 Well, hey there, it's Sandy Allnock. And today I am going to be unboxing some art supplies from Altenew. First is their watercolor pencils. These are woodless watercolor pencils, a set of 24. And I am going to be coloring this image this weekend on the 11th as part of their anniversary celebration blog hop. So you'll want to subscribe to Ellen Hudson's channel or watch my social media because I'll link over to that when it goes live. And you'll get to see how that gets done. But I thought I'd do the swatching over here. So you guys could see what all the colors are, and I can talk about them a little bit. The woodless watercolor pencil means there's no wood in there. So you're not buying a stick of wood with a piece of lead in the middle. You're buying the whole stick of color, which means you're going to get a lot more color out of these long term. And that's always a good thing. These are also colors that are very bright. I kind of think of them as as kind of sweet store kind of colors, you know, like candy. They're not my colors. They're not my kinds of colors. I like neutrals a lot. I know a lot of you don't and it drives you bananas. But a lot of you love these these kind of really super sweet kinds of colors. Totally fine. Really big benefit of that is that I am giving them away because these are not colors that I will necessarily use a lot. I had fun playing with them for this project. And I will tuck in the mojo when I send them to you, but I'm going to give away the woodless watercolor pencils as well as the watercolors that are coming up in the other half of this video to two lucky winners. And you will get the swatch sheets along with them. And my swatch sheets are always a mess. I'm just going to tell you that if you haven't noticed, I don't worry about, you know, taping things off and making everything perfect. I don't worry if I get a little tiny bit of bleeding here and there because this is really just to give me the overall sense of color. These pencils, since they're all color, are very dark compared to what color you actually get on paper. So it is helpful in this particular instance to have a swatch sheet to go from because then you know what color you're getting when you use it. When I first laid out all the pencils to try to get them in the order that I wanted them on my little swatch sheet, I kept putting that really dark blue in the second row down with the black. I thought it was like a gray color and it wasn't, but it looks like it. It's a really, really dark color. So it's helpful to be able to see all these and see what kinds of colors you get out of them. You can also tell that they melt out really nicely out of all the watercolor pencils that I have. These are probably in the top group for melting out and turning fully into watercolor and not leaving residue behind. There are some like ink tents where you have to work really hard sometimes to get it to break down. You don't have to do that with these. I'm just going through this really quickly. It is sped up, but I'm going through it quickly and they're just working. They're just melting out and and having a good time. So there is the swatch sheet and that's over on my blog. If you wanted to download and print that or anything or save it in your Pinterest and whoever gets the set of pencils is going to get that swatch sheet as well. I will even sign it for you. How about that? This is the watercolor set and I've seen a lot of people using them and I thought, oh, they'd be interesting. But I knew that I wouldn't really be using them a lot. So I hadn't bought them and was tickled when they did send them to me for the blog hop so that I could get to play with them a little bit and see what they're all about. And they do come in these little half pans that have labels on them. Yes, that's a sticky label on top. It goes down both sides. And you could peel it off or what I did was just cut a hole in it. Just chopped it out. So whoever wins this can sit and peel all the labels off the side if you want. But there you go. The label that I put in the top, the little swatch sheet. I just cut a piece of watercolor paper so it would fit. Always use whatever watercolor paper you normally paint on. So this is actual arches watercolor paper. And I put a black line there so I could tell whether or not these colors were opaque or not. If they're opaque, then you'll see some dulling where that black is. And you can tell whether or not they're going to cover up your stamp lines. And it doesn't matter a whole lot, except your stamp lines may look a little grayed out. They don't look as sharp when they've got one of these kind of chalky paints over top, something that's got opacity to it. When I say chalky, if you've used the Gansai Tambi or even the Koi watercolors are even more chalky. That's the kind of thing that I mean that these have. They don't have the full transparency of the Daniel Smith colors that I use. And as you can tell, they're also these like super sweet candy store types of colors, not my color set at all. So I don't mind parting with these, even though they were fun to play with. They're not my look. And for lots of people, this is exactly what you're looking for. For your cards, you want all those rainbows totally perfect for you. So you can enter over on my blog to win these. And they're going to be fun to play with. That is for certain. So I'm just going to continue to swatch these out. There is that one green there that I'm painting right now that I kind of liked. That's my kind of color, something that feels very natural. And yeah, I'm I'm weird that way. I like the dull colors. I like the desaturated ones. These also have kind of funky names to them. They're very crafter type of names. They're not like like art paint kind of names. They're not artists colors. There is a lapis lazuli in here that looks nothing like lapis lazuli. But, you know, they're named for crafters. They're not named for fine artists. So I'm going to give them lots of grace on that. So there are the finished colors. And what I end up doing with them is writing all the names on them. I did a very bad job on this. So whoever gets this, I apologize because my pen just seemed to be really fat this day. But I've also had my hand injury and my hand was not doing all that well after all of this work that I've been doing. So yeah, you get the funky little cheat sheet for your palette. But what I do is put a piece of packing tape over it, fold the ends over the back side of it, put some double stick tape on it. So it will stick into the lid and then it stays in place and it's plastic. So it's not going to ruin it, you know, you'll you'll keep your colors. You don't really need it for this set, though, because the paints, unlike art paints, these actually look like the colors that they are. So they're going to not really need the swatch sheet there. So you could take that out and just use it for mixing wells for paint colors. So be sure to hop over to Ellen's channel and hit the subscribe button so that you can be notified when my video goes live on the 11th. And then you can also go over to my blog and enter for the giveaway of the pencils and or watercolors. Make sure you leave in that comment a note as to whether or not you want one or the other or whether you're OK with whatever you get, because I don't want to send you one if you already have it. I want to send it to somebody who hasn't got one yet. All right, I will see you guys again soon. You know me, I will be back here with more creativity in the very near future like next week. Take care and have a great weekend. Bye bye.