 Hello there, it's Sandy Almok and today I'm going to be making an inked card. I'm going to use some new ink that I just purchased, an unboxed set for you, and I'll get out a glass pen and use some other supplies along with a stamp set from MFT. And it's called Wild Poppies, and I'll be making this gorgeous card. I'm making a blue poppy card because our blue poppy event at the local Road to Dinner Garden is apparently canceled already this year. It's not till May, but they've already said they don't think they're going to host it. So bummer on that. I'm hoping maybe they'll still be open that I can go see the blue poppies when they bloom myself because they come out every May. But I'm going to use this brand new bottle of ink that I just bought called Kanpeki Hiroshizuku that is made by Pilot. And I love inks because the bottles themselves are just so gorgeous that I just keep buying bottles of ink even though I'll never use all of this ink. So here I am using it on a card. So I'm hoping I can come up with some more techniques that I can use for cards at least and not just use them for my sketching. So I've stamped with some no-line ink onto watercolor paper because I want the lines to just barely be there because it's going to look like a hand-drawn card when I'm done. And I've covered it with water first, just a nice good very very wet layer of water. And I put the ink onto the tape because with ink it really sets in. Like if you put a blob of ink you're going to get a blob shape. It is not like watercolor it's not going to lift as easily that sort of thing. And I wanted to get an almost smooth background. It's a little challenging with inks because they aren't made to do smooth backgrounds necessarily. And I put the ink down the sides of the tape so I could just pull it in with the brush and just go back and forth in different directions. This works pretty well overall. It was not perfectly even but by the time I got all this part done it actually did work out pretty well. You might try this with other inks. You could try this kind of background with reinkers as well if you wanted to get a smooth background because sometimes those reinkers will act the same kind of ways as these bottles of ink. And this brush is really good for that because it's a nice wide one. Very smooth the way it goes on and I could just paint back and forth until I'm satisfied with what I'm getting here. I wanted it thin enough that I could see the ink drawing or the ink stamp underneath because I'm going to just draw over top of it. But I wanted to have all this ink color down here first because ink has a very special property. At least some inks do and this one did. I tested it out real quick so that I could make sure that it would do what I was hoping it would do. There are a number of inks that have properties to them. And you may remember I did a video last year I think it was using bleach with some inks because I took a class online from Nick Stewart who does amazing things with inks and was very excited to find a bunch of the inks that I have in my collection react in some kind of a way with bleach. Some of them change color completely. Some of them just disappear. They go to white. There's lots of different effects that they can have but it's kind of interesting to play around with something like a bleach and see what it can do. So I wanted to get this thing really dry before moving on to this step. So I've got some bleach in a little jar and I'm using the glass pen which these are really cheap over on like Amazon. You can get them at lots of different places. They're like ten bucks or something depending on how fancy you want the handle. And it basically picks up the bleach and I'm drawing in some highlight areas on this. I wasn't sure whether this was going to do what I wanted it to do overall. I knew it was going to lift up and make some white lines and you could basically go over this and just make the whole thing look as though it was drawn in a white type of ink except it's not raised at all. It's bleached out of the ink color that's there. But I just put some in the highlight areas and wasn't really worrying too much about oh my goodness where's my light source. I just wanted some on the tips of some of the flowers on the tips of some of the leaves and when you leave the bleach on there if you leave it on a really long time it'll just keep eating away at things and it'll keep expanding. So every once in a while I dab it off with a Kleenex just to lift that excess so that it wouldn't keep lifting things. I dried it and I thought I dried it really well but apparently I did not dry it well enough because one of the things that happened when I started going back in now to do the line work with the actual ink was that when I touched the ink to the places where the bleach was I guess that dries more slowly maybe than the watery areas would have dried because what it did was suck in extra of the ink color and most of the white ended up going away as this wore on as I continued with the drawing but what it did which was very cool was to give me some areas that were very very very dark blue because in any of those spots where it was on top of the bleach or touching the bleach the color went really dark because it sucked more I guess probably out of the nib of the pen I'm not really sure what it was doing. I began to get worried that I had ruined this at this point because I was instead of having a consistent line I had this line that got really thick and globby in some places and nice and thin in others but I kept going because that's how I work when I am working on a piece of paper I'm not going to give up until the piece of paper has nothing left to teach me and I decided to get out a brush and see what would happen if I started using some water and a little bit of ink to start to paint in some of the flowers and just portions of them not every single petal that kind of thing using thinned down ink I didn't want to use straight out of the bottle all that much because I wasn't sure if it was going to go on really heavy the way that those dark lines did and I also had to be careful not to put my wet brush into the bottle because I didn't want to water down the ink by adding water to it from the brush so it's kind of a dance trying to put some ink and a little bit of water into the cap that I could work from instead of messing with the bottle itself and at this point I'm not even following the lines of the stamp all that much anymore because I can't really see all that much I'm so distracted by seeing everything else so the stamp lines have kind of disappeared visually and I can just add in whatever leaves I feel like adding in. This is one of those places where my sketching students could just have fun and go crazy adding in little extra bits here and there to complete the whole bouquet of flowers and that sort of thing so I'm trying to balance out dark areas light areas that kind of thing and it was really cool I was very excited with how this was coming out and the kind of things that I could now do with inks that I wasn't really thinking I could do before they're a little challenging to paint with they're not like watercolor watercolor can lift and it has a different way of moving than inks will move so there's different kinds of techniques you'd need to apply if you're going to use inks. Well then I decided I wanted some of that white back so I completely dried all of the painted blue ink and started going back in with my glass pen and the bleach again I got a little dollop in the corner in the upper left over by the bottle kind of dripped out there but I didn't worry about it because I was going to trim this down to put it on the card anyway so it was going to fall outside of that area and then I added some dimensional adhesive underneath this panel and left a little of the card stock showing on the left and then a little more on the right and then just added a sentiment on top of all of that and I think it came out really pretty it made me not as wistful about my blue poppies and maybe I'll have to paint from photos of blue poppies this year instead of going to see them live myself I don't know I'm gonna go see if I can do that in May I've marked it on my calendar so I don't forget so thanks so much for visiting with me today I'll see you again soon with another video take care bye