 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to talk about making interesting blends by blending your colors wet in wet rather than in the palette. I have two stamp sets I'm going to show you examples with. This one from Trinity has all these buildings. You can put a scene together for a whole slimline card like I'm doing or you can just do one house, you don't have to do them all. But look what happens when I take my burnt sienna and say cobalt blue and mix them in the palette. I get a brownish grayish kind of a color. I want that to be more interesting when I'm doing my painting. I don't want it to just be a flat, weird kind of brown color. I want it to have some life to it. So I'm going to mix the colors wet in wet on the paper. There's a number of different ways you can do that and I'm going to be doing it just with painting straight onto the dry paper. You could also wet it and then let the colors blend, drop them into the wet areas. But this is going to make for less blooming if I do that. So I want to not have a whole lot of blooms. So I'm using paint that is not necessarily thick but it is not watered down. And both the puddle of burnt sienna that I have and the puddle of cobalt blue are the same thickness. If you want to have a really light hue that's going to blend from one into another then you can use them both watered down. If you want them to be darker then make them thicker but make them both the same thickness. And don't go dipping a whole lot into your water to rinse your brush or if you do squeeze it out the same amount. Get rid of the same amount of water because you don't want to change the consistency in between each one of the colors that you add. So I'm going to speed this up because it's fun to watch all the colors blend but it's not fun to sit here forever at your computer in the middle of summer. So if you're watching this in the middle of summer when it came out then I want you to get back to painting or doing your summer activities or whatever. But I'm trying a bunch of different combinations from my palette and you can do the same thing. Just see what happens with different colors that you have and what do they turn into. One of the things to note is and I've talked about this before reds yellows and blues when you use them together turn into neutrals. Most of the time they'll be some sort of a gray or grayish brown. That's why the blue and the burnt sienna turned into a grayish brown because the burnt sienna has some red in it and some yellow in it. And that means it's going to end up acting as the red and the yellow so mixed with the brown it's going to turn into a gray color. If you're looking for interesting neutrals this however is a way to do that without just mixing them straight up that way. And for buildings I wanted them all to feel I guess more neutral. I didn't want to have just bright buildings that you might want to have bright buildings you can do this with other colors too. But here on the garage that I just painted on the left that was yellow ochre with moon glow. This one on the right is going to be yellow ochre with imperial purple. I just wanted to see how they'd compare. And a scene like this with a whole bunch of different buildings that have different colored roofs and different colored bricks are a great place to practice something like that. So you can find images that are in your stampy stash or you can go get this one from Trinity and try out a bunch of different things right next to each other at the same sitting. It's one thing to do it overall and you know you notice in one piece that these two colors blend this way and those two colors blend that way in another painting. But when you can see them all directly right in front of you it's really helpful. And I actually sometimes will put sticky notes right along my piece of paper whatever I'm doing my test paintings on and just jot down colors or initials of colors will quickly because you need to do this fast it needs to stay wet in order for the edges to blend and in the heat that I'm in right now it was really hard to get some of these to blend. So there you go if you're in a hot area just know you have to work really quickly. In the winter this is a lot easier. So here's a way to deliberately make a neutral now taking my burnt sienna and some French ultramarine blue which I know the two of them together will make a gray. And I'm going to mix three different consistencies of this color. This middle one is going to be for the sidewalk. So I want to have a sidewalk that was a little bit darker. And then I'm going to add a dollop of water to the pigment puddle and make a very light gray because I wanted my mail truck to have a light gray side to it with some highlights on the top of it and that sort of thing. So just use the same puddle a different consistency. Then I added more burnt sienna and more of the French ultramarine blue to make a darker almost black color for both the wheels and for the road. So depending on what thickness you give to the paint you can come out with different colors different amounts of light and shadow for each one of them while still knowing that in your head burnt sienna and like French ultramarine works even better than cobalt blue but even cobalt blue will work. And it's nice to know when you don't have all the colors in your palette which ones you might mix to get something to work. I set that one aside and worked on stamping a scene with this other set. And it's got all different kinds of parts to make a front porch scene. I chose just a few of them because I didn't want to be working around all kinds of tiny areas with these blends that I was trying to do wet and wet. But I did draw on the boards on the side of the wall and then on the porch itself with some dimension to them so they look like they're going back into space and then started doing the very same thing. It's even more important in a large area that you match the consistency between the colors because your blooms are going to show up even better here than they ever did on the small one. So this is for people who have practiced this a little bit and while you can see some blooms appearing in a few areas what I did was instead of trying to repair them I waited until it was dry and I took a baby wipe and just softened up some of those edges where I ended up with a few of the blooms. The floor I used really watered down paint and then just used a lot of water to spread it out so the floor looks lighter. And for the bench or for the swing I guess you call it I used very thick pigment and I used a dark indenthrone blue to blend with the burnt sienna so I'd get a little different color. It would be a little darker and then use some blues and browns to finish off the rest of the scene. So both of them I just mounted very simply on some card stock to make cards out of them. And here you can see I added my cute pillows with lots of sunshine hitting them so that they are that swing is the star of the card. So that's it for today's World Watercolor Month video. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you're doing lots of painting or coloring things that are water related if you're participating in this. It's lots of fun. I'm doing a whole lot over on Instagram which has been a blast and I will see you again very soon. You take care guys. Bye bye.