 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnach, artist and crafter here on YouTube and today I'm gonna do both watercolor and fake watercolor in Copic Marker. Colorado Craft Company just came out with some new stamps and they're big and bold, so they're giant stamps, there's pears, there's avocados, and there's pineapples. And then the one that we're gonna be working on today is the lemons. And I will have examples of each one of these done with the same technique at the end of this video. There's also these two tile stamps. I'm not using them on these cards, but there is a video on Ellen Hudson's channel where you can see a card made with those and I'll show you how to color the tiles so they look kind of realistic. But I'm gonna start with watercolor. My whole idea was to do something that felt very still life and I wanted a way to help people who are stampers to make that transition toward painting a still life type of painting. And what I've done is set my misty up and I'm just barely going to press so that I get just a haze of the image in my black, permanent ink. This is a waterproof ink and that means if everything else floats away because I'm putting so much paint in water, I'll still have that, I can still see it. And then on top of it, I'm using Distress Oxide Inks. I'm using a Wild Honey and a Peeled Paint. So I'm doing the lemon itself in the Wild Honey and the Peeled Paint is for the leaves. And underneath of that, remember, is the black. So if it goes crazy, if it goes AWOL, I still have that black under there. But it isn't going to be a big black outline because I want this to feel very painterly. Some of you are going to just look at this and think, you're out of your mind, I am not doing it. But I also want you to know, you can paint just this much of it. We just paint the lemon itself and not do the whole crazy background thing that I will be doing because that's for people who like that. If you don't like that, don't do it. So I have painted water in here, leaving that open space for a highlight and dropped in two yellows. My new Gamboge and then some Nickel Azo and just used a brush with just a little tiny bit of water on it to dance around that center section and create those highlights. I'm just doing random shapes in there for highlights. But now I'm going to do the scary part. I'm just painting water around the rest of the thing except where I want the white. And I'm strategically thinking about where I want the white. I want it on the tip of one leaf on the right and I want it on the edge of the leaf that's on the left. So I'm going to just paint around those areas and I'm letting all the paint go everywhere because I'm putting a background in. I know I'm going to cover all that up. And you might wonder why I want all of this bleeding to go around the outside. And that is so that the painting of the lemon doesn't feel like it's sandwiched on top of the background like a sticker because that's not a look that I particularly like for my own paintings. So I just kind of kept throwing color on here so I could get some color that would go from the image itself out into the background. And so if there are areas where my painting is going to transition from one area to another, I want to have those underlying colors. But I want them to be really soft. That's why all that water. For the shadows on the lemon, I wanted to have some wet paint. So I put a little bit more of the new Gamboge in the shadow area and then I'm taking purple. I know don't freak out, don't just hold your breath, it's going to be fine. And I'm going to drop this purple in my shadow areas. And I'm just going to let it do its thing. If it doesn't move, if you don't have enough paint underneath of it that's wet and you just get hard edges, add some more of the yellow to it to soften it. But mine is nice and wet. I made sure I put fresh wet paint right in that area so that all of that is going to continue to blend and just going to try not to touch that part any more than necessary. But you can see I can touch it with a little bit of that paint if I'm concerned that those edges are not going to feather. You need those little feathery edges. That's what's going to tell you it's going to dry beautifully. So now it's, I shouldn't say completely dry, it's not shiny anymore. And the shiny is what's going to make everything bleed like mad. I want some soft edges so I didn't wait until it was completely, completely dry just till it wasn't shiny. And now I'm taking really thick mixes of the paint, dark greens, just mixing a bunch of dark greens and then I mixed puddle of the purple and I have imperial purple in mine. You can see how dark you can make watercolor. You can get really contrasty with it. I know a lot of watercolors love that very soft ethereal look and that is great for some things and I like a really strong contrast so I really, really do. But what I can see as I'm doing this painting is that black under outline. Even though the distress oxide ink has disappeared, I can basically follow along that black outline. But since it's so light, it's so pale in there, I can change it. If my brush happens to flick over a little further, I can just shave a little bit off of the leaf, shave a little bit off of the lemon. I can adjust things a little bit if I need to in order to make it look right and not have to worry about, oh my goodness, my brushwork. I messed up my leaf. I didn't hold my brush straight, whatever it is and I can fix those things. The other thing that I want to do before all this dries is to take a brush that's clean and just damp for the most part and I'm touching some of the edges so that a little bit of that color from the background encroaches into the lemon and I want the lemon to encroach a little bit maybe into the background. I want both of them to push into each other so I get some really soft edges around each one. Now every time you do this, it's going to be different because every time it's going to depend on what dried first and when you try to move color and when you loosen things up. So it's always going to be different. I'm going to show you a couple examples in just a minute but here I'm going to try to see if I can knock that leaf back so it just becomes less important. It's a supporting character and I wanted it to kind of disappear into the darkness behind the lemon and then I added a little bit of color and tried to pull some of that purple color down onto that leaf on the right so that I could get some just kind of meshing into the background with this. Instead of everything looking like it was a sticker or a very sharply cut out on the edges and that sort of thing. So here are three different versions. You can see each one has little different things that I like in one versus another. Some of them have softer edges in one area than another but they all make great cards and a lot of these new Colorado Craft Company stamps have sentiments that fit onto the fruits whether they're horizontally or vertically stamped so I just stamped those on each of those cards. Now some of you are not watercolors. I get that some of you want the control of Copic markers so let's see what it's going to take to do something similar but in Copic. Over on Ellen Hudson's channel I do have a much more detailed and a little bit slower coloration of all of these four fruit stamps so if you want to go watch that one you can apply the same technique after you color each one of the fruits that I'm going to show you here for the background and all the colors are listed over there and everything. But I am basically taking some purple colors to make shadows that I go over top of with the yellow to bring them back into feeling more like a yellow color. Purple and yellow are complementary colors to each other. That's why the purple is what I added when I water colored it as well because that gives me that natural desaturated color when the two of them mix with each other and I can just keep going over all these colors over and over again all I want for right now for this first pass and I say first pass you might think okay you're done no I'm not going to be done there's going to be more added to it because what I'm going to do to the background is going to put all this coloring in the foreground into context and I wanted to at least get the main color done first. Some people would choose to do the whole background first so that then they don't have to keep guessing and going over the lemon and the leaves again. I don't really care one way or the other it doesn't matter a whole lot to me but some people will prefer to do that and that's perfectly fine. So just going to keep coloring away on my crazy leaves and I'm trying to create those same shapes that I did with the watercolor. The background now I'm just using a whole bunch of different dark greens you can use dark greens dark blues dark purples you can mix them together like put some purple in with your greens because it's color and color as we saw on the watercolor one I mixed purple and green in the background you can do that here. I'm going to use some blue greens in here and some reddish greens and some brighter greens and just combining different colors and if you don't like the color that it came out just go over it with something else this bottom section came out really bright green because of the green that I chose I can just color over it and dull that back down again so it pushes it all back into the background and now you can see that the lemon looks really pale doesn't it compared with the rest of the image so I want to add something to it. BV02 normally feels like a dark kind of blue violet but it wasn't dark enough for this background so I went to a BV13 I know hold your breath it's gonna be fine we're just going for a ride everybody's just hold on to your seats and then I'm going to take the next color down that BV11 and I'm gonna soften it and just knock it back a little bit for the next stage as I start moving from the darkest shadows over to the mid-ground type of colors because remember I can take my yellow and go right over this and pull it right back into feeling like a lemon again it's just the the joy of color that you could just keep doing that with Copic markers you can pull all those purples back into you know feeling like they belong there on that image but they give you a much darker and more neutral kind of shadow on them which is really nice these leaves I wanted to knock back entirely they're like way too bright way too cheerful they need to just melt into the background so I'm just gonna pull some of the same greens that I used in the background and add them to my leaves and just start to darken them and this is how I tend to work back and forth on images to move them from being too bright in one area to being darker in another and getting a good balance so that the image looks like it's a hole over on the blog I have still pictures of all of the cards that I made as I was working on this project and I did each one of them in both watercolor and in Copic marker so you can see how all of these different stamps can accomplish the same kind of a feeling of being a still life picture and I give you a couple notes about each one and some things to consider about it so that is all I have for you today except a special treat I told you there was a video over on Ellen Hudson's channel this is a sneak peek of what's over there I've made four different cards with each one of these and give you a lot more detail about the colors and everything to use for each one of these fruits so get busy click those links in the doobly-doo and I will see you again very soon with another video take care thanks for watching