 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to do some painted collage cards inspired by the art of Eric Carl. He was a children's illustrator. He died just recently and I thought this would be an appropriate time to honor him and do something that was inspired by some of his work. And the Hungry Caterpillar is one of my favorite books of his. So I thought I'd give you a little flip through if you haven't seen the book before. I love his style. It's so fun, lots of crisp edges and yet very painterly. And I don't know if the technique I'm going to be using today is what he did, but I'm going to do it anyway because it kind of has that flavor to it. And I'm going to do sunshine and rainbows on my cards for this. They'll be clean and simple. I'm using some Tomo River paper and it's a paper that's very, very thin. And since I'm going to be gluing layers of it on a card, I thought it might be helpful to have some really thin paper. I also use some for a Bible journaling page. I'll give you a peek at the end and that Bible journaling page needed to also have thin layers. So I wanted to make sure that I had really thin paper. What I'm doing is using a bunch of different acrylics and you could use any brands. These can be kids acrylics, don't have to be fancy at all. I've got a whole bunch of brands in a big basket and I picked out a basic rainbow of colors and I'm trying to cover every square inch of it or at least every square inch up to the edge because I didn't feel like making a mess on my freezer paper underneath all of this and just started painting so that I had something interesting everywhere, something where there would be really fun edges no matter what piece that I cut out for any of the collages. So I get really fun edges and I just started working my way through the rainbow with two colors on each page. This is something you could easily get your kids or your grandkids to help out with this summer, get them to paint a whole bunch of pages for you and then you can collage to your heart's content or they can collage to their heart's content because this is really easy and fun. I didn't have any purples so I had to make my own purple so I used a pink and a light blue and got a really nice baby purple out of it and then I tried to make a darker purple with a darker blue. I turned out using the magenta color with a darker blue worked better than using my red with the darker blue because my red has some yellow content in it which means when you mix red, yellow and blue together and you do have some yellow carried over in that red then you end up with a neutral color so I got this weird funky dark purple when I used that one so I tossed that sheet and just started again and tried to put in the medium blue which is kind of like a cobalt blue and then mixed in a darker one to try to see if I could darken that at all and it worked a little bit but I have two different purples at least now and then I've got a blue green with some green. You can go to town to your heart's content with these. The amount of time it takes to dry will vary it depends on probably the paints but also how thick you put them on what the humidity is where you live how hot it is. I put mine in the window to try to get the sun to bake them and dry them a little faster and started working with them in about a half a day. I probably should have left them overnight because I did have some moments when I was doing some cutting apart but I realized some of the paint underneath was still sticky even if the surface was dry. So now I've got a bunch of beautiful papers that are all ready to use for my collage and I decided to get out a rainbow dye from Ellen Hudson and be really smart and cut them all at once. Doesn't that sound like a smart idea? Well, it didn't turn out as smart as I had hoped because some of the paint was damp under the surface and it was a little hard to pull these out after they'd been smushed together in the die cutter so it took me a long time. I lost a few pieces, a few tore, a couple stuck together but I had enough to make a few cards with so I was still happy with it anyway and I've got a piece of A2 size card stock here but I wanted something a little simpler than this so my plan was to put the rainbow in the bottom corner and then cut them out with four bar dyes so I would have smaller cards four bar or I think five by three and a half inches so they're smaller than an A2 size card but this would at least give me the the rainbows glued on to the paper to start with. Now the glue that I'm using is a glue stick. You've never seen me use a glue stick here on YouTube because glue sticks come undone. Everything will eventually fall apart on this card. It's going to fall off and I know that but I don't have any expectation that my cards are going to last forever. People might save them. I don't really know but eventually this will fall apart and that's okay but I didn't think that the heavy duty adhesive that I used the last time I made cards with this die would work because if I had to move this at all to adjust it the paper would just shred and rip so I'll link you to the other video with the sparkly paper that I used with this particular die because that one could tolerate the heaviness of that adhesive and that sort of thing so I decided to only use four strips for my rainbows as well since I was going to be making these smaller cards so now that that's all done I trimmed off the edges and then ran it through the die cutter with the four bar dies I am wiping off the surface of my freezer paper by the way because you can use freezer paper again if you get paint on it or if you get glue stick on it or something just wipe it down with a baby wipe and you can roll it up and use it again later because it's very tolerant of making messes so if you have kids or grandkids just put some freezer paper out on the table and save yourself a lot of cleanup and you can even save yourself from buying more freezer paper by wiping it down so I'm embellishing with a few holes that I punched out of some scrap pieces of the collage paper just to add a little bit to each of my cards and there they are and they sweet I put this sentiment down low and left lots of white space to keep them in that very modern flavor of card design now the other cards that I was going to make I wanted to do some sunshine cards so I made a circle just using a roll of tape and then I wanted to make a circle that felt hand cut rather than felt die cut just to see what that was like because Eric Carl did lots of hand cutting on his at least that's what it looks like to me had very hand cut looking edges and then I chopped it in half the Sun did not cry don't worry I glued them down on the paper same deal as I did with the other cards that I made this time I've already got the cardstock cut to the four bar size so I know exactly where I want to put each of my sons and you can put them at the top at the bottom on the sides any old way that you want and for the rays of the Sun I wanted to use these skinny little pieces that I chopped down from a piece of scrap but I didn't want to use a glue stick because that looked painful so I drew lines with glossy accents that I could add each of the rays to and the lines from the glossy accents were not as long as the rays that I had cut and that leaves me the option to either do this one of two ways either put a little drop of glossy accents underneath of the end of each one to make sure they stay down and they don't all peel up or like I'm gonna do on the other card once it's dry trim off the edges that aren't glued down so one will have short rays and what the other will have long and I get the chance to see if I'm gonna like the longer rays or the shorter rays if I ever do this again so I decided to add the little embellishments again and I like using three embellishments because that is an odd number which tends to look better to the eye and there's all my cards aren't they fun happy little sunshine and rainbows and on my Bible journaling channel you can see this video where I made the caterpillar on a tip-in inside my Bible so you can see the rest of these papers being used over on that video again I'll have a link at the end of this right here on the screen as well as I'll put it in the do-we-do for you thank you so much for visiting with me I will see you again very soon take care bye bye