 Well, hi there. My name is Sandy Olak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm calling this video The Great Dog Pumpkin. I don't know if you've seen The Great Pumpkin by Charlie Brown, but this is The Great Dog Pumpkin here with a Lawn Fawn stamp set. These are so cute. I love these dogs. I did some fancy stamping and masking with them. And if you haven't seen my masking video, a lot of people have found that to be very helpful. And I use that technique to create the scene that I'm using here, along with my misty. And just stamp the things in front first and then the things behind afterward. What I'm doing is coloring with my watercolor pencils. And you can see I'm kind of scribbling along, and I'm not worrying about every bit of coloring being absolutely perfect. And you'll see why as soon as I hit it with the water. These are the Albrecht Durer pencils that I'm using today. And on each of the dogs, I wanted them to feel a little bit different from each other. Didn't want them to feel like they were exactly the same. So I added some spots onto this one little wiener dog so that I could give him some black spots. And with any of the animals that you've got in your stamp collection, always consider making some adjustments to them so that they look like animals that you know. It's a whole lot more fun that way. And I am filling in all my colors. And you can see I'm using a dark shadow color for my shadows. A lot of folks will use just one color for their shading. But I wanted to show you how you can do this with multiple colors without the watercolor kind of blending all the colors together. Because that's one challenge that I found as I was teaching all summer with watercolor pencils, that a lot of people had a big aha moment when I realized that if you're used to taking your brush and touching it to the darkest area first, all the color mushes into one color. So I'm going to show you when I get my water out how to do this so you retain some of that shading. So I'm coloring everything in. And I'm sharpening my pencils pretty good in between. And I'm using the cold press paper. This is not the rough. The rough is a little bit challenging to use with watercolor pencils. But I'm using the the pencils in a very sharp fashion. And the pencil sharpeners also listed in the description if you want a good one because I did find one good one that I've shared with lots of people. And many of you have said you were skeptical because it's not an inexpensive one. But as soon as you sharpened your pencil, you went, oh, now I see what she's talking about. So I share that again with you because yes, it's important when you want a good sharp pencil. So I'm going to add a little bit of purple color now to all of my browns and oranges. And that's the color that I decided would be one of my accents. Get my mustard on the dog. And now let's jump in with the brush. I'm using a silver brush. This is the number six. And even though I often recommend a four or a six, I do find that having a larger brush can often be a really big help. As I probably, I hopefully have mentioned before, I may have mentioned it to people in person and not as much here on YouTube. But I watched a video where the person said in order to get looser with watercolor, she found that using a brush bigger than what she thought she needed was helping her to become looser with her watercolor. And that seems to have helped me a lot as well. So I'm using a six, almost as my tiniest brush nowadays and switching to larger brushes as I'm able. So however big you're able to afford, I would just recommend trying a larger brush if you can. Just add another to your order next time you place one and try it and see what happens. So here you notice that I did my yellow first, I watercolored the yellow first, and then started touching the orange and I didn't touch the brown yet. And now I'm going in to touch the brown. I'm going to get some blending between them. And I can, once I've got all the colors in there, then I can start moving the color around in a controlled fashion. But I'm, I guess I used to and I don't know how many of you guys do, but I used to start with the darkest color and then paint toward the light. But if you start with the light and then paint toward the dark, you can retain some of that light area. And sometimes you don't even actually need to do strokes. And I'll show you some of that as we go along. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit further here. And keep on the painting, just adding my water in the lightest area, and then going into the darker areas. Whatever pencils you use will determine how much water to use. I find that a good amount of water is usually really helpful. If you use a damp brush, you're not going to get much to move at all. And here's one of those places where you can see that I added the water in the light gray, and then I'm tapping into the black area. And that's going to help to keep the dog space from getting all black. You can see it there better than you could even in the pumpkins. So hopefully that was helpful. But anyway, depending on the the kind of pencils you're using, you may need more or less water. And depending on the kind of paper, you may need more or less water. So experiment with it. Try it out on some scratch paper, try a few swatches or even stamp a few images and try them and see what works best for you in that particular image so that you can kind of know by the time you're ready to go to your finished card how much water you want to try to use. But it's helpful to to use a good bit because that pigment floats up off the surface of the paper. If you have a smoother paper, then you may find a different amount of water is required or not required so that you may need to change depending on what kind of paper you're using, as well as what kind of brand of pencils that you're using. But these favor castells are really fun. And here I had some brown that was left on my brush. So I decided to add a little bit of shadow to each of the dog bones. Now the background is going to be a whole lot of fun. And while everything else is drying, I thought I would start with a layer of the glowing color. So I'm going to have a color glowing around each one of these so the little magical bones are going to be flying through the air as well as a glow around the moon. And so I'm using the same kind of purplish color that I used on the little cape on my little caped puppy. And then just going to add water. When you want to blend something into white, and I don't necessarily want to blend it into white here, but I'm showing you this so you can see that, just add a lot of clean water around it. Every time my brush leaves the camera here, you can just guarantee that I'm dumping my brush into some clean water and bringing clean water back to the image. If you're bringing dirty water back with you, then you're going to end up with a dirty image. You're going to be mixing your colors. And you'll also notice one of the things that I did during this whole thing was to color just kind of bounce back and forth with my brush and not color areas that were right next to each other that were wet, because I didn't want to pull from one color into another. So while everything else is drying, I'm trying to color the sky, just trying to manage how much of everything I'm doing so that I can keep working. And I'm trying to stay away from any of the areas that are damp. So I'm staying away from that pinkish area. You're going to see something in a few minutes that will show you what happens when you start coloring over something that's not dry. I tend to not like to heat set things in between anymore when I'm doing watercolor or watercolor pencil work. It just does something to the paper that I'm not really thrilled with. But you can see right around the moon. As I touch, I'll go back up there in just a second. But right close to the moon, you can see a shift in that blue color. So as soon as I saw that blue color starting and right there, you can tell there's a little lighter blue. That's where some of that water had been. So I'm being a little bit careful around there, because if you color with watercolor pencil over top of water, sometimes you can never move that color again. And I don't want to get to that point. I want to be able to move it all. But since I was plowing through, I decided to just keep plowing through and be really gentle with it and cross my fingers that I didn't have to start the video all over again if I messed this up. So I'm going to add a little more purple, that darker purple color that I used on the little puppy's cape and put a little of that color in the sky. And everything else is pretty much dry enough now that I can start doing my water coloring. I'm starting with my lightest areas and keep going in with clean water to add to them. Because if I pick that brush up and I move it right back over those areas right next to the moon, I'm going to end up dragging more of the dark blue right in there. There's a bunch of different ways that you can do a background. Here I'm just kind of tapping the water. Once I get a flood of water in there, just a total puddle, I'm tapping to move the color around. And depending on how dark or how light you want that color, then this might work for you if you're doing a lighter sky. Watercolor pencil and watercolor in general will always dry a little bit lighter than what you put it on as. So if you let it air dry, you'll notice it will end up getting lighter. But you can do a sky like this. I'm just kind of moving the color around with the brush and trying to clear off some areas. And I'm watching where any of the hard edges start to appear as things start to dry. So you want to keep an eye on it and just start to keep your eye moving around different areas so you can control them if they start getting weird on you. Now once it did dry, I decided that I was going to add more to it. You can see how much it dried back. And I wanted a richer sky. I didn't want to have just that really super light sky. So since this is watercolor pencil, I thought I'm going to leave it looking like watercolor pencil. And I started going over a lot of this and I used a very sharp pencil. And I used a couple of my blues that I'd already used as well as switch to an even darker blue here for the sky. And then just kept going in, you know, with my very sharp pencil into that texture so I could try to make it smooth. And you can add more water to it again and make it just another layer on top. But I was really liking how this ended up looking with the texture. I thought the texture was pretty cool. It took a while to do this. So I'm not going to tell you this is not for the faint of heart. It's not something that I recommend to anybody who doesn't have patience. But I loved how this one came out because I was able to really control with the pencil and not worry so much about the brush and the blending and the hard edges and the soft edges and everything. It's a background that is kind of behind the image. And the little dogs are what everybody's really going to be looking at. So I added some gel pen stars in the background and a sentiment on the bottom. A couple layers of paper on the card. And it's a nice flat one that I can send easily through the mail for Halloween. Wishing you a treat filled day. So I hope you enjoyed that. On the left is a comparison of a couple different brands of well I should say a bunch of different brands of watercolor pencil that I did recently. And the other two are different watercolor pencil videos that I have done if you're interested in seeing some more of those. And you can also hit the subscribe button if you have not yet because I put out lots of videos and have lots more I'd love to share with you. And I will see you next time. Take care. Bye bye.