around here was where I discovered, oh, wait, these are the watercolor ones because I looked at one of the pencils and saw that it said Museum Accorale on it. So there you go. Now I'm I'm in the process in my head of deciding what I'm going to do with the fact that I grabbed the wrong pencils. So I've got my little manger that I'm starting to draw here and notice that I just put some yellow around it, added a circle and then another circle, just a head and a body. And I cut off the bottom of the body kind of flat. So it looks like that bottom part is coming toward you a little bit and then added fringe around the edges just two feet underneath of the manger. It's a nice simple way to make a manger if you've got other stamps that you want to have facing around a little manger to the baby in there. But I decided, OK, I'm not working on watercolor paper, but I'm going to see what happens if I use a baby wipe to move the color. I do this in my Bible journaling a lot because I don't want to put a lot of water on the paper. And I thought, well, I don't want a lot of water here either. So what's going to happen if I actually use the baby wipe here? You do have to be really careful. I have fat fingers and I was kind of having trouble staying away from the red and the green and just doing the gray at one time or just doing the brown and not pulling too much color into each other. But what I did find is these pencils lifted nicely. So if I got a little bit into a more white area, I could actually lift up some of it with the baby wipe. I started using the brush there just a little bit on the red and realized that I didn't want to do that quite yet. I'd wait until the end and see if I could do most of this without using a brush because it's drawing paper. I didn't want it to get all curled and warpy and I was worried I'd bring in too much water with the brush, which is the same reason for not using a brush very much when I'm doing watercolor in my Bible because the baby wipe moves the color. Pardon me, without putting in too much of the water. I'm using some sticky notes for some very simple masking because I thought it would be fun to put a barn scene behind them with a little window. And I was pretty impressed with the texture that I was getting using the baby wipe to move the watercolor pencil around. Now, the colors that I'm using, the Museum Aquarelles and the brand that it is, it's a high quality watercolor pencil. If you're using intense pencils or something, I'm not sure if this will work because you need to really be able to move the colors in there. Some of the less expensive pencils, watercolor pencils may not do quite as well at this. I'm not really sure. I didn't test anything else. I just kind of was trying this one since I had it halfway done here and I didn't want to waste the stamping on this paper. And it was really curious to see what would happen and was really pleasantly surprised that this actually started working and I was waiting for the paper to curl up on me, though, at some point. I wanted a blue sky up here. So I just used a couple of baby wipes to mask that out. Look at that nice crisp edge. And I left white on the left and the bottom to indicate that there's light coming in the window, adding a little bit of detail, just some sketchy detail into the the wood wall on the back, not going to put a whole lot into it. And then I started adding more concentration of color in my animals. And what I found was that the color got darker and heavier and put out more pigment if it was a little bit damp. As soon as the paper started to dry, it didn't put out quite as much. But as long as I kept it damp, I could put in really heavy color and get some really nice contrast. For the hay on the bottom, I wanted to keep some texture. So I started kind of making crisscross hash lines and stuff all around the ground area, knowing that I was going to use the baby white to blend the outside. I was only going to leave some of those lines in certain areas and then layer more of them. So I softened that and then added more lines over top because I knew now that the dampish paper was going to take the pencil a little bit more and I was going to be able to get more dark color and so that it could radiate out and get darker around the outside edges. The paper is trimmed kind of significantly bigger than what I'm going to be using for my card. So I do have lots of room on the outside edges to trim it down. So that area outside the chicken and outside the little baby lamb and that sort of thing, I'm going to be able to cut off. I did put my star too high because when I cut things off, the star ended up kind of a little high in the window. But there you go. And I went in and finished a few last details after I got it all glued onto the card base and started using the brush just slightly, just a tiny little bit and then a few extra details with my pencils to add just a few pops of contrast here and there. It was easier to do that once I had the whole thing stabilized on the card base and had the whole thing kind of laid out nicely and was able to add then extra shadow right underneath of the little manger and give that a little bit more contrast right underneath because even though the glow feels like it's coming from the manger itself, it wouldn't it would have a shadow underneath. And so now I'm just going to add a little bit more around baby Jesus. And there you go. There's what it really looked like. The video did get a little washed out, but it was fun to do as a fun experiment, tried something different using watercolor pencil on drawing paper. And as long as you don't use a ton of water, it kind of has some fun effects to it. The texture is just really interesting. So there is an experiment. I hope you have a great shopping day. It is Black Friday. You know how that goes. I'm going to have as many links as I can find to sales and things on my blog. So link in the doobly-doo to that. And I will see you all later. Bye bye.