 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to be playing with some shimmery watercolor powders, two different brands, and seeing how they differ and a couple of techniques to play with them. Just this week, I purchased Catherine Pooler's brand new set of Colorverse. There's four different colors that match some of her inks and two of them on the right hand side are shimmery ones. And then I also got some of these Nuvo powders and I had never used them before and I thought those would be fun to play with too. So I got a bunch of different colors to try out and you'll see all of them in the video. There's also that other bottle in the upper left that I didn't take time to show you here on the video, but you'll see that in action and it is some Cocoa Powder Shimmer Spray. So I bought some of the Ken Oliver watercolor paper, mostly to see if it's any different than the stuff he used to have and it is the same stuff. It has two different sides to it and it has one side that has a texture and one side that's smooth. And if you've used his paper before or the Ranger paper, I think they're basically the same stuff. And sprinkling on the watercolor powders, you don't need much. I mean, you can hardly see anything there, but with a tiny bit of crystals, you can get a whole lot of color. When I used to travel and teach with these, I always showed people how little you could get away with using so that you don't get too crazy too quickly because this stuff is not super cheap and you don't want to waste it by putting on tons on one project when you could really get a lot more projects out of that same amount of powder. So start with less. You can always add more. In the top section, I started by sprinkling and then spraying the bottom section. I sprayed and then sprinkled. And one of the things I'm being careful to do is keep the green away from the red. That is because green and red are compliments on the color wheel and that means they're going to make brown if they mix. So I'm trying to insert some yellow and blue in between them so they don't mix a whole lot. And if you end up with an area that starts getting kind of weird and muddy colored, I've done a little bit of practice with these tonight and ended up with a few bits of muddiness so you didn't get to see those and I just tossed them. But you can wipe off some of that color. Just dab off with a paper towel if the colors get too crazy. You can make these with just a background and it can just be pretty color. Or you can do what I do with them which is to try to see if a scene appears. And what I started seeing here was a garden with just red and yellow flowers across the middle and some stems on the bottom. So I started guiding it a little bit as best that you can with this stuff because it's watercolor powder and not really controllable. But I did end up with it all dry and it kind of is working the way that I wanted to. If you've used Brush-O in the past, which I've used quite a bit, it stays more granular than color burst wheel. Color burst tends to get really smooth like this and I like that granular look. It's one of the things I love about watercolor powders. So I'm going in with another layer and I'm adding, you can add spray of water and you can add it with a brush. You can do all different kinds of things with it. Some of the color underneath will reactivate but it won't wash off entirely. So it's not like watercolor in that you can't just spray the heck out of it and get most of the color off. These powders are so highly pigmented that really they're going to stay where they are. There's not a whole lot of lifting you can do but a little bit of it will move so you still have to be careful in what you layer on top of what. The shimmers in this set are both liquid so there's a red and a yellow and I apologize for not using the proper ink names. They do match Catherine's Carnival ink line and if you like to have your inks and your colors and your paints and everything match, this is a great option for you. And I'm just kind of playing around, moving around some of the color a little bit with a brush and here it is, dry. And I will cut this down to put it on a card. I'll show you the cards at the end when I'm all done with all the painting. Next up I decided I wanted to do a underwater scene because the sentiment set that I wanted to use on these cards has all kinds of stuff about water so I wanted to do a water scene. And I wanted to see how these colors move. I never really tried this. I wanted to see if I could get not necessarily a smooth background but I wanted to see how they drip. And I haven't really done, you know, I've done some regular watercolor doing a graduated type of fill of the whole background before but I didn't know if this was going to work and it didn't seem to want to even though I wasn't trying super hard to make it perfect. I was trying to make it streaky but it was a challenge to get it to keep moving because as I said before this stuff stains the paper and when it stains paper it kind of means it's not going to move when it stains. But I did find that keeping it wet at least made it look a little streaky and watery which was great and then I could turn it over the other direction while it's still wet and start adding all my coral at the bottom. If you know me I love to do underwater scenes because I have some underwater scene classes over on my website and they're really fun to do. So I added the metallics in here and just started playing around with dabbing off some of the color. I'm even using the paper towel to make the coral a little more streaky. You could also see this as a garden. It doesn't have to be a coral garden. It could be a regular flower garden and be done in the same kind of a way just have a really soft background in the back and then all these beautiful colors bursting at the bottom and you can add as much or as little of the metallic as you want. You can leave it as dots or you can spray it and melt it into the rest of the color etc. And here it is all dry. And now to try out these Nuvo Shimmer powders. They've been around a little longer than Catherine Pooler ones are new but these have been around and I was curious about them so I bought a few different colors as you saw listed at the beginning and I'm doing the same kind of thing sprinkling them on but this time I wanted to make a row of trees. And I didn't know what colors were going to burst out of these because I didn't try them out first. This is my first swipe at it but I thought these would be a really fun and simple way to see all the colors and still come out with something that I could then put on a card or if you make something like this you could certainly turn into a frameable painting on your wall quite easily. So I just made a big swoosh of all the different colors across added some extra of the powders but one of the cool things about the shimmer in these is that it's within the powder itself. It's not a liquid like it is with the Ken Oliver ones and the liquid even though it's really intense and you get a whole lot of that shimmer it doesn't want to move as easily whereas in these guys the shimmer is part of the powder and even though it's a very light kind of shimmer there's not a whole lot but it's just a real soft shimmer it's a little more evenly distributed I guess. So there's different reasons you might want one or the other but I really like these quite a bit. I also like the more muted colors even though there's that beautiful aqua and that beautiful red they're a little less I guess primary than I see in a lot of the Ken Oliver types of colors in the colorburst line and I'm just that kind of person I just like those more muted colors and I love how the trees are developing though as I was painting the ground down here at the bottom and adding some of the blackish color and a little bit of the gold in the grass it was just fun to watch all those colors in the trees slowly start to merge into each other and that sort of thing. Use my brush to touch up a little bit added a few more spots of powder here and there just playing around with it and then once it all dried it came out just gorgeous. I might have to make one of these to frame for my wall because it's so beautiful but I did put it on a card and then came this spray and this cocoa powder spray is really cool it's very shiny it's the shiniest out of all of this but it was out of control so I thought oh I'll just put it through a little circle that I punched in a piece of scrap paper and instead of I was thinking it was going to burst out and make like fun trees on the other side instead of it made circles so I went with it and I just started making circles all over my paper and made little popsicle shaped trees instead which is still a whole heck of a lot of fun so you could do this with any kind of sprays that you have really cute little way to use them to make a scene instead of just spraying background types of texture things and I'm using the extra color that's sitting on my scrap paper to paint the rest of the scene making tree trunks throwing in some grasses debating whether I wanted the grass to be more linear like this or if I wanted it to be softer so I decided to spray it and this color turns into a very soft brown when it's down there at the bottom all watered out but when it's all thick like in the trees I had to dab some off because it was super thick it's super shiny look how shiny that stuff comes out holy cow really really really bright shiny okay now for the making the cards the stamp set as I said has all kinds of ocean sentiments in it and I made two skinny cards out of my one coral piece and use some wow embossing powder to emboss the sentiment next up is my little flower garden all I had to do is add paper layers and a little bit of embossed sentiment and did the same thing on this one embossing the sentiment and leaving it as a really clean and simple card even though it's nice big five by five or five and half by five and half even and then same with this one just added a little sentiment up there on the top I hope you enjoyed this it was my playtime yesterday and I just threw it into a quick video for you today and I will see you all later on go see more on the blog if you want to and links to all the supplies are in the doobly-doo and I'll see you next time bye bye