 Oh hi there, my name is Sandy Allnark, I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I want to tell you that watercoloring does rock, however, today's video is about actually watercoloring rocks. There's a lot of different stamps that you can use a technique like this for, but when I saw this little set from my favorite things, they sent me a little package, thank you to them for blessing me with a little bit of happy mail. I thought immediately of doing some rocks with these because they're blue prehistoric guys and rocks would be fun. So I started just drawing rocks around the scene. I'm going to show you a couple other scenes later on in here so you can see different ways that you can use rocks on a card, but I'm just drawing round-ish shapes, make some of them kind of rectangular-ish blocks, some of them smaller, some of them larger, and make some of them look like they're in front of each other and that will just make them look like they're a pile of rocks. But there's no magic, no science to this, just make a pile of lines. I'm using a Sharpie because this is going to be in watercolor. If you wanted to do something like this with your Copics, then just use a Copic-friendly pen to do that with. So I'm going to add some water. I'm going to use a big fat brush, but you can use a small brush for this as well. I'm going to use a big fat brush and just drop some color in. You can use whatever colors you want and whatever brand of watercolors you want. If you use especially a rough paper like this, this is an Arches Rough Watercolor Paper. And rough paper has a really bumpy surface to it, and that means you're going to get some immediate texture and you're going to get this color moving around this way. I'm just dropping in random colors. Some of it is even random stuff that's just left over on my palette, like badly mixed colors or leftover reds, blues, and yellows that I'm just mixing together to create something for these rocks. Because rocks, it doesn't really matter what they look like. They're rocks, and if you make each one look different, then they're going to look like a pile of different rocks too, which is really fun. So I'm going to do some with yellows, some with browns, some with both colors, and I love just playing around with it and watching the color move on this paper. I've been teaching in my watercolor classes a little bit about paper, and if you think about the rough paper with this rough surface as a carpet, if you spill milk on a carpet, you get a little spreading like this. If you were to spill milk on linoleum floor or wood floor or something, you'd get a puddle that would go out in even lines. It would be just a regular rounded shaped puddle. That's the difference between either a student grade or a hot press paper and this really rough cold press. So if you like the look of watercolor when it kind of does this mushy out thing that it's doing here, then get yourself some of the rougher paper. It can be regular cold press or it can be this super rough paper, but a hot press or some of the student grades won't do this as much. So the technique works a little bit better when you're using a paper with more of a bumpy surface to it. So I dry it in between just so that I don't get too much bleeding in between the rocks. But again, they're rocks, so if you do get some bleeding going over one edge and the other, don't worry about it. Just spread the color out a little bit more because they'll look a little bit more like rocks as you go. I'm heat setting in between periodically to just dry some so that I don't have too much bleeding, but rocks are so forgiving. And they're also something you can use with a lot of different stamp sets. With lots of animals, there's lots of things that we can create scenes with, and rocks are such an easy way to do that. You can play around with hard edges, soft edges, do some different kinds of brush techniques, and it's a great way to practice them and just play with them on something as simple as these rocks. Now for the little dinosaur, I'm going to paint a base coat of a sap green on him, and then all the other colors I'm going to use on him for the time being are going to be sap green. Just going to use it a little bit thicker so that I can create a little bit of shading. So I wanted his body to have a little bit of shading right behind his head there. And I'm just tap in a little bit more color and keep adding some shading until I get him as kind of round as I'm looking to get him. Spread the color around his head so he has a little bit of shading on the bottom. But I wanted to add some texture, and that's one of the things you can do as well if your watercoloring doesn't come out really smooth. I'm going to add some texture to this anyway, and I knew I was going to do that, so I didn't worry a whole lot about it. I just wanted some basic shading underneath so I just established where those shadows were going to be. And now I'm just going to make little shapes in here. Little tiny shapes that'll be sort of his scales. I have no idea, of course, what dinosaur scales look like. If there's any dinosaur scientists out there, please don't critique me because I'm just having fun with this. And with some of them, you know, I'll add more color. Some of them I'll just drop more color in. You can kind of watch it move around, but I'm still using that same green. It's just one green. I'm using in different mixtures. Sometimes very heavy pigment, sometimes lighter pigment. And just making little tiny scales all over his little body. And if you have too many really distinctive dark shapes, he'll look weirdly polka-dotted. But if you just leave some of the spots really distinct and then let some of them be just barely tone on tone, it'll give you a really nice texture on top of him. And then any watercolor mess-ups underneath won't be any kind of an issue. On his head, I was going to do the scales all over the place. And I was feeling like it was going to get too busy. You weren't going to be able to eventually see his eyes and his little smile and stuff. So I was trying to figure out, as I was doing this, I'm getting further and further over there with all my little spots. So now how am I going to solve that? Because his eyes are just getting lost in this. And that's when I decided to just paint over a bunch of it and let that color turn into those little scales just toward the back of his head and let them stay away from the front of his head a little bit. And then I just added it onto a card base. So when you're having a lot of fun with your coloring, as I've said many times, it's really fun to do that and be able to just pop it onto a simple card base because you've already put all your time into the coloring. You don't need to do super fancy designs and embellishing and all that sort of thing. Now I want to show you a couple other different things that you can do with rocks, with some of the other stamps that are in this particular set. And Wego Wayback is also a hilarious sentiment. I love the ones in this set. And this little guy is going to have a rock wall next to him. So I'm just going to draw my rock shapes around, you know, kind of behind him and just think about where they might stack up on top and behind each other and let them be crazy shapes. You know, you can make a little rock wall behind pretty much any character that you're putting onto a card. Any of the places where they join, you may want to make sure that they kind of look like they fit. And then I stamped a tree behind it. I just messed off so I could have one little tree from the stamp set and painted it. Looks really cute, but it's really easy to do those rocks and create some fun textures and practice your layering of textures. It's a great way to see what the paints actually do. And I wanted to share one more because of course we have short arms, warm heart. I think that's probably my very favorite sentiment in this set. I always have felt really bad for the T-Rexes that they had these short little arms. So I stamped it crooked. And this is a technique that if you are a crooked stamper, then it might be something you could actually use to your advantage here. So I made it look like this rock had fallen down and was laying on the ground. And then I'll add the rest of my rocks around the picture. And I'm gonna give him a cave. He's gonna live inside of a cave kind of. We'll be standing outside of it. So I'm gonna make rocks all the way around him and basically create a round or oval opening for him to have as his front door and then add the rocks around the outside. There's so many different things you can do with rocks. So I hope if you actually do any, do end up doing any rocks on your cards that you tag me on Instagram because I would love to see what you're creating and how you're using this idea. So I was debating whether it would just be a hillside of rocks. So I could have left it here or just finish off the whole top of the card. And I thought the top would be really fun. So I just kept adding rocks all the way to the top of my piece of paper before I started painting. Finish those lines off. And now I have a scene that I can just paint. So we have a short arms, warm heart, cute, cute teabags. So I hope you've enjoyed this and that you've gotten a little something out of it and you may try it on your own. If you'd like to see some other videos that I've done with some other MFT stamps, there are a few videos here that you might want to check out in a couple of different mediums because I use mediums all the time of all sorts. If you're new to me, you may want to hit that subscribe button and see what other kind of fun I have up my sleeve to share with you. There's more information on the blog, on these cards that I made and links in the doobly-doo. And I will see you guys next time. Have an awesome day and we'll see you later. Bye.