 Hey there, it's Sandy Alnok and since we are still in World Watercolor Month, I'm doing some stamped watercolor with a little bit of regular watercolor along with it. We're part way through World Watercolor Month and I'm going to celebrate a little bit more watercolor here on my YouTube channel with some art impressions and every year we do July as World Watercolor Month and yes, stamped watercolor counts. So if you'd like to do these art impression stamps, then you could do them and hashtag your work on Instagram with World Watercolor Month and maybe join in the fun and see what other people are doing and let them see your work. I'm starting by taking this large cabin. There's two cabins in the stamp set and I'm going to stamp one of them kind of in the lower third of the picture and I'm going to make a deep in the forest kind of cabin because that's where I would like to be right now. It would be nice to take a vacation. I haven't had a vacation in like, oh gosh, maybe last spring and we're already in this summer. So it's been a while since I've done anything fun like that and a cabin seems like a good safe place to go during the pandemic. So yeah, it would be nice. So I'm going to paint one instead and these cabins, there's two of them and they each have a little place for painting in other features. So there's some window boxes here where you can stamp in some flowers and I will be adding a little bit of that. But I'm taking my brush with just some water on it after using some brown and black on the cabin itself and then on the freezer paper that I have underneath, you can work on a plate or a tile or whatever kind of palette thing you want, scribble off some color and preparing that color with a couple of different greens for what I'm going to do in a few minutes. But I'm taking some of the other flowers I have from a whole bunch of different sets and I have a giant collection of them that I have put into cases where all my flowers are together and stuff. I have other videos that talk about how I store them and things that I will link you to at the end and down in the description so you can see more about them and I'm just going to stamp a whole bunch of greenery because I want this to be a really kind of deep thick forest and I'm speeding this up because this could take forever. This is actually a grass stamp that I'm using, but literally when you're doing these kinds of things you're making a forest, you can use any of the florals or grasses almost to make something that looks like trees. So I'm just kind of putting a couple of different greens. The same three greens that I have scribbled onto the freezer paper are stamped all over the background now. I wanted some of the greens of course to be sort of like moss and things on the roof so I have some of that color that I picked up to move over and any time that I run into a spot where I didn't get enough ink stamped on I can just take my brush and touch some of that color and use it as a palette and I'm going to spread the color around in all different kinds of directions leaving some of it you know not worrying about making it absolutely perfectly melted out. I am working on some arches cold-pressed paper and I always recommend to new people who are doing this for the first time that Kansan XL tends to work better for new folks because it melts out a little bit better. If you like the texture of watercolor paper, which I do, then this paper is a little bit better. It will give you more interesting edges and that sort of thing. So I've just kind of added a bunch of water to it so I could spread the color around and then I'm going to do negative painting around a path coming out from the front door that gets smaller toward the house and then wider toward the front which indicates a distance. And then I'm going to add in a little bit of detail into the windows using some black marker that I scribbled up there with my greens so that I could get a little more contrast in that. Now if you're going to leave your cabin just like this, you might want more detail in it than I'm getting. I wanted it to be a little bit loose, a little bit broken because of the rest of what I'm going to do. So I'm going to take again another type of grass stamp and just stamp it all over, but I'm going to focus on putting more of the color on the two sides. I wanted to feel like there's an opening right above the cabin where the sun is coming through and I want dark color around the outside edges. So I'm getting this kind of weird texture thing for right now that is going to look gorgeous in just a few minutes and there's no way to know what it's going to look like until you do it. So I didn't know that this was how it was going to come out and it really stunned me that it came out so perfectly, but I didn't know that before I started. That's one of the things about stamped watercolor or watercolor in general. You don't know what you're going to love until you see it and you love it. You're like, wow, that was amazing. And that's what happened here. These ended up looking so tree-like and it was grasses that I used. So if you've got a bunch of art impressions watercolor stamps, you could use a lot of different things. Be creative in how you think through what you're going to actually paint onto your picture. So I'm using a little bit of color that's scribbled onto the paper to use as a palette to make almost some little bushes there in the background and give a little control to the horizon line here. And then I'm going to use some of my brighter green in order to make the grass look a little bit different color, make it a little brighter. These are from the Sandy's Favorite Colors set of Tombow markers that's over at Ellen Hudson. So if you want to use the exact colors that I've got, you can do that. So then I completely dried the whole thing and I taped it down because the paper got a little warped. So I wanted it to be good and flat and I'm going to paint in my own trees. Now, I know a lot of people are going to be like, well, Sandy, you can paint trees and I can't. Well, it's not as hard as you think. I am taking that long brush that I talked about a few weeks ago. Was it a week ago? I don't remember how long ago it was, but I'm going to take this Princeton Aqua Elite brush and I am laying it on its side to make something that approximates some nice big fat pine branches and just stacking them up at the top of each of my tree trunks. And notice the tree trunks are not on the perfect side. I wanted this to feel really loose and washy and watercolor-y. I'm doing the same thing for the grasses down at the bottom, laying this brush down and just pushing it upward to make the little grasses on the top. I'm going to, again, mix another dark and I'm using a couple of different darks, a dark paint's blue-gray, some perling greens, some green appetizers, whatever dark greens you have, mixing a thick paint out of a bunch of different colors and then making sure that it's not going to be really watery and wussy. And then each one of these stands of trees is going to be darker than what's behind it, which means it's going to look like these are in the front and everything else is way far in the distance. And I'm trying to even take some of these branches and make them in front of the cabin itself. So you're literally coming up the drive, looking through the trees at the cabin as you're driving up to it or walking up to it, however you get to this wonderful cabin. And then I'm taking my fancy needle brush that I also talked about in the same brush video recently, and I'm going to make little frilly edges on each of the ends of the trees, that kind of thing. Now, I have a whole class for people who really want to learn to paint trees over on my teaching site. It's a new class called the Landscape Foundation. So it's for people who want to learn to paint large landscapes, but these kind of tree techniques are taught in that, but they're really not that hard. They really aren't. You see how easily, I mean, this is sped up, but they're going down really easily. It's just a matter of loosening up your hand and being willing to see something as trees, even if it doesn't literally look like the shape of a tree. So I'm going to have a link to that class, link to the stamped watercolor classes, too. This card would have been great without these trees in the front of it as well, because it looked really beautiful. Those trees back there were gorgeous. So this just adds a little bit to it by creating this strong contrast in the front. And I think it makes it a mixed media card, sort of, because it's stamped watercolor and rigging watercolor. Does that make me a mixed media artist? Let me know in the comments what you think. So that is it. That's all I have for you today. On the screen is a playlist of all of my art impressions watercolor. I've got them all together. So if you need some more ideas, check those out. And I will see you again very soon with another video. Take care. Bye-bye.