 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to do a little prehistoric watercolor. I don't know if they actually did watercolor in the Dinosaur Times, but we're going to pretend. I'm using this cute set from Reverse Confetti called No Tomorrow. Party like there's no tomorrow, or there's also a wishing you a dynamite day stamp, uh, stamp sentiment that you can use with it, or you can combine it with other stamps that you have, and I've got them stamped onto some watercolor paper. And what I'm going to do is start with the background because then I can color over the edges of some of these dinosaurs and not threaten accidentally pulling some of that color into my background. And I'm going to start by making just this little point of a volcano, and then some mountains on either side, and I'm going to let them go kind of up and around above the sentiment, so they make sort of a bowl around the sentiment. And I'm careful to leave some white places there because I want this to feel like there's a lot of light in the background, and it's going to get darker and darker toward the foreground. I did a card similar to this with Copics on Instagram a while back, and enough people asked about it. The same idea applies in Copic Markers is to just use some lighter colors in the background and then let it get darker toward the front. Now, with watercolor, it's going to change color. So the background is going to get really light, probably lighter than I wanted it to, but I didn't want to go back into it and add all that much more in that distant stuff. So be aware of that and make sure that you understand that your color is going to change as it dries. That's just what watercolor does. But as it gets toward the front, we want the color to get a little bit darker. So I'm adding more pigment. The stuff in the background was really just letting some colors from my palette that were just left over from another project, just using up that stuff. If you mix up everything that's left on your palette from another project, you'll usually find that you have a gray or brown there and you can tint it a little bit. You add a little bit of blue and it'll go more gray. You add a little bit more of a red or a yellow. You can push it more toward brown and use up that little extra bit of paint before you clean your palette. I'm an obsessive palette cleaner, but every once in a while I do like to use up the excess that's just sitting there. So the bottom part, I'm just going to let it dry and let that be a solid area for the moment. But these areas in between, if I want to lighten them up, I'm going to use a thirsty brush, which is basically a dry brush to pull some of that color out. So if you end up with areas that are too dark, then just wipe that kind of off and just let the brush carry those colors away. While I wait for things to dry, I'm going to add a little bit of a bluish gray up there in the sky with a little, a few little clouds right around my volcano. So the volcano looks like it's maybe kind of blowing up a little bit, but just a little light sky up there because really I want the focus to be on the dinosaurs. The background is just letting the background be there behind these critters because I want the dinosaurs to be the main focus here. But you know, you got to put a sky in. You can make it all kinds of crazy if you want it to really look like the the volcano is blowing up. It can have oranges and reds and things in it. The bottom part is dry enough now that I can start painting in my dinosaurs. And I'm going to use some really nice strong color on them, not going to worry too much about shading them. I just want to put some fun color in and this, this color here is green appetite, which is one that has some beautiful granulation. Watch the granulation start to happen. It just breaks down as it dries and breaks into like this really interesting texture, which I thought would be super fun for dinosaurs. And I'm using the same color and this is just straight color. I'm not mixing it with anything. Same color for the decor on the other dinosaur. And then I'll flip it. I'll use the same color on the body of one that I'm going to use on the detail of another. I did not do yet the arms and legs of the other guy because I wanted to make sure that the background behind him was really dry. So I'm just going to give it a few more minutes while I'm doing the rest of this detail. So I'll go over now and finish up a little bit more. I just wanted to test that background, see if it was dry and it is dry enough to put his legs in. So next I'm mixing up off to the side there a little bit of black, lunar black, which also does some granulation and mixing that in with some phthalo blue green shade. I love the phalos. They're staining colors, but boy, are they fun. They're really rich colors. But I mix it with black because I want that granulation because the lunar black will granulate and then both of these things will have the same kind of granulation. But look at that fun color that I can get by mixing a color that granulates and a color that doesn't. And I get a nice dull color, which makes this a real boyish card and when you're doing dinosaurs, lots of times you're doing these for for guys, although this can go to a woman, women like dinosaurs too. We are science fiends just like them boys. But I'm painting in and around each one of these and I wasn't painting very carefully. So some of my brush strokes are going over top of some of that green. Well, rather than panic about it too much, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do here to repair that and went, wait a minute, what says that I have to actually do anything other than paint right over top of it. The green was already somewhat dry, so it didn't spread, but I just put another coat basically of color over top of it. Now, if that green was really soaking wet, you're going to have a lot of bleeding. But here I'm able to just kind of move that color in and around in between. I wanted to retain a little bit of that greenness so that it coordinates with everything, but really just making sure that my dinosaur is colored properly. And then you can see the granulation appearing as well in that dinosaur. And now it's time to do the cracked dry ground beneath of them, which I don't know how we know that there was all this cracked dry ground, but I see it in all of the Ice Age movies, so I'm pretty sure that it must have been a thing. Drawing them as like rocks like I've done before, but horizontal. You want them to look a little more like flat pancakes because of the angle that we're looking at them at. You want bigger ones towards you, and then they're going to get smaller and smaller in the distance as they get toward the back. And we're not going to draw them all, we're just going to draw the ones in this foreground area and let them get larger as they get closer and then let them disappear. We're going to paint in a little bit of the detail as they move back into the background, but really just allow these ones in the front to be drawn with your pen. You can draw it with watercolor, but I tried it and I had a hot mess, so you can do that if you wish. I found I had a little better success here when I tried drawing it in with a pen. Now you can see I just put in a couple little sketchy marks toward that background. And then it's a matter of just grabbing some dark brown pink. This is sepia mixed with a couple other browns that were on my palette. And I'm just going to go in between some of those rocks, just dropping the darkest color in between and allowing it to make each one of those rocks pop so that they're apart from each other. And this whole thing is going to get covered with another layer of paint. So just chill, don't worry about things that go out of the lines. Just get some shadows in there so that the rocks do look like they are separate rocks and apart from each other. And just let your brush kind of dance across some of those spots. And then we're going to mix more of a warmer brown color. So this one has a little more, say, some quinacridone burnt orange in it, a little bit of quinacridone gold. And then just pick a few rocks to highlight with that just to get some of that warmer color in. And then I took some really wet quinacridone gold. And that is going to give me that overall color. It's going to blend some of this stuff together. And then as it as I move toward that back, look, I'm doing just sketchy lines, not drawing every rock, just doing some sketchy lines. But with that quinacridone color, it carries a little that color from the back to from the front to the back, but without giving it too much heaviness. I've left some white areas and little white spots in the front, which allows some light to come through. So don't worry about being perfect, you're not trying to paint every single rock in detail. We just want the feel of where these these little dinosaurs are at. So here's my finished card, silly as it is, party like there's no tomorrow with a really fun scene out in the background and some of those broken dry rocks in the foreground. Kind of fun to do. Hope you enjoyed this. If you'd like any of the supplies, they're always linked in the doobly-doo down below. You can click on my face to subscribe, watch some other videos, go take a watercolor class, whatever you'd like to do. And I will see you guys next time I put out three videos a week, so make sure you subscribe by email so you get notified when I put up a new creation. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.