 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock and I am going to do a long-awaited project around here, altering some office supplies. These are cubes of various types. There's a whole bunch of different types you'll see. Some of them are just pads of paper. You tear them off. Some of them are loose sheets. Some of them are sticky note types, lots of different kinds, but I'm going to be altering them for gifts. But I also thought I would use these paint pens. I recently got a random package in the mail from Derwent and they're the people who make intense blocks and stuff, and they were going to send me some other stuff, but they sent these instead. They were a little surprised that they had done that, but I thought I could still use these. That would be kind of fun. And there's two sets of colors and you shake them. They come in those little plastic sleevey things. You have to take those off, shake them, and then, you know, press the nib down to try to get the paint going. And then they work really great. So I decided I was going to try doodling on the sides of some of these with it. And I wanted to make continuous scenes around some of them, if I could. So that's what I'm doing here. I have mountains drawn on four sides of this and decided to just start seeing what would happen. Like, is this going to work? And I did have to hold the pad together because you can see even just on the end there, it does start to come apart. So if you don't hold it together and squeeze it, then you might end up with like the paint pen going down into the pad. But these are paint pens, which got me thinking, oh, paint pens, that means there's paint, so I could move the paint. So even though I wasn't having a lot of success in making a really thick area that's filled with color, I could use a baby wipe to drag across it and just masked off my piece of mountain so that I could then create just a shadow on the side of the mountain itself. And then I used a big old fat pen for the sky up on top that I'll draw some stars into because, you know, me and my white pen. And on one panel, I decided I would put some trees. So I wanted to see how these pens go over top of each other. They're paint pens, so they're not particularly transparent. So the trees worked great on top of that blue. And I haven't put them to more of a test yet in terms of that kind of thing, but you can see how cool this block came out. This one, I haven't found online. I'm linking all the others, but it has a hole for a pen. I thought that would be kind of fun to give somebody a cool pen. And then they have sticky notes and a pen handy. So there you go. I'm not going to say who any of these are for. So in case they're watching, they won't find out until they receive it and open their gift. Nice thing about these is that you could just tie a ribbon around it and they're so pretty they would actually not even need wrapped. Although they do come in the mail in boxes. So I have some boxes to put some of them in. So this one is Earth Notes and it's a particular brand geared toward recycled paper and all that kind of thing. It comes in a cardboard box with loose sheets of paper. So nothing's attached to each other. There's no adhesive that gets put into the earth or anything. It's just pieces of paper because we all need little pieces of paper anyway. And I know somebody who would really appreciate this. So I stamped trees from Art Impressions in two different colors, a light green and a darker green. So I could have a little scene in the corner and debating. I think I might put that cover sheet back in and just say I stamped these for you. So she realizes I did something to all those sheets of paper and I also decorated the outside because that's just a cardboard box. So you can easily stamp on it and do lots of different techniques that it's a dull surface. So it would lend itself well to being kind of cool. So some of you may have seen that one by the way over on Instagram because I did a little reel with that. All right, next up is another one that I wanted to do but this one had loose papers in it as well. And what I decided was I have all of these crazy numbers of little flowers from Art Impressions that I usually use for Art Impressions watercolor. And I just decided to get out a bunch of bright colors of ink and I stamped them all. But this particular pack came in a plastic case. It's a little plastic holder and I'll apologize now for the zoomie of the camera and did a little funky things to me here. But I just got out some alcohol inks and I pounced some on using the felt pad and sometimes I just dripped ink on there and then moved it around, just kind of played with it just to see what would happen. And it came out really cool. This was white plastic before I started. So it took the color really well and worked really nicely with alcohol inks when you're using this kind of thing. Make sure you think about the colors you're using. Red and yellow and blue together make brown. So if you end up with getting brown things when you make alcohol ink stuff then you might have like a red and a green and think okay that's not red, yellow and blue. Well your green is made up of yellow and blue. So just a word to the wise. This one of course had white on the inside so I decided to use a makeup pad to move some of the same colors around on the inside so it would look kind of cool. And when it was done there was a couple of sticky spots on the outside so I put talcum on the outside of it, just sprinkled some all over it and then used a tissue, a nice soft tissue to wipe it off and then buff it nicely and it brought it back to a perfect shine but there's absolutely no sticky left and I did not seal it with anything. I have no idea if this is going to last but the person I'm giving it to is not going to care. She's not going to keep it around all that long being a young person but I thought it would be fun for her. She likes tie-dye and all kinds of crazy colors like that so I thought this would be good for her but you can see how deep the color becomes once you get all of that powder wiped off so there we go. And so this one is going to have all those little sheets of paper in it that were stamped so this one will be the super colorful one with all the pretty flowers. Those were Catherine Pooler inks that I used and they work quite nicely for really simple solid images and you could put that in a misty if you're going to use the same thing over and over again but I was changing around to all different kinds of stamps so I ended up just doing them with a block just putting all the stamps on a block. So there's that one which was really fun to make. There was another one that I found that had a clear plastic case so I did the same technique with a blue and a purple and you know did the powder on it and everything and these I used some Colorado Craft Company stamps and I stamped them in light brown and light blue and light gray inks so that they would not be intrusive on the pieces of paper but you can see the cool texture on the outside of the plastic and that was a lot of fun. I hope she's going to like the one that she gets. I think that they're all going to have some discussion over are they're going to horse tray is somebody going to like somebody else's a little more and then for the stampers because I know lots of you love to stamp. I thought it would be maybe helpful and I tried this a little bit. It didn't work all that well to make a big long piece of paper that would hold these things together because I was worried about stamping on this. I wasn't sure whether or not it was going to just collapse when I pushed on it so I just wrapped this long piece of paper around it. I'm not taping it to the block itself but just to the taping it to itself and then pressed. Now I am pressing way too hard. You don't actually need to if your ink is nice and juicy the outside of this takes it really nicely. I was absolutely surprised. Had I known this at the beginning I probably would have bought more of these and stamped them instead because that was a heck of a lot easier than stamping on every single piece of paper just doing it on the outside of the pad but you know such is life and when I used this piece of paper to wrap around it I had to keep moving it every time I turned it to a different side and I eventually gave up on that because that didn't seem to be worth it. I did have to be a little bit careful to make sure that I wasn't pressing really hard and squish the whole thing so that it tilted down and I was able also to not completely match them as they go around. You'll see when I spin it but I was able to get the flowers to almost almost look like they were seamless across. I just lined the stamp up so that it was roughly in the right place and I think it still has that effect even though I didn't work out exactly how to do it. So see there you can see it. It comes unsquished a little bit if you're not super careful but it doesn't take a whole lot to just hold it in place. So this one was super fun and I loved the way that it came out and I think I might order some more of these so I can make some more of them because it was really fun to do the stamping and it was done really quick and these might be great gifts for like my neighbors kind of thing because I have a lot of flower stamps. You could also give somebody a fountain pen with it which would be kind of fun. There's some really cheap fountain pens. This one is just one I'm going to get rid of so I'm going to put it with the gift but there's also some that are just a couple bucks and then this one was also done in the paint pens. This one I'm keeping. So this one I was writing notes to myself about jotting it down, writing it down, don't forget things, just write it down and on the bottom of it I ended up putting a piece of heavy duty chipboard on the bottom so that the bottom piece on mine started falling off so I just made my own bottom for it. So I am going to make lots of notes on my graph paper stickies. Before I go I want to let you know that there is a two part studio sale going on that's just started this week with part one and in part one everything is marked down in price so you can get a deal on that painting you have been looking at and you've wished you could buy and go get it now because if you don't get it now you may lose your chance because on Friday, Black Friday, everything is coming out of the store and I'm going to put up two products, two things that you can buy at two different price points and they're both grab bags so you're going to get what you get if you purchase one of those you're going to get a screaming deal on it but you won't know which painting you're going to receive. Not everything that's in the store right now is going to end up in that grab bag sale but a bunch of it will. I'm going to be revamping that whole website and I just don't want to put everything back up again after taking it down so it's just going to make it easier if I can re-home a bunch of these and just get that artwork out the door so that you can enjoy it and it's not just sitting here in a drawer in my studio so if you're interested in any of that make sure you check out the link in the doobly-doo and get on the email list so that I can remind you on Friday that the grab bag sale is up or else you can just watch my social media and I'm sure I'll be reminding you there. All right that is it for me. I will see you all later. Have a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving if I don't talk to you before then. Bye-bye.