 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to show you a happy accident. I know some of you love to see that people like me screw up all the time, so this one has been recorded. And I'm going to be using Poinsettias from Colorado Craft Company from last week's brand new release. And I'm going to show you just one pedal so you can see how the pedal is done and then I'm going to zip through everything else because we want to get to the happy accident and the stuff that happened after that. So I'm starting by covering the whole pedal with a coat of just the base color, the lightest color. And then going in with a dark color, R89 is one of my favorites for using with reds, but you can use an RV99, RV69, it's just something really nice and dark. And then I'm using a lighter color than that right next to it so that I soften the edges of it. It's not just big strong lines. I want it to feel like it's one kind of mushy soft pedal because those pedals are really soft. And if you have too much hard line in there, it's going to look like it's, I don't know, shredded paper or something that can look really funky. And so then I stepped it up one layer a little bit lighter and so that's an R17 and I'm leaving some openings so that I only have one layer of the R14 showing. And then when I kind of try to smooth all that out so that I get something more uniform, I've got all of this nice blending going on underneath. So I've got the dimension carried through from that, but I could just kind of go over it real quickly with the R14 and it sort of ties the whole pedal together while still leaving all of that detail in there. So I'm going to zoom through the rest of coloring this one flower so you can watch it develop and watch how adding the contrasting color is what makes the definition between all those leaves. If you don't have enough contrast, that would be why your flowers don't look dimensional. So you want to have enough dimension in them. So I'm doing the dimension on each pedal first, doing the same process that I did with the first pedal and growing the colors little by little for each one. And they kind of start to smooth out. You can see they're all kind of coming to the point where the first pedal was. But watch what happens as I go in now with some darker colors. I'm going to take some RV9, no RV69 was what this was, and I'm adding some really strong like darkish shadows, not as dark as the R89, but darker shadows and then working my way across each one of the pedals because then each pedal feels like it's got a whole bunch of dimension going across the whole thing as well. That's just a lot of layers of color. I had this idea that I was going to do some faux watercolor, like making Copic marker look like watercolor. So I was going to put down a whole bunch of dark blues in here. These are all from the B9 family. And I wanted dark color right around the flowers and then merging toward lighter in the center portion. But I had to kind of work at it and as I said, it's lots of layering and layering of colors to try to get the color to go from dark around the edges to lighter in the middle, but not lighter in terms of light light, but lighter in terms of a medium kind of color. And I wasn't worried about the blending being perfect because I was going to put in these faux water droplets, almost like your paint kept making blooms and blossoms and that sort of thing. And using different B99, B97, B95, and just trying to make something look like there were all these little dots in there. And then I took my little spray bottle that has the little stick in it and I could bring out some single drops and put some nice drops of colorless blender and look at me. I had a big oops, that big spot where I tipped over the bottle and I spilled it. But I turned it over and look what I see on the back. It's almost like having this beautiful little window coming through there because the colorless blender sucks all that color right through the paper. Well, that gave me the idea since I kind of couldn't figure out how I was going to rectify that flower. I wanted to see if I could push the color through to the other side by adding a lot of colorless blenders. I just sprayed a whole bunch on and you can see how those flowers are starting to develop. So then I put more on. It just started playing around with it. This is what I talk about when I say, don't let any piece of paper go by without learning something from it. If you can add something to it, just try and see what happens. If you soak it with colorless blender, then see what happens. Now you could also create beautiful pink flowers by doing this same technique because look how beautiful those pink flowers look as well. But on the other side, I was getting this really rich color and this is much richer than I had when I was working with just the straight marker color and using that on top and I'll show you at the end the two cards that I made and you'll see the difference between doing it this way and the other way. So I spritzed a little bit more, found a few areas that I needed to kind of go back and push a little bit more of that color through. And I'm just doing this on a craft assistant. It's kind of a craft mat, a black metal craft mat thing. I'll have a link to it in the doobly-doo if you're interested. But the edges of the flowers are really soft and then not all of it filled in completely. So I took my markers on the good side, quote unquote good side on the side I liked and started adding in more marker. So that ended up filling it in so I could put it on a card and I did decide to take a gold uniball gel pen and outline each one of the stamps just in a really loose way, not even trying to match the stamp lines at all. But when you look at the two cards that I made, the top one is not done with this bleeding through the paper, the bottom one is. And the color is much richer on the bottom one plus I get the shimmer and shine of those gold edges on it. But it was really fun to see the difference between whether you just color on the surface or whether you're pushing the color through to the other side and making it really soft and kind of artsy fartsy and cool. So I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you'll get a little something fun out of it. I do have a mixed media Copic glass that I will link in the doobly-doo as well if you're interested in more techniques like that, check out that class. It's a whole heck of a lot of fun. And I'll see you again really soon with another video. Bye-bye.