 Well, hi there, my name is Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I bring you another in the Mermaid series today. I'm going to be making mermaid paper or technically just making a background for a card with mermaids. All week we're doing mermaids because there's so many great mermaid stamps. I combine them all into one happy little week full of swimming ladies. And this one was one that was inspired, I guess, by a lot of fabrics that I've seen. There's so much with pineapples out there. And her bottom, the way her fins are drawn and her body is drawn, just reminded me of a pineapple for some reason. And there was a fabric that I saw on, I think, Pinterest that inspired the colors and the feel for this. So I stamped a pattern with the same image. And I tried a bunch of different ways. I'll give you some tips on what I learned, which is that the Misty didn't help me because it made it so regular that I had to do too much math in order to figure out how to jog them down and over. And that was just more work than my little pea brain could do because it's summer and things are supposed to be easy. So instead I started with one mermaid and kind of just jogged up to the left and did the next mermaid and then went straight down and over and just started moving around until I got them stamped the same direction and away from each other in a relatively even distance from each other. Some of them are a little further from each other, but I was going to put color in between them anyway, so I didn't worry about it too much. Now for my coloring, I'm using Inktense pencils and the paper here is the Kansan XL student grade watercolor paper. And if you're new to watercolor pencils and things, sometimes you'll find that the student grade paper is smoother, so it's going to be easier to deal with. You may, if you use a more textured paper like I usually like to do, you just have to work a little bit harder to get some of those colors to soften out and to become more watercoloring. But smoother papers will do that a little more automatically for you. So I'm just throwing all my colors on here and I'm going to just do a light coat of a green color in between because I wanted an overall color to this as well. So it feels like that sort of a fabric look and almost vintage in the field that I have for it overall. With any of these kinds of things where you're coloring a whole lot of the same image or there's repeating images throughout things, I did this with both the pencil and with the watercolor is focus your eye on one thing, like first do the faces and color all the faces or watercolor all the faces first. And that way your eye gets trained to sort of see that shape and how it repeats itself across the image. I'm trying to focus on all of the faces and starfish and the jellyfish because they're all about the same color. The faces have some shading in them. So there's a little darker brown off to one side on their faces and bodies. The others just have some light wash over them of that color. But since I'm doing all the same color, I don't have to constantly be changing and cleaning my brush so I can move around and just do that color across the entire background first and then just switch to another color. I'm going to heat set in between because I don't want any of the other colors that I use that might touch that skin tone color and start bleeding into it. So you can run around and heat set in between or just let it air dry so that you can switch to another color and have no danger of that bleeding going on. So I'm going to run around and do all of the greens. Now her green body, I use three different greens on there. I think I could have probably done with a lot less when you have a lot of inking, like a lot of that little detailed image drawn. You don't necessarily need as much in terms of color shift or color change. So I think I spent more time than I probably needed to in creating a couple of different shades there on that very busy, busy area. She's got blue hair, which is the pop of blue. That was one of the things I saw in that fabric that I thought was really pretty and it was all these rich, warm colors and then all of a sudden this sort of tropical blue color, which works very well for mermaids. And just water all that out. And then started working on the green. Now, the green and the blue, I thought would be nice if they actually did mix together a little bit. So I didn't heat set in between them because I thought if the hair bled into the green background, that wasn't going to hurt anything. And you can see how easily you can water this out. Now, this is going four times the speed. I know I realize that, but it's summertime and we are all busy. So I did not want to have you sit here watching the same thing over and over again for ages. So this is spent up. But it's really easy to do with watercolor pencils. So here's the finished card, which you can see how much richer color the camera does not pick up quite that beauty and richness. And I added a sentiment from the same companies as both from Impression Obsession. After I finished this card, I saw that there was a stamp from Impression Obsession that says, if your thighs touch your one step closer to being a mermaid. And I'm going to link you to that one in the doobly-doo as well, because I think it's hilarious and I've got to get that one so I can make another one of these cards and use that sentiment on it because it's hilarious. So if you've missed the other ones that have gone out this week in this mermaid series, you can click on the three above. The rest of the week will be the two on the bottom. In addition to today's video, you can hit the subscribe button so you get them all delivered to you. And if you're watching this later on past Mermaid Week, then you can watch any one of these and I'll see you guys later. Bye.