 Hi there, it's Sandy Elnock and this is going to be the first time I'm trying a specific way of using airbrush with this technique. And I'm going to use a stamp set from Honeybead called Just Because, has a beautiful honey jar and I'm going to try to make it look really realistic. And as you can see, I think I achieved that, but I'm going to show you how I did it. I had a friend in college who was big on airbrushing and he cut out a gajillion masks, just a gajillion. I only cut out a couple. I've partially stamped the images, wiping off the ink from the areas where I wanted the honey to drip, because I didn't want to have to fight those lines being there. And the pieces I've each got cut out that I'm going to use later when I get to the rest of the airbrushing, but I'm going to try to use a technique that I normally use in watercolor in order to do this. But here I had to think ahead quite a bit more than I do in watercolor because I'm dealing with stamps and trying to think through all this process in my head. So I am going to begin by using my Copic Airbrush. I'm going to do most of this in Copic Airbrush. The final touches I'll do with marker strokes. But you put the marker into this airbrush and the air blows out that hole, that triangular hole, and across the nib. So you press the button and the air flows from the compressor across it. And you can just change out colors like crazy. Now this is the part where my buddy in college who used to do this would probably just pull his eye teeth out by the ease of being able to change colors like this, because I remember him standing there washing out his airbrush just for hours. He was every single color had to change it out. So an airbrush that you just put a marker into works really well. And what I was trying to do was put down a base color underneath of all of this because then I'm going to use the masks on top to start carving in the background. And that's a lot of what I do in watercolor. So if you wonder why I do so many mediums, it's because I learned things from one medium to the next. And I try out, you know, I learned something how to apply color in one medium and I'll try a version of it in another. And here I put down some of the masks so I could put some color over top of that glass lid and darken it, but not interfere with the jar that's off to the left of it. So I was able to just put that over top. And now I cut a little tiny piece that I'm going to use for the drip of the honey on the table. And it's going to be coming just cascading down the whole thing. I wanted a nice dark table, a nice dark background, but I wanted certain kinds of colors. I wanted it to feel warm and juicy and reddish, orange-ish, but have some places that glowed a little bit. And since I'm not very good at airbrush, I don't know a whole lot about it. I was playing and I don't purport to be any kind of an expert. I was just trying it out to see what would happen. And the thing that I find with airbrush is you can just keep layering colors and layering colors and layering colors. None of it sinks into the paper. So you're using less ink when you use airbrush, except for the fact that once you start using an airbrush, it gets addictive and you want to airbrush everything. Not everybody's going to be trying to do this kind of airbrushing. Most crafters are more than satisfied to just do a sky and a wash of color over something. But if you want to do something more complex, you certainly can with Copic Markers. And I'm just going to be layering the colors on until I can build up the kind of color that I had in my head because I wanted something rich and warm and dark that would complement all of that beautiful honey because I wanted the honey to feel like it was glowing in the picture. So I'm going to just work my way all the way to the top of the card, picturing all the light being down at the bottom, because I wanted to do some golden bossing and have that part up at the top. And that meant that I needed to darken everything else that's up here. So I just kept layering on red, brown colors and then move to brown colors. That sort of thing. And with airbrush, when you choose a color, you generally want to choose a color that's a little darker than what you want to have happen because you're getting all these little tiny dots of color put down, which means your finished color is going to be lighter than what it would be with marker strokes. And it's lighter in terms of also coverage because you're not taking all those marker strokes and pushing all that ink into the paper, it's all just sitting up on top. And you get the benefit of all that color without losing a lot of it into the fibers. Now, when you're using the marker on the paper and you're pushing all that color around with the nib, you actually are blending. But here you blend by just layering on top of each other rather than using the fibers of the paper to blend them together because that's in general the best way to get colors to come together is just pushing all that color into the fibers of paper. And it just sort of soaks it and the colors start to mush together. So next I wanted to start doing some other masking. I wanted an area that felt darker. I wanted to give this a sense of space, but I didn't want to cut out all kinds of things and do a counter or a cabinet or anything like that. So I just opted to make one section a little bit darker. So it looked like there was a wall or some sort of an edge of something because it was just meant to be a suggestion back there. So I used a very I think it was like an end 10 or something to knock that back. And now for the moment of the great reveal, what happened when I started taking all these things off is I find out how good or bad any of my cutting of the masks was in the placing of them and have to go around each of the edges and try to create a color that's going to match them. Again, the colors that you put down when you're using your marker nibs is going to be different than the color that was airbrushed. So sometimes you need to choose a little darker color or a little lighter color in order to match that background. But that got me toward then putting some detail into the honey itself. And I wasn't looking at a picture or anything. I was just trying to picture how all that honey would start to be dripping down from from the dipper and then moving its way down. And so all of this, the glass and everything is out of my head. I had no reference for it because I couldn't find anything that was what I was picturing. So the bee, I used a gray and a black to give the bee a little bit of dimension on his body. And I added a back section to his butt so he'd have a little more black on him and then started working a few marker strokes then into the lid. The lid doesn't have any honey in it. So the lid is going to have more of the color from the background in it. And we'll have a little less of the light. And then the honey is all seen through this glass. So everything here I wanted to be gorgeous and saturated and glowing. But I had to move back and forth between saturated and slightly desaturated colors as well in order to create that that magic of making it look like glass. So here you can kind of see me trying to work out in my head how I was going to make all this join up with the spot I had left for the honey at the bottom. And that was just, you know, one of those things I hadn't really planned out super well. This whole thing was not planned out as well as my friend in college wouldn't plan it out. He would probably would smack me around. We had that kind of relationship back in college. But he was he was the master of masks and he would have cut out each one of these pieces and airbrush them in. I chose not to because for one it's a card. And I did want it to get done in a reasonable period of time. This whole card took me an hour by the time all was said and done anyway. And since I got all of that gorgeous detail in the background anyway, and I got that initial yellow, that whole glow underneath of all of it in the first place, I felt like I was doing OK to put some marker strokes down here rather than try to cut out all those little places. But I was trying to build up the color to drip around where that honey was coming from the top. But then I saw that black line interfering. This is one of those places where I was kind of wishing I had done a no line look with this so that I didn't have to fight with it. But since I needed a couple of bright white highlights anyway, I just went over the black line to take it out of commission so that it wasn't going to be bothering me in that bright part where all the highlight was supposed to be and just worked my way around adding in a few white details here and there. Some on the honey, some on the glass, just to give it that little tiny bit of sparkle. But the light is clearly coming from the right side. And as I was doing this, I was realizing I was putting all these beautiful highlights in, but I was going to need to darken. This was not dark enough. And I debated whether to do that with. Like the marker strokes themselves, or was it going to go back and airbrush because there's a couple of different ways to approach it. So I decided this is an airbrush card. So I'm going to try to airbrush. This is also going to, quote, unquote, hide the fact that I did so much marker strokes because now the airbrush is going to be the thing on top. But this blue violet color, even though it made a really great shadow, it was too blue. So I layered on top of it with a V04, which is one of the colors that I love to shade yellows with. It's a very warm and yet it's still purple. So it started bringing some of that life back to it. And that sort of thing. So a lot of times with a lot of my artwork, I just spend a lot of time going back and forth between trying different types of colors. It's one of the ways I've learned. And if you don't experiment, if you get really nervous and think, well, I don't know what color to use for a shadow here, just use one. Just pick one, just go with it and see what happens. If it doesn't work, it's just a piece of paper. Just a piece of paper doesn't really hurt anything. If you were messing it up and you were going to throw it away anyway, it wouldn't matter. So just go ahead and try something. So here I put a nice dark shadow behind the honey jar, but I needed to redden it up. So I added more red to it to finish off my slimline card. I added it to a card base made of this goldish kind of semi-shimmery paper and use the same paper to outline the sentiment a day without a friend. It's like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside. So I have no idea who's going to get this card, but it's going to be a really special person because I don't know if I'm going to want to part with it. It's so pretty. Thank you for joining me for this video. If you have not yet subscribed to my channel, please do so. I put out videos three times a week and I hope there will be something inspiring for you. Make sure you click the all button, not the personalized button, because then YouTube just picks what's personalized for you instead of you getting to choose from all the content. All right. I will see you guys later. Take care and have a wonderful, wonderful day.