 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I am doing two videos today for the Ellen Hudson blog hop. This one is a watercolor scene, the other one was Copic. They're both cruise ship themed, so this one is a snorkel scene with utterly awesome stamp set, these otters and sentiments, as well as the otter wear, which holds a lot of other different pieces that you can use to make a scene. And I love to make scenes. So this is the masking paper that I use, you could call it also masking tape, it comes in a couple different sizes from Judykins, and it's basically a giant sticky note roll, and you can trim out your image after you've stamped it on there. That's going to allow me to stamp over top of it, and this part will be protected so it won't go through and mess up my image, and I can make things look like they're in front of and behind each other. The first thing I wanted to do, there's a little kelp heart, and I wanted the kelp heart to be second in this scene, so I wanted it to be second behind this little tiny otter. So I'm going to mask out the otter, I also have that little piece that masks out the top of the heart, and I'll show you why in just a second, because I want the heart to be right behind the little otter, and then the big otter to be behind that. So I'm going from the front to the back when I do my masking. So if I peel that off, you can see now the otter's ears and head can peek out over the top there and not have that green ink behind them. However, in order to make sure it doesn't go over top of the green, I have to mask out the little heart. So I've got the rest of that piece of paper that I already had stamped for a mask. You can ink that up, press it down, and voila. And this is the misty, if you have not seen a misty before, it's a really helpful stamping tool. Lots of different things that it does. Positioning is just one of them. But here I've got a scrap of my masking paper, and I'm going to stamp my little otter, and this is in waterproof ink. I'm using some Ranger Jet Black Archival ink. I'm stamping him over here. I want him to be behind a little coral scene, because I'm going to do a coral scene on the right and bottom of my card. So I'm going to take all the little stamps from the two stamp sets that are seashells and different kinds of kelp and greenery and stuff and sentiments. I'm just going to try to figure out what my seam is going to be. Some people might figure this out first, and I recommend it, but I didn't do it until I started getting my stuff together here. So, you know, do as I say and not as I do. So I've simplified my sentiment a little bit. I've got all my stamps in there, and now I can stamp it a second time in the same place. I didn't get really good impression the first time, so I can stamp it two or three times since it's in this misty and fix any bad stamping because I'm a notoriously bad stamper. The next thing I'm doing is taking a Sharpie, which is waterproof, and I'm going to go around my kelp heart and just trace around those outside leaves and finish off any ones that got cut off when I did my stamping, and I'll add my water that's at the top of my card and then start drawing in more kelp, more plants, more rocks, and these can just be really simple shapes. So don't let it intimidate you. I did a video previously on watercoloring rocks, and lots of you tried it and it was great. If you try any of my techniques, I always love it. If you tag me on Instagram and let me know, I'd love to see what you make that's inspired by one of my videos because that's why I do it to inspire you to actually create something, not just watch a video, but go and make something yourself. The paints that I'm using are Daniel Smith watercolors, and I have all of my primatex that I own in one palette so that when I want to paint something that I want a lot of texture and granulation for, they're all there at my fingertips. So what I decided since a lot of you haven't seen all the colors that I would just put the color names up on the screen. Hopefully I got them all right because I was trying to talk while I was painting and tell myself which color was which. I didn't do this very systematically, so I hope I got everything right. But I wanted to be able to show them to you in case you want to pick out a color or two to add to your collection. In addition to adding just a particular paint color to your collection, you could get a dot card. There's a dot card that has a lot of different colors on it, and I will link the dot card in the description down below. The one that has the full set or almost full set of paints has all of the primatex on it, so you could try out a little swatch of each yourself and see in person what they look like before you go investing in tubes of color. So that's a great way to try out different colors without doing too much expense-wise to your budget. And with a lot of these paints, I'm using thicker paint, shall I say? I'm not sure if thicker paint is the right way to say it because it is watercolor, but using more pigment versus less pigment because you can change the value of the color based on how much water you add to it. So if you have something that's mixed with a lot of water, it's going to be a paler color. It gives you a lot more options for what it's going to look like than something like Copic Marker because Copic always comes out the same color out of your pen as long as you've refilled it with the same color. Then does watercolor because watercolor, you can change it based on what you mix it with in terms of other colors as well as how much water. And you can see here all of my colors are starting to do their little granulation. Granulation is something that the primatex do. These are made from very natural pigments from rocks and they do granulate, meaning they get this really interesting texture. Some of them are more textured than others and that does mean also since they're from natural pigments, they're not going to be bright colors. They're going to be very earthy types of colors and I tend to like to use these all together in a scene like this because it's going to give it a very different feel than other watercolors might. I'm going to take one of my favorite greens, green appetite, and just go over top of each one of these leaves, going right over top of the ink that I already had in there. It's not going to hurt anything. And re-emphasize the green and then that also ties them together for the extra leaves that I had to draw on myself. And then I'll start painting in some of the greenery around the scene. So I'm going to use some serpentine green as well. Serpentine is a lighter green. I kind of think of it as a snakey green since it's got the word serpent in it. The green appetite is much darker type of green. Most of the colors that have the word genuine at the end of their name, by the way, are the primatex. I don't know if they all do. I think most of them do if not all of them. I shouldn't say that because I'm not positive it's a rule but I know that all the ones that I have in that palette of mine all have the word genuine at the end of them. Now the background here I'm painting in kyanite and I will also add some Sleeping Beauty turquoise to it. However my camera, lucky me, decided to poop out in the middle of doing this. So you only get the first layer but I did add a second layer as it dried so I could have two colors in here and deepen the color at the bottom. So I have a darker blue. This kyanite has a really amazing sparkle to it which is gorgeous. If you paint night skies and things it's just delicious. But here I've blended it into that Sleeping Beauty turquoise at the top so they get some really interesting color. Now the rest of this is going to be hematite all my little otters and hematite is kind of a grayish brownish color so I'm putting more pigment in the darker areas and more water in the other areas and as it dries I'll add more pigment to some of those areas if I want to intensify the color in them. As I said you can just take more pigment onto your brush to make them darker or you can just add layers. I find it more successful if I have layers than if I just try to load my brush up with heavy pigment. When you try to use a lot of pigment at once that's what they call mass pigment. That's a technique you would use more for acrylic. You want heavy pigment on your brush so you pick up a lot of color. In watercolor if you do that the paper might crack so if you bend the paper afterward watercolor is not meant to be put in in mass tone. It's meant to put in with water. It's supposed to blend and move with water which is one of the reasons why it works so much better to do layer after layer. It takes a little more patience but it also gives you a lot of flexibility because you can change things as you go based on what it looks like on the piece of paper. So if you decide you want to have more paper showing than add more water. If you want more pigment showing add another layer of pigment. You can also futz around with blends and things a whole lot easier. So here's my finished card. I just glued it onto a card base very simple straight up so a one layer card if you don't count the fact that this got glued onto the card base. It's a whole lot of fun. I hope you've enjoyed the little underwater ambient sound we've had during this video. If you want to see the other cruise ship video you can click on the screen to get that one. You can hit that like button click on my face to subscribe to my channel and I will see you guys later be sure to head over to my blog as well to enter for a prize in the blog hop because you know that's always fun. See you later. Bye bye.