 Hi there, my name is Sandy Olnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today since this is my first video of the New Year, I thought I would share a little blessing with all of you because I am praying for more blessings in 2017, 2016 was a hard year. So I'm using a set by Honey Bee Stamps. It has this really big I have done a video in the past showing how to make some faux hand lettering, but I'm also going to add some other things to it this time. And the Bless has a couple different endings to it. You can have Blessing, Blessings, or Bless with a lot of other sentiments added to it. If you want to use the Inns, then I'm going to do the Bless first so that I can overlay the tip of the eye with the S in Blessings so that it looks a little more natural. But what I'm doing is putting it in my Misti and then coloring it with Tombow markers. You can use other markers with it too, depending. They'll each have a little different, I guess, success rate based on exactly what kind of thing you want to use and what kind of markers and that sort of thing. So you'll have to test it out for yourself. But I'm doing this on watercolor paper and that means I'm going to get kind of a hot mess not only because I'm using watercolor markers, but also because I'm using the watercolor paper. It's a combination of the two. But the great thing about the Misti is I can just keep stamping over it and keep putting more ink onto my stamp and get it all put onto my paper this way. It's all going to line up because of the way that it's laid out on the Misti. And it's just going to keep going back and forth until I have enough coverage. It doesn't have to be perfect coverage. You'll see why in just a few minutes. But now I can lay my ING so that it works right with that S so that they connect. And I'm doing it on the second half of the Misti. If you have the large Misti, well, not the really large, but you have the normal size Misti, the regular size, you can do multiple things with it. So I have a Post-it note so the bless on the left hand side doesn't end up getting onto my paper. And that way I have it set up to do more later on. And I did have to stamp the S myself by hand since I didn't have any spots left on that Misti. I'm just taking a brush and going over all of the ink that's here. And you'll see as I go and speed this up a little bit in just a minute, but it starts to melt away all that texture. And it looks like faux hand letter. You look like you're a genius at hand lettering. There's a lot of different stamp sets from different companies that work really well with this technique. But I love this one because there's so many partner stamps that go with it. There's lots of things you can combine with it for so many different occasions. And use the word bless, blessed, blessing with all those other phrases. So it might be one you would like to pick up. And I'm just going over, as you can see, really simply going over with the brush and water. And it's turning into watercolor. Now I'll tell you this one thing because I did it. I didn't wait for it to be completely dry. And unfortunately, I ended up making a mess with my hand on top of it when I went on to this next phase. So make sure it's good to dry. This is my second attempt at getting this done. I'm taking the bullet nib and doing some drawing. You can do this with any kind of drawing and your tumble markers. I'm going to put basically a drop shadow around this leaving some white space right by the letters. With this yellow pen, just a little bit of color there. And then I can take my brush with just clean water and start to paint right up to that edge. And just touch that marker color and it's going to pull it out and make it really soft. The more water you use out toward the empty part of the paper, the softer your blend is going to be. But you're going to get going outward from the word. And so I'll speed this up again. You can see just lots of water on that outside and then you can even dab it off with a paper towel to make sure you don't get a hard edge, that sort of thing. You could also combine this with watercolor. And once you get your tumble lettering done, you can watercolor things around it. So I'm going to do the same thing on the top. I'm going to go around the top of the letters. And then I can also add in a little tiny bit in between so it looks like there's a white outline around the blessings. A million different ways that you could do this. But I just wanted this yellow glow to come out from the letters themselves. With the water and start to spread that out. And as I said before, I do hope that there are many blessings to come for all of you, for all of us in this world. Well, it's been really a rough year last year. 2016, we lost a lot of good people. Whatever they do, those end of year reviews of all the people who died. It's just shocking to think back to the loss of so many of our icons of culture and music and just people all over the world that this world is going to miss. I was even sad when Florence Henderson died on Thanksgiving. 2016, couldn't she even do us the favor of letting us have Thanksgiving without something like that? That would be really nice. But I am just about finished now with spreading out this watercolor around the word blessings. Tap off some extras to make sure there's no weirdness going on where the color is not going to end up being soft and blends out into that white. And here's where I'm adding a little bit of the yellow on the inside of each of the letters. Just a tiny bit. You could go around the whole thing. I decided not to go past the middle part of the B or the middle part of the G so that I could keep all that color in the center. Look at that part out. These colors are just so cheerful too. This is going to be a really happy card to send to somebody at some point. Finish that up. And then I thought it would be fun to add some hand-drawn elements in here. Now you could get some stamps out and stamp some flowers or butterflies or whatever else you'd like to around it. And I was just thinking about it and decided I wanted to do some florals around here. And so I'm going to draw them myself but do whatever you would like to stamp things. So I'm going to do something I've tried before with my Copics and I didn't know if it was going to work with these tombos which is laying the nib down and it makes kind of a flower point. Here of course I'm trying not to turn my paper all the way upside down because I'm here on video but you could turn it upside down and it ends up being like a fat part down on the bottom of each petal as it gets to the center and then a point out to the outside. But basically when I started painting I decided to opt out of that and make it have more petals anyway. But you can see I've got all this color here I can just pull out from the center to make a flower and I thought I want to make this the feature flower on the whole card and have a lot more small flowers elsewhere. So I'm letting that pink one dry so we do a lot more detail to it. And I'm just doing a little circle of dots with one of the other markers and just scribbling over top of them with some water. I'm just letting them be kind of loose and soft and then I'll add another layer of detail onto the pink flower by adding some of that same purple that I used on the letters. Spread that out with a brush and then I thought I'd make a little pink flower, a small one, same as the large one but using again the purple on the inside. So it's fairly good and dry before you start adding more dark color to it or you might not be able to move that color. And then I wanted a little detail sprinkled around all of the place so I decided to take that yellow marker and make some dots. Just some random ones here and there. Trying not to make them look real regular. Spread them out just to add a little bit of happy sprinkly detail and then went over them with a little drop of water and that's going to soften them and make them look like they were just softly dropped on there once again. And then now that my big pink flower is good and dry I'm adding detail with a white pen, basically outlining some of the petals to make it look like there's multiple layers of petals. So rather than do every single one, I'm doing kind of every other one-ish so that it looks like there's one layer on top and then others below. And it's just going to add a lot of detail to this one and let it continue to be that feature flower on the card. There's a lot more things you can do with a card like this. You can die cut around the edges and do fancy things, all different kinds of things to make it a fancy card. But I opted to keep it really simple. I glued the panel onto a card base and used my corner chopper to make rounded corners on the outside edges. So it's a very simple card, very flat to go through the mail, praying for big blessings. Big, big, big blessings. That's what we need in 2017. So here's that other video that I referred to showing a little bit more about how to use the watercolor markers with your lettering stamps. So a couple other videos here using some water-based markers. If you're interested in seeing some more, you can hit the subscribe button. You can go to the blog and pin this card so that you remember it for later when you want to try it out. And I will talk to you guys later how an awesome 2017.