 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olak and today I'm going to show you what to do when your art goes completely off the rails and goes wrong. You can still make pretty things out of it. I know people wonder if I ever totally screw things up and this video will prove that yes I do. So there were things I learned from this and I thought I'd post this video anyway even though there's some hot messes along the way. I've got a piece of Yupo paper and some inks from Ranger and this is my Copic Air Gun. These may not be available for long so I thought I'd show you that you can use this little guy which normally attaches to a handheld USB type of device that plugs into a USB and it doesn't have as much pressure with that but I can actually use the same setup that I use for my Copic Air Brush. So even if you get the one that's cheaper because the one that comes with the handheld is less expensive. You can't put a Copic marker in it but you can do the blowy thing that I do with my ethereal alcohol inks using it but you can eventually if you decide you want to upgrade and get a compressor you can hook that thing to the compressor and do just fine. So I've got a couple colors on here and I'm just kind of making a mess which is usually where alcohol ink starts just making a mess. And one of the things that I realized in doing this is that there's some colors that I put down at the beginning that actually I call it staining the paper. They don't move very well. You'll see them appear. There's some spots right there in the middle where it just doesn't lift. Sometimes leaving the alcohol on there a little longer will soften the color and it will move a little bit but these were not wanting to move. So there are things that move better on photopaper or other surfaces than they do on Yupo. And I don't know whether it's by color or by brand but just sometimes I run into this where I have like goobery weird spots. So I was trying to put more alcohol on here to see if I could loosen some color. Just kind of push it around a little bit and just nothing was going anywhere. There's those underlying spots that were just not going to cooperate at all and that was kind of a bummer. So know that that happens. It's not you. It's just like this weird thing that sometimes just occasionally happens. So what I decided was to put more color in there. Cover it up and pretend like it wasn't there. So I threw on more ink and more alcohol and this time I'm not going to blow off as much. I'm going to let the color remain a little darker in there and then that will hide the fact that I've got blobbies under there that I was not particularly liking. And all of this was because I wanted to try out something else that I purchased recently and I hadn't had a chance to use it which is the alcohol lifting ink. So I wanted to have enough ink enough color on here that that would show. I didn't want to have anything weak so I've got sort of a streak coming across because I tend to like some white space in my alcohol ink art and that sort of thing. So yeah just moving around and then blowing on it tends to dry it which is why I tend to try to just get it to dry before going to touch it and stuff. But I realized I had this little piece of Nina that I had cut circle from another project sitting here and I thought what's going to happen if I just dip it in there and I'm just going to let it soak it up and see what happens. What does it look like when I turn it over? It's actually kind of cool. You can move it ever so slightly not very much on Nina and I threw in a little alcohol to see if that would soften it and it didn't and I didn't like that one side so I just kind of dragged it through. But again I'm trying to keep some of that air some of the white spaces in there and I thought I'd set that aside and use it for something later on so there will be a card made with it. So now I've got my chrysanthemum stamp from Ellen Hudson and I've got it all set up to use it with the alcohol lift ink and this stuff what you're supposed to do is stamp it and then wipe it off like buff it off and yeah it did not work quite as well as I had hoped. At first you don't see anything it's it looks invisible but what I wanted to do it it said on the instructions on the stamp pad that you can stamp it a second time on another piece. So I got it started stamping on that other piece of UPO so that then I could take a moment before this dried to dab it off so it says to to blot it and then to kind of wipe it off. So I've got it it's it's a tissue that I'm using for this really soft and I'm just using soft pressure maybe I'm not using the right pressure I don't really know maybe this is too busy of a stamp to use but it started kind of appearing you can sort of see it but it's not great it was not impressing me I think if you use the right stamp with it something simpler maybe or maybe more blobby like more solid types of ink behind it you'd be able to see the image more but this one was fascinating because it only had partially stamping done from the the alcohol that was transferred so I set that aside so that I could definitely work on it but I thought I'd see if I could recover this one because this looked like a hot mess and what I decided to do was take an old crappy crappy brush and try to paint back into it and that didn't work all that well I got some weird highlight places and then I tried to add some regular ink to it to add some shadows in there and it was not doing much for me but you know I'm all for experimenting and since I'd already done stuff to this piece of paper then why not continue and see if my next thoughts would make it happen and that's often where I learned things is by beating up a piece of paper until it's done and until I can't learn anything else from it and this one I thought I'm just gonna keep going because it might be that when I die cut it it's gonna look perfect it's gonna just be amazing and it'll be great so why not continue and so I did and I yeah was not really super thrilled here you can see it doesn't look a whole lot like a flower this one however was pretty special because it was really soft and I loved how easy it was to paint into each of the sections and move the alcohol around and the ink around to make it a super soft flower some of it is just the ink that's already there that my brush is moving and sometimes I'm just picking up extra ink to put on it and notice that I'm using the alcohol not very much not a ton of it because the more alcohol you use of course everything could get smooshy and I didn't want to get smooshy owned it retain some detail but I'm I'm using a brush that I don't care much about so that I don't wreck it and just painting around the flower and trying to add some shadows in the inner dark parts the dark places are all in the plate in the spots where the petals dip deep into the center of the flower as well as underneath of those curled edges on the tips because the stamp has little tips around this chrysanthemum that that kind of hang they kind of curl over if you are a floweraholic and you want to learn to color more flowers then I have a perfect opportunity for you in a class that has a good cause to it and that is the flower power class it's over on my teaching site link in the doobly-doo the way that this class works there's five friends who joined me in it and this particular stamp this chrysanthemum is one that Therese Calvert colors the most beautiful ways with Copic markers and colored pencils she is phenomenal and you're not going to want to miss it and that class you can either take for ten dollars by paying for the class outright and the ten dollars goes to world central kitchen to help feed hungry people during the pandemic or you can get it for free by buying one of the stamps that's used in the class and there's you know a whole list of them in the the entry point of the class so you can see that and learn more about which stamps qualify you or you can do a minimum purchase of just anything on Ellen Hudson's teaching site whatever you want to buy and then you can get the class for free or you could just go ahead and pay for the class and go buy stuff why not because you know doing good is a good thing it's good for your heart and you learn how to create beautiful flower cards all right that is enough of the yammering on about the class will stop the commercial and get back to the alcohol ink painting and I'm just adding more of the little petals here and there and decided that I needed to add a little more dark to it so I increased the amount of pigment that I had to draw from and started adding in really dark center and that sort of thing one of the things that happened when I stamped this is that the center didn't stamp at all so I'm just making up the part center in the middle on a flower like this nobody's gonna know if you made it up or not because they're just gonna see it and think boy isn't that pretty so just gonna slowly add a little bit of dark radiating out from the middle so it gets lighter and lighter at the outside edges of the flower and you can just feel the depth starting as I kind of concentrate all that contrast in the middle and then let it get lighter and lighter and lighter around the outside you can manage the amount of darkness lightness by the amount of alcohol you mix with the little puddle of ink and just play around with it until the flower looks like what you want it to look like next up I wanted to soften the outside edges those stamped lines that are on there you can probably barely see them but I could see them and I wanted them to disappear so I was trying to scrub them away a little bit with the alcohol it worked a little bit with the brush just trying to break up that that little line and then once I took a clean Kleenex turned it until I found a clean spot that tended to work a little bit better it lightened it enough that it wasn't going to be too intrusive and did that on the left side as well and then I was ready to do my die cutting of both of these pieces because I had an idea for the card and I wanted to have them both be apples to apples so that I could put them side by side and decide which one I liked better now you could just cut this out and put it as a card front and it would be lovely but me and the die cutting had to happen because this sucker was in trouble the dark flower was in serious doo-doo and it did not make me any happier to have it die cut out that looks terrible but the other white one I decided I'm gonna go ahead and die cut it anyway so I can have cards that are matchy matchy and lined it up as best I could without the lines that I had hereby wiped off the stamped image so I didn't have anything to line it up with but this guy I decided to add more alcohol work to it and just wipe away what I had done already because I'd already ruined the piece of paper right this is a piece of U-bow it's plastic you can beat this thing up until the cows come home just keep going at it you can put a bunch of alcohol and wash it all off completely and start all over again if you wanted but I just wanted to get something more pleasing I just was not pleased with how any of this worked out it looked so terrible so I added more ink and more alcohol and use my airbrush to just blow it around more and I did it on a paper towel because I didn't want the color from the freezer paper to kind of slide back into the die cut shape usually I trim off the outside edges of whatever I'm doing an alcohol piece with and so then it doesn't matter the freezer paper works just great but on something like this I didn't want to end up with a puddle around the outside edge so then I took that same yucky brush and started painting back in a little bit of highlights on a few of the pedals since now I was super familiar with them having tried earlier to fix the the mess that I had made and I kept it much simpler this time because of course I don't have the stamped lines to follow I didn't have a bunch of tiny pedals so I could add just little tiny bits of pedals to give that flavor of having a little something there and then I added a few shadows of the thicker ink to it so that I could get a little more dimension and I have that blobby thing on the right hand side that I kind of didn't mind too much I did end up putting a little bit of the powder over it so that it wouldn't be sticky and there you go there's my cards this first one square card I just popped the the die cut of the flower and then the die cut of the leaves that are in the set with it did the very same thing with the dark flower and I think they actually worked out pretty good the little circle that I had used earlier on in this video that I had just captured some of the ink I ended up adding a die cut butterfly from another Ellen Hudson set and put some stickles in the middle of it and a hello sentiment from another Ellen Hudson die set to make a beautiful little butterfly card out of just scraps and bits of leftover things so don't ever throw away a piece of paper just keep using it until it cries uncle and you get something out of it if nothing else you learn something from it so continue to learn and grow hit the like button if you've got something out of this video and make sure you subscribe if you haven't yet already and I'll see you again another another video very soon bye bye