 Well, hi there! I am Sandy Almok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to work with the Gil-Friend stamp set from my favorite things and make a thank-you card or a thank-you card, as the case may be. And I have stamped a row of fishies onto some rough watercolor paper, and this is from Arches. And I really do love this watercolor paper. It's got steeper hills and valleys than does the cold press. Which means the watercolor moves almost better and more and differently. And you often can get that rough watercolor edge that you might not be able to achieve on other papers. The hot press is the flattest of the papers and then the rough is the I guess the bumpiest. So that's what I'm using here. It does take a misty often to stamp the images because you have to stamp them a few times with your waterproof ink in order to make sure that you actually get it stamped really well. And when I'm adding color, I like to mix my color on the paper as much as I can. And when I do things like that fish, I kind of just sit and watch it for a minute and then allow the paint to move where it's going to move. And if I start to see that it's not blending the way I want to or it's starting to develop a hard edge, I can keep an eye on it and move it around with a just barely damp brush. And that means like wipe it off on a paper towel or something so that there's really not any extra color or water that you're putting down. You can even lift up color like I did right there with a dry it out as much as you can and suck some extra color out of it if you get too much. And that's where patience really comes in big time in water coloring. If you watch my channel very much, you know that I usually have a lot of trouble waiting to paint the next thing that's right next to something. And everything starts to bleed because I have zero patience whatsoever. Well, on a card like this, the fun thing is I can work on sections of each one of the fish, move on to a different fish. By the time I get back to the first fish, it'll be dry and I can add the fins without any risk of having any issues with the colors bleeding together, which is kind of fun. So it makes my impatience work a little bit better for me when I have a lot of images like this. And I decided to do just this grouping across the middle of the card, let the top and bottom be white just for something different. Instead of filling the whole thing, it draws some extra focus to the fish themselves in their little school going back and forth swimming across the card. And not on all of these did I remember to leave a white highlight, but leaving that kind of a white almost a horizontal apostrophe shape on a round image like these makes them look a little bit rounder. And if you like this stamp set and want to see more ideas with it, I'm probably going to be using it a little bit more during this summer on my Instagram and Facebook and stuff. Because I'm going to be using this, this and my other fishy stamps to do more samples all summer long of the underwater mini course that just launched over at art-classes.com in which you get to learn to make fantastical scenes. This is not going to be a fantastical scene, but at the end of the video I'll show you one of the crazy scenes that I've made with this particular stamp set. So you'll be able to see that. And that's all in Copic Marker. I have not mastered doing a lot of these complex scenes in watercolor as of yet, or at least how to teach them in watercolor. Sometimes I can achieve them, but it can be kind of painful to try to do in watercolor. So for now I'm sticking with mostly Copic and we'll see maybe, maybe a little pencil at some point. But I love watercolor, but it can be really challenging to add scenery and all kinds of things. So I don't often do crazy backgrounds with my watercolors. So there's my favorite phthalo blue. Got to love those phthalos. Really strong colors in all the different phthalos that there are, but phthalo blue, red shade and green shade are particularly gorgeous. And of course we have to have a pink fish, because why not. All of these colors, by the way, are in my dot card. So if there's any of these that you're like, wow, that's a really cool color. I'd like to try that out for just a couple bucks. If you're shopping at Ellen Hudson anyway, you can add one of my dot cards to your shopping cart and I will have a link to it in the description down below. Just add one of the dot cards and then you get to try a dot of paint, which is enough to do many cards. Just a little dot. You just take your brush and touch the dot card surface, the dot of paint and paint with it. So it's not a whole tube investment, but you can try out the colors and see if you like them, see how they mix with other colors that you already have and which ones you might like to have in your collection. So lots of these are of course from my main palette, which is the one that I use most of the time here on YouTube, because I don't want to have all of, I own probably 75% of the Daniel Smith colors. Part of it was because they stocked me up at the beginning when we first developed a relationship and I don't get paid other than that one bunch of paint, they don't pay me to do any work for them at this point, we're just friends and they share my stuff with their audience and they hear about me worldwide. So for those of you in countries other than the United States or even in the United States, if you have gone up to Daniel Smith People at a booth and mentioned my name, thank you, it makes them think that I'm famous even though I'm not. So there you go. But anyway, I have tons of their colors and I'm always playing around with different ones, like even when I picked my favorite ones, there was no way on earth for me to have played enough with every single color to have completely ruled in or out all the colors. So eventually I may change up some of my colors who knows and do something different, but I picked colors that I thought were particularly appropriate for stampers. So if you're looking for a good first color collection, those are ones that I really love a lot. Now I tried something different on this one, I wanted some bubbles all over this card. So what I did was take a bunch of dots of water first, and I wanted to see if this technique could work. And you can decide whether it did or not. I dropped in a little bit of turquoise paint in each one, just a tiny, tiny bit because I thought maybe they'll dry looking like water drops wouldn't that be cool? Well, they didn't. So after they all dried, just put a little bit of glossy accents over top of them. So it would look intentional rather than look like I gave my card measles. And instead it does look like bubbles, but they actually do show up a little bit better with a little color in them than they had prior to that. So if I've done cards before that just had regular old glossy accents and no color underneath it, and these do stand out definitely more. So I just stuck this onto a card base and called it done, no other embellishing other than adding the thank you stamp set. So if you're interested in the crazy backgrounds class, go check out the underwater class at art-classes.com. This is one of the samples of one of the backgrounds using this particular stamp set. And that's about it for me for today. Come back again for some more World Watercolor Month coming up because all month along I'm either watercoloring or coloring water. And I'll see you guys on social media on Instagram and Facebook and then back here. See ya. Bye.