 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I will be painting puffins on our rocky coast. And I got the Catherine Pooler stamp set with these cute little puffins in it and lots of other elements that you'll see used on the inside of the card later. But for right now I wanted to be able to show you how I'm going to paint the puffins so that they have a warm color to them rather than a cool blue or gray color. So I'm going to begin with a nice clean palette so you can see what colors I'm mixing. And I'll start off with some paints blue-gray, which might be a color I might normally use to paint something that's white. You might have seen me paint other things that are on that light colored side. But then I was also thinking I'd like them to be warm. So how do I do that? Well, yellow ochre is another color in my palette that I thought might work, but I happen to know that if I put burnt sienna into Payne's blue-gray or any kind of like transparent red oxide, that kind of color into Payne's blue-gray, I get a more neutralized kind of brown and it's a very nice brown. So I'm going to use these two together. I'm going to start off by painting some of the yellow ochre and leaving some white highlights on the sunshine side, which is going to be on the right-hand side, and painting the yellow ochre to the left side. That's going to indicate my light source, so I'm just going to paint that loosely in there. And with watercolor, you can either put the color in wet-in-wet, which I'm going to try to drop in a little bit of wet color, or you can wait and do it when it's dry. And I'm going to do a little bit of that as well. So I just put in a little so that it would keep that yellow ochre from being too yellow, because these are white birds. They're not yellow. They're a little dirty because they're on the beach, so that's why I decided to go with something a little warmer than a gray color. After drawing that color so that none of the other colors would bleed into it, I mixed up a little bit of an orangish color using my Aussie red gold, and you can either use something like Quenacridone Rose or any kind of red that you have. Just drop a little bit of that into it and it makes it more orangy than what Aussie red gold normally would be. And then I'm going to paint it into their beaks and their feet. And the picture that I was looking at for my puffins has a little space, the closest one on their beaks, the space closest to their faces, is actually a grayish color, so I'm going to paint that in at the end. So I'm going to leave that open for now. But then I mixed up a little bit more of that dark brown color, a little darker than the first round, so that I could put in a real shadow. So this is going to be a much stronger shadow than I had previously. But this is one way you can get a strong shadow without trying to keep making your watercolor blend. Just get that first layer down so you have at least the base of it. And then when you add the second color, rinse your brush after you put that first line of dark shadow color down, and you'll lift up color. Just pull up color that's already in existence there. So I've got a clean brush and I'm kind of just moving around the edges so that I end up with the roundness of the birds. And you can keep tending it. I would tend it until it's pretty dry and stable. Because as it dries, you're going to get hard edges in there. And the more that you can keep an eyeball on it to make sure that it doesn't bleed and go nuts on you, the better off you're going to be. So if you need to heat set it and dry it, then feel free to go ahead and do that. Next up is painting the rocks of the coast. And this is a super easy way to do this. So just take some of the Payne's Blue Gray. Now remember that I talked about the Payne's Blue Gray going with the burnt sienna to make a really interesting neutral color. Well, I'm going to let the paper do the mixing this time because I mixed it in the palette previously. But mixing it on the paper is going to get a more natural mix to it. So I can just put swooshes of the two different colors, one brush stroke of one, one brush stroke of another, and get a really interesting rocky coast look without really having to worry about it too much. Just put the two colors in there. You could leave this and not do anything else to create those rocks because it's going to look like that to someone who looks at a card like this. And if you were trying to do a finished painting and you painted your puffins and you added this in at the bottom, you might be just fine without doing anything extra. Well, I'm going to add extra because I can. So I'm going to heat set it all first so that it's good and solid dry before I get started on the next step. And I'm going to finish off that little slice that I talked about on the beaks of the Pains Blue Gray color. And then I'm going to start in with a fountain pen. Now you could use a Sharpie, any kind of black pen, especially if this is your final layer and you're not going to paint anymore. You can use any kind of pen. It doesn't matter if it's a pen that bleeds. If you're drawing on dry paper, it's going to make no difference. But I'm going to create some sections you can follow along with different ways that the watercolor fell and outlined some of these sections to make them look like rocks, but make them different sizes, different angles, that sort of thing. But the shading, I'm going to try to keep at about the same angle. And that's going to give the whole thing a more coherent feel rather than have lines go all different directions. But it doesn't mean all the shapes are going to be in that same angle. Just the lines are going to be. So you may want to draw in some lines and then color three quarters of a rock or something in the linear format so that you end up with some sections that have lines, some sections that don't. Because that's going to give you some nice variety in the rocks, because that's one of the things about rocks. They're going to be very unique and different. And if you need to create any area underneath of the puffins for them to stand, then you can draw specific rocks under them to tidy it up. And then for some of the open spaces, just put some circles, dots, that sort of thing in there to give it some rock texture. And that is all there is to it. It's really simple. I'm going to do the same kind of a thing on the inside of the card. This is a panel that I'll attach inside. And I'm going to just paint right over these solid shapes. You could make this for a front of a card as well. Super easy to do. Just put in some of the Pains Blue Gray. Add in a little bit of the burnt sienna. Drop it in in the absolute identical way to make something that looks like rocks. And this can be under the ocean if you want to do that. You want to paint blue above it to paint some water in it. Or it can just be coastal rocks, a tide pool, that kind of a thing. Or you could even put just a little bit of water at the bottom. So the rest of your card above would be either sky or nothing at all. Just have a horizontal with just a low amount of water at the rocky shore. And once again, I'm going to use my fountain pen to go in here and draw in extra details. Give the crab some eyes because he didn't have eyes. And I thought that was helpful for him to be able to see. And then drew in some rocks. I'm going to do the same thing as I did on the front of the card, making the angles the same. And when I say same, I don't mean it has to be perfect. Perfection is never something that I'm looking for. I'm looking for something that feels nice and feels coherent. And if I use the same kind of angle and the same style of drawing on the inside as the outside, it's going to feel like they go together. I'm also going to use the black pen to fill in some of the places where my stamping wasn't perfect. Because on watercolor paper, sometimes it's really hard to stamp even with a misty and to get it all perfect. And I'm even using rough watercolor paper. So rough watercolor paper is extra hard to get a good solid stamp. But with a pen and a little bit of elbow grease when you're done, you can fill all that in quite nicely. So my finished card has just a little gold layer around the outside of it. And then a black card base with a nice panel on the inside. So there's my card for today, a little quickie. I will see you guys again really soon. Go see more on the blog. If you're interested in still pictures that you can put on your Pinterest board, and I will see you again. Take care. Bye bye.