 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Alnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. I'm going to work on some autumn stamped watercolor cards today using art impression stamps. You've seen me use these hopefully before. They have a lot of different ones in their collection, and these are two new sets that came out. They're little mini sets. One is a barn and one is a covered bridge, and this is what they look like. They each have a couple stamps in them, and you can use them in conjunction with each other, and I will be using one of the stamps in both of the cards that I'm going to make. But the way that you do this is you take your markers, whatever water-based markers you want to use. I'm using some Tombows, and the list of colors will be on my blog, so I didn't get time to put them on the screen, but I'm just going to scribble a bunch of different colors onto the stamp itself. Then I'm going to stamp onto some Eclipse tape, which is a masking tape, and it's got sticky on the back. Trim it out, and then I can stamp the trees behind it, because there's two tree stamps in this particular set. This one has a bunch of birch trees, and I'm going to stamp that little cluster on one side, and then there's another single tree, and I'm going to put that on my block and color it up. Both of these I'm just doing with multiple colors of browns and things, because I wanted to make these fall cards, since we are in the fall season. You can do this secondary stamping, so I have these lighter trees that are going to look like they're a little more in the background, and you can also draw in more things with your markers. These are little tiny acrylic blocks. People have been asking me where I got these little ones, and now they are carried at Ellen Hudson, along with all of the art impressions stuff. So I'm going to use one of those little blocks to do a little cluster of blossoms that are going to go on the trees. You can use this little cluster for a lot of different things, and they can be flowers on the ground, they can be leaves on the trees, and I'm going to do them in multiple fall colors. I want the trees on the right-hand side to look like they're kind of yellows and browns, and then those birch, I'm going to make more of a reddish color. And I'm zooming quickly because you don't need to sit there and watch me keep coloring on top of that little stamp. But I'm just putting ink on it, and usually stamping at least once or twice each time I load it up with color. I'm not cleaning really in between them. This doesn't contaminate the markers particularly much, except for your light color. So you don't want to contaminate your light ones with dark ones, or scribble it off if you happen to do that. So, I'm going to get all of the red ones put in here now over on that cluster up there on the left, and I'm doing some of it right over top of those branches, and I'll show you how I make it so that you can see some of those tree trunks when we get to the watercoloring portion. But I wanted to have some hill sides down there on the two riverbanks because since this is a covered bridge it goes over water. I took my marker and I added some shading, some really dark shading inside those windows because I knew that the marker that's on the paper would not be enough. But I'm going to take my brush that just has clean water on it, and I'm pulling color in from the outside lines because all those stamped lines have ink in them, so now they can be moved around like watercolor. There are other types of water-based markers you can use. You can use distress markers or you can use the zigs, but I tend to find that they love to party with water so much that they end up actually becoming mush really quickly. I like the Tombows. They have the best balance of being able to be broken down with watercolor as well as retaining the lines when you want it to so you can get either effect when you use the Tombows. And so now I'm going to add water to each of the trees. I'm going to rinse my brush in the places where I wanted to keep it more yellow because as I pick up more color with the brush, I'm going to get more brown on the brush and it's going to pull that color all over the place. So anywhere where you want a little more pure color, just clean your brush off beforehand so you're not mixing previous color with what you've got. And I'm just scribbling along. I'm leaving some white spots, some areas where I did not make it all a full flood of color because those little hard edges are what really makes watercolor look like watercolor. For this batch of trees, every time I pick up some color, I'm going to go down to the bottom section and go around those tree trunks. And that's going to allow the tree trunks to look like they're white in the midst of all of that funky leaf stuff going on at the top. So I'll be working back and forth, tapping in color at the top. But you can see how many colors I got out of that little tiny, that one little stamp that has had those little leaves on it. And I was able to add them and make these look like they're different trees. The ones on the left and the ones on the right just by using different colors and different tree trunk stamps. So now I've got some stuff going on along the ground here with that same stamp. Remember, it's a very versatile little stamp. And I can just add water along here and let all of that color just kind of mush together because these are going to be the banks of that little creek as it goes across or underneath of the bridge. And I want the banks to go off to the left and the right. And I'm just going to keep adding more color all the way around the outside edges with just water. And that'll carry a little bit of the color out there. But I can also dab it off if I end up with too much and if it's not getting really light. I decided I wanted a little darker road coming toward the bridge and then back out the other end of it. So I drew directly on the paper with my marker. Now, if your paper is wet, you don't really want to do too much drawing with the marker because that line will never move again. So be aware of that. For the river that goes in here, I was debating whether I wanted to make it look like it was a windy river that goes off into the background. And then it was kind of like, what am I going to do with those two little pieces of the shoreline? And I thought, nah, I don't know that I really want to leave them and do them with the greens and the flowers and things. So I just filled it in and I put a little bit of sky in there too with a little bit of water to melt it out toward the top. So now I wanted to add a little more depth in a few spots. So I put a little bit of brown marker over there on the left behind those trees which is going to make their trunk stand out since they're going to be against some colored out. To add a layer of detail in the front, in the foreground, I'm doing a little more stamping now with that same stamp just to add some sharp detail because all of that stuff underneath got nice and mushy and it looks more like it's in the distance. But I wanted a few spots where there was just a little bit extra that had lines of color. Now you can draw in and scribble in little lines as well, little flowers and grasses and things if you want to, but doing it with the stamps is nice and easy. So I'm just going to take my brush and scumble around with the water until my scene is as I wish. What I did was trim it out. I actually ended up trimming it a little bit crooked. So I trimmed it a little closer because that's how I straightened it out. I made sure that my little bridge looked like it was straight and then put a panel across the bottom with a sentiment from a Hero Arts stamp set. Now the second one is going to be this barn and I'm going to use some of the knowledge that I learned from the first one and apply it here to the second one. I'm just going to do a whole bunch of different colors with the barn. So there's a little blue, little brown, little gray, little rusty color. And I'm going to stamp the barn off to the left just a little bit because I wanted to have a scene that sort of tumbles from the upper right down to the lower left and have a place for my sentiment because the other card I didn't leave a place for my sentiment and I had to add a panel. That's why I had to end up doing that. So now I'm going to have all my tall trees off to the right-hand side and I've taken an extra piece of that masking paper and blocked off the ground so that front tree doesn't go down too far. And then I'll do the same thing, just move that over so I can make my trees that are going to sort of tumble downward and get lower on that end with the grass masked off. And again, it's time to do the very same thing with my little tiny stamp to make all those tree leaves. Now if you're doing a wintery scene, you don't even have to do all these leaves on there. It could just be the branches against a sky. And if you did want to paint a sky, I would paint it first, stamp your barn and then paint in your blue sky and then stamp the trees over it after it's done. And this particular stamp set has in it a little fence and I'm not going to stamp the fence until I'm done because I want that to be in the front. So it's the same principle as doing those trees in the background. If you're just going to do the skeleton of the trees, just do them afterward and make sure it's good and dry. Same as I will do with my fence. But I'm adding all different kinds of colors in here. I thought it would be fun compared to the other one. I didn't have enough color contrast in some of my trees. I thought let me try a different way of doing that and try something else with this particular set. So I'm trying to give myself sort of a ground that is going to have a line to it. So I made my barn almost on an angle, the bottom of it. So it looks like it's on a little bit of a hill. And I'm pulling the color in from the outside edges and creating a little bit of texture by just dragging my brush across the paper. And I can add more later on. I can take some more marker and darken up some areas, which I will do. But for now, I'm just going to work with the color that's already there on my paper. And next I'm going to go through and do my tree branches, the trunks, just because I want to make sure that I don't totally water those out enough. If I put them in there with a little bit of the brush, then I'm going to hold on to them and not forget and get totally crazy with the water first. But let's how beautiful this is. I'm just scumbling the brush around, which is basically dancing across the surface. I have some water on it. It's not super soppy wet. If it's super soppy wet, you're going to end up with a big just cloud of color. And it's going to be too mushy. So I'm leaving some dry white areas in between and just dancing the brush around. And I've got some areas that are red, some that are yellow, some that are brown. There's a little bit of green in there. You can even look out the window at the fall trees in your yard and look at how the leaves turn. Are they turning from the top to the bottom? Are you getting yellow on the outside and red on the inside or on the top to the bottom? Just look at the ways that the leaves change color because they do tend to go on different trees in different sequences. And you can plan out a little bit of your colors on something like this using the trees in your very own yard. And I do collect pictures as I run around in my town and everything as well when I see some beautiful trees just to get an idea of some colors that I might want to use and different ways to lay them out on a card. So I'm spreading the color out to give myself more of that hillside going down and I'll create a little bit of a hillside back there in the background but not too terribly much because I'm going to put my fence over on that side. But just give myself a little bit of a line so I have that cascading hillside going down and I have some colors scribbled on that block that I can pick up and paint with. And I can do different colors there too. I'm going to do two different yellows after I did a little bit of the brown and just paint across that and make the grasses in front of the barn kind of yellowish and then use lots and lots of water to fade it out as it gets down toward the bottom and even wipe some of that off. Now I heat set it so that it would be good and dry first and then I took my dark brown and I made my fence and stamped it right on top and that end I wanted to just kind of draw one more fence post there. So depending on what you end up with your scene you may need to draw in a little another piece of that and then I'm going to do a small cluster of grasses and things down here on the right side on the bottom and I'll just take my brush and water them out a little bit. That's also adding more detail to the foreground which is going to make the background recede just a little bit more as well. And now I've got a little bit more color that I've drawn into my barn into those dark areas in those windows and around the eaves just so I can have a little bit more contrast and that one will stand out a little bit more. In this one I didn't trim incorrectly so I was able to use just a panel. I've got it die cut with a dotted rectangles from Avery Elle so I have a little detail around it looks like stitching and then I had room to add a sentiment again from that same Hero Arts sentiment set. So now I have a couple more videos for you if you'd like to watch any of those and get some more ideas on how to use different ones of the art impressions, watercolor stamps, lots of their flowers and trees and things are interchangeable with all of the sets which is a really great thing to have. So you can watch some of those, you can hit the subscribe button, go visit the blog to see more and I will see you guys in the next video. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me. Hit that like button and I'll talk to you later.