 Hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and I am going to paint a Yeti today for a holiday decoration. I'm going to put it in a little frame and hang it up. I'm trying to use up this last bit of an arches watercolor block. Watercolor blocks are sealed around all the edges so you can just peel one page off. You don't need to tape anything down. At one time I thought I liked blocks and I bought a whole bunch of them and now I have the remnants of them. Once they get down to just a few pages at the end, I find they come detached from the block itself. There's a cardboard backer and a flap lid and mine came detached from that and it's just been floating around here. So I'm just going to do some little paintings, little practice things and I haven't played with salt very much lately. I will link you to a video at the end of this if you want to see a bigger painting still with salt in it, but this will be a frame of a little piece in my studio. I started by doing my drawing, just a loose drawing of a Yeti, body, head, arms. He's going to carry some packages and I'll put a little scarf on him. I filled the whole background with water and then really good quantities of pigment. This is Payne's Blue Gray only and I'm just going to cover it with that because I wanted to have something to put the salt into when I do the snowstorm for the background. To do that, you have to have the right amount of pigment and the right amount of moisture. It's very hard to tell you exactly what, but this was way too much moisture on the paper still to worry about putting the salt on yet because it would just get swallowed up by the pigment and the water. So I needed to wait for it to dry more and while I did, I went in and refined the edges of my figure so that he would have a little more of a Yeti shape to him. Not trying to make this super clean and perfect. I'm just trying to make it look more Yeti-like. Not sure what Yeti-like looks like since all we have is the cartoon bumbles and people's imagination. I suppose we do have some CGI in some movies, but nonetheless, I'm going to paint a few details into this and I wanted to keep it loose and simple. I didn't want to fuss over it too much. So I'm painting some of the interior shadows just doing some negative painting so that I can create those arms. And when it gets down to the bottom and even some of the outside areas, I just brought in color that's already on the painting. So touching it just slightly to the background will allow some of that same color to come in and since it's still really wet, I had trouble with more of it coming in than I was pleased with so I would have to dab some off in order to make that work better. But in the meantime, just going to give some roundness to the head, make a little break in between the head and the body, and a little scruffiness to the top of the head. And then I used a baby wipe to pull up more of that extra color and dab off some of the puddle and not all of the puddle in the bottom corner got dabbed off, but nonetheless, I'll tilt it and see if I can make sure that doesn't get too swampy in that corner because nothing will happen if it gets too swampy. So sprinkle that salt on and then let it air dry because air drying is the best way. And sometimes it's fun to watch it. Sometimes it's fun to go in the next room and come back and be amazed at what you see. And that is what happened. It was really kind of cool. So I painted into the face more, adding a little more detail so I could bring the eyes out. And when my hand moves, notice that the bottom right corner where you get a little more of that swoosh, that's where all that moisture was. So just make sure you're careful in where you have that moisture. If you want to create a swoosh, then have more moisture on the page at the time. The top section didn't get very much salty because there was not enough moisture. So trying to get it all even if you want an even coverage is really important because the amount of moisture makes a difference. So next up, I started adding in more detail to the face and then the scarf. Since the background is all dry, I'm not risking the scarf bleeding into anything. So that's why I waited till this point. If I had started while the background was wet, I would have had quite the mess on my paper. And so this is anthraquinoid scarlet that I'm using that you could make your scarf any color you would wish to create your your bumble. And then I'm going to paint the gifts. I started out with just wanting one gift because that's what I left space for. I left a rectangle there and then realized you really needed to have more than one package is a big bumble and big bumbles can carry big packages. So I decided to paint a second one. And I'm using some striped wrapping paper this time, putting a red lid on it. I'll put a little bow so that he can have some decor on the packages and they'll differentiate from each other. Using the same color means I don't have to worry about bleeding. And I can keep this whole thing really simple. In, you know, not putting in a gajillion colors, that sort of thing. I did want to clean up a few details on the Yeti himself. So I emphasized the split in the legs and then realized that I wanted to add more shadow down there entirely anyway, because it just needed to be darker. And then the face needed a little bit more, too, because his face was not intense enough. So I added more paint to it so the eyes would really pop out more. Now you can really see that confused expression, which bumbles seem to have quite a bit. I love him the character they develop for him and that he turns out to be a nice bumble and helps with the Christmas tree. Oh, sorry, if I spoiled that for anyone, I'm sorry. He's a good bumble. He's a good abominable snowman. So next up is reaffirming some details that split between his legs. Just did not seem to want to stay put. And then once it was drier, I could add details onto the packages, like polka dots or one of the boxes and a little bit of detail into the scarf itself. So spread that color around and he is just about suitable for framing. He's adorable. And he was a good way to use up some paper that I didn't really need anymore. So that's a good thing as well. Some shadow underneath the lid of the other package. Take off the tape and we're done. Super easy way to do this. And if you would like to paint your own Yeti, but you don't want to draw him, there's a stamp for that over on Ellen Hudson's page. I have a step by step pictorial tutorial for you today using her little Squatch stamp set and I made the cake myself. I'll show you how to do that. Just use some sticky notes to make yourself a template and have at it. It's a really fun way to make a birthday type of celebration guard. You could make a Christmas cake, too. That would be awesome. All right, links to everything are in the doobly-doo. I will see you again very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.