 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Alnok and we're gonna start off Penguin Week by painting an Arctic scene with watercolors. I have been buying a ridiculous number of penguin stamps and these little guys are so much fun. I had to buy them and they had to be the first in the Penguin Week series, so I'm gonna be doing penguins all week long. So make sure you stay tuned, especially if you like penguins. And this little guy is gonna be inside of a little hole in the ice. And I've just created an oval shape that goes off of the side of the card by just using my watercolors to paint it. Don't feel like you have to add a lot of pencil line or anything. That's gonna trap underneath of your color. And here you can just have the freedom to adjust if you need to. Because you're painting in the watercolor. You're not actually doing any drawing ahead of time. You may decide you want to sketch that oval, but I dare you not to. Now to make it an Arctic scene, I wanted to paint something that looked a little bit like a an Aurora Borealis. So I wanted to have that color in the sky, that pink and purple and pretty colors. So I'm trying to create a little bit of dark color at the bottom and what I did was, and you can probably hardly see it here, I tilted my board upward. So the top is facing down and the part that's at the bottom of the card is lifted up so that the paint runs up the card. I wanted some of those striations that you get when you've got an Aurora Borealis going on. So I did that. Let it all dry really nicely. And then I could go back in and add some trees. I've taken the color that I used for the sky and just added black to it. So I I'm not wasting all that paint that I had already mixed up for the sky that I didn't use yet. Just add a little bit of black and then start making trees. Trees are basically triangle triangles with scribbles. So when they're in the distance like this, especially people are going to read those as trees, whether or not you are perfect and drawing trees. So I'm just doing some little scribblies along the way so that my little little line of trees back there reads like a scene without having to stress out over the trees. Because if we are stressing out when we're watercoloring or when we're making cards, we are missing the point. This is supposed to be relaxing and we're not going for perfection. We're going for keeping the main thing the main thing. If you help your viewers, whoever's looking at your card to see the thing you want them to see and that's what they see, then don't worry about the other thing. So here I want them to see this darling little penguin. So I'm going to create some contrast around the penguin. I painted the penguin himself first and I let it dry completely because I didn't want my ice and my water to be bleeding into him and then added more richness to the water that he's swimming in. And in order to create that panel of ice behind him, I'm just painting some lighter blue, but with some white lines kind of in it. So that makes it almost look like thicker ice, which is kind of cool. I'm going to use the same color to put some color at the bottom of the penguin and then a clean brush with just clean water on it to spread that color out into the top of the eyes. So he ends up looking like he's got some shading going on. Each one of these steps, of course, you're going to want to make sure you dry it nicely in between if you're going to switch colors to something else. So if you want to do his little flippers next, then make sure the blue is all dry. In order to get a real soft edge there, I'm just using a baby wipe to dab off some of the excess color. Now for his flippers, like I said, it was all dry first, so I don't have any bleeding going on with these. I'm going to use some yellow colors and then drop in a little bit of that pink that I had mixed up for the sky. Again, so I don't end up wasting it and drop a little bit more of the yellow in with it. So I start getting some shading going from dark at the bottom to light at the top and give him a little orange nose. There's a little orange beak peeking out and then using my brush to make sure my blending goes nicely on the flippers. Now, here's the last little bit of fun, which is a color that I don't use very much in my palette. I hope I'm going to be using it more during Christmas cards because it's a perfect time to use them, which is the pearlescent shimmer. And if you've used things like Wink of Stella, this is like Wink of Stella, but in watercolor. So you really only have to have this. You don't have to have a Wink of Stella pen. And remember where you hit it last, et cetera. So I even put some little stripes of of the pearlescent shimmer on the water so I get a little bit of look of sparkliness on the water and a little bit in the sky. And since that's clear, it doesn't even matter if you blend that in because it's really only going to leave the glitter behind and stuff. I wish I could like kind of twist this card around to show you how glittery it is. But you can see how twinkly it is in the water there on a little penguin because he's so cute. And I also did a little bear very same technique. I just used the bear instead for that one. But I did the very same thing. So much fun to make penguin cards. So I hope you'll join me all week long because I have too many penguins to share. Lots of Christmas cards or cards you can use year round or for just winter season. And I will see you tomorrow. So take care and have an awesome day.