 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnock, and today I'm going to do some very easy inked watercolor lilacs. This beautiful stamp set from Colorado Craft Company has a lilac branch, some beautiful sentiments for birthday cards, and I'm going to use a sentiment about hope. And I'm going to paint with inks and a little tiny bit of watercolor. You don't even have to have watercolor to do this, but I am going to. And I think I can call it a mixed media card if it uses that right. So I've used the Queen for a Day ink from Catherine Pooler and noticed the masking for that little flower at the bottom, because I stamped it once already, was just two sticky notes. Don't worry about on something like this, whether or not you get a hard edge, or if some of the little flowers on the edge stamp over top of something else, because this is going to be such a cacophony of little blossoms that it won't matter. You can cover that up real easily, easiest masking ever. And I'm just going to take my brush that just has water on it and touch it to the ink. And you can see it turns into watercolourable nests. You don't even have to own any watercolours in order to watercolor. You could use a brush like this, it's the silver black velvet number eight that I'm using, and I love the point on this that you can get for stamps. And that's why I recommend this brush line for crafters. If you're going to only get one, then you might want to get an eight. If you're going to get several and you do backgrounds, then I would suggest a 12. And if you do 80, 80, 80 bitties, then yeah, you could get a six. But I generally recommend an eight as the smallest brush that I use, because with watercolor, you don't want to get super tight. You don't want to get, like, if you want to get that tight, go get your pencils out because it's just not the way watercolour is built. Watercolour is built to flow. And if you use a bigger brush than you think you need, then it will help you to loosen up more because it's a big brush. You can't get lost in too much of that detail. So you can see all I'm doing is putting watercolor or water on half of each one of the floral little petals. That's it. It's really that simple. And the color in this is a beautiful purple. It does split out into a little bit of other colors. So you get a little variety in the purple here, which is nice. And just make your way across all of it. Now you could do just one branch of the lilac, but I struggled with this stamp a little bit. And I'll tell you why. The way that the leaves are drawn in here, if I was trying to have this purple outline to everything, I really struggled with getting the green leaves to look right. So by stamping two of them and only having a snippet of the green leaves show, I hid the fact that I couldn't figure out what the leaves were supposed to be doing. I couldn't tell from the drawing where they were supposed to be hanging down, et cetera. I probably should have just gone and looked at somebody else's video and see if someone else figured out the structure where those leaves were. But I love lilacs and I grow lilacs in my backyard. So I happen to know that they're just kind of a crazy cacophony of leaves and color and stuff mushing together. I can't wait until my lilac bush blooms. I always love to bring the lilacs into the house and have that lovely smell. So down here in the bottom is the place where I was really struggling. That little pair of leaves down there, I think that's what they're supposed to look like, but it's hard to tell from the stamp lines. But when I've filled most of the page, filled three quarters of it with the flowerettes from the lilacs, like it doesn't really matter if I get those leaves right. That's just a little green accent here and there. And this is sap green that I'm using from my watercolors. So the sap green, you could also use any of your green inks that you use in your normal stamping stuff that are water-based. If you have Distress Oxide inks or other Catherine Pooler inks, I don't own very many green inks, so I decided to use my watercolors. I'm also adding a tiny drop, just a tiny, tiny bit of a watered-down thailu blue to some of the flowerettes. And that's going to give me a little more variety in the color. Now you could do that with a pink. Just make them a little bit more on the pink side. And this just adds a little more sparkle to the coloring instead of just having that purple color alone. But you could certainly do without and be just fine. So it's a super easy technique. And the stamps, links, and the inks, and the colors, and everything are in the doobly-do down below, as well as over on the blog. And if you would like to see more on watercoloring flowers, there's a link to a whole page with a ton of watercolor flower videos that I've done. Thanks so much for joining me for this video. Click the Like button. If you could, it helps the channel out. And I will see you again very soon with another video. Bye-bye.