 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock, and I'm going to do another in my series inspired by children's illustrators. And I've been looking for the right stamp set to use for this one because I've been just loving this book. I bought it recently, and I decided a Lawn Fawn stamp set was going to work. I wanted an epic sky because this whole book is full of epic graduated washes for the skies. I absolutely love it. I love his illustration style. I also have I Want My Hat Back, which is another of his great books. He's got a whole bunch of them. So go look him up, go to your bookstore, and pick up The Rock from the Sky, which is this book, and it just came out in 2021. So I'm going to use some of his trees. I'm going to use his horizon line at the bottom. I'm going to do one of the skies, and I want to try his clouds and his sun. So I'm going to possibly do other washes like this in World Watercolor Month. So if you are watching my Sandy Olnock Fine Art Instagram, then you'll see that I am doing daily reels, just all different kinds of watercolor projects in 30 second videos. And some of them might happen to be other ideas from this book that are not maybe going to be cards. Might be other things. So I've sketched in a circle for my sun, some funky shapes for my clouds and the horizon line. I'll tip up the board so I get gravity working in my favor. And I do have white tape that I have been using instead of green or blue tape like lots of other crafters do. It's a little bit more expensive, not all that much, but it doesn't ever rip my paper. And it also, excuse me, does not distract my eye color-wise, which greens and blues do. They change your sense of the color that you're painting. And using either white or black is always a good thing so that you can get a really good idea what the color is without any ambient color right around it. So I've finished painting water into the entire sky all the way down through the ground and everything. The ground can be painted over top. And John has a bunch of washes in a lot of different colors. I've never really tried much with washes in this kind of a way, trying to get a really smooth, single wash. So I'm challenged to do this. It's not an easy thing. But I wanted to go from sort of a rusty color like he had to a paint's blue gray and then to a green. So I threw some sap green into my mix and started moving on down the page. And one of the great things too about his, even though his washes look perfect, if you really look close, they're not perfect perfect. And I love that out of illustrators that they're willing to show us and print stuff that is not absolutely 100% looking like it's been airbrushed because that is what makes it art. So each of his also end with a little bit more of a yellow color at the base. Now that might be the paper and the way the photographs were shot. So there's little yellow showing through. Mine is more of a yellow ochre rather than the kind of yellow he's got. But it's going to dry really light and I think give me kind of what I want. Turning it upside down so I can get gravity helping me out to try to smooth some of this out, adding more color in the green area and then darkening my paints blue gray area, kind of with a mix of the colors that are here. If everything's still wet, you can still work with it. But if it starts to dry, do not fuss. One of the keys I find for washes is to constantly be watching where paint is collecting. And right underneath that one cloud, the green was collecting. So I turn it over so the green will move the other direction. The clouds that John uses, he paints the shadow side on the top. And you end up with this really pale version of the color in the background. I don't know what technique he uses to get that, but I had to do some lifting because my paint started moving because I was trying to do it while it was wet. And that was a bit of a challenge. So you might not want to try the way I just did it. But then I dried everything completely. And when you're trying to paint, you know, like a big solid line for a tree, if you've ever tried that and your paper kind of did a wobbly thing, it just went up and down and up and down as you were trying to make a straight line. It's because your paper is not fully, fully, fully 100% dry. So make sure that you dry it completely. As it dries, you can actually see it flatten out when it gets to that final stage of drying. So either wait for it to do that or use a heat setter or, you know, some kind of hair dryer or something to dry it out. So he's got his big tall trees and I have painted the first part of the tree, the trunk and some of the branches. And I wanted to do the big branches while they were still wet because I don't want to have a place where they join and get a weird spot where the paint starts bleeding and blending and looking weird because you've added it once it was already starting to dry. So my brushwork leaves a little to be desired. So I did a little clean up here. I am using that 12 brush, which makes me paint a little looser, a little bolder. And that's what John seems to do. He's got very bold strokes. If you get the book and look at the tree page, he doesn't worry about perfection in those. He's just big and bold and he makes his marks and that is what it is. And that's what I'm trying for. I'm trying not to over fuss anything because that's something that I struggle with in all of my painting is overdoing the tiny details. And I wanted to try something that's simpler. It's one of the reasons I think why children's illustration appeals to me and might appeal to a lot of people because the lines tend to be simpler. Just the pictures tend to be more communicative in that kind of a way. And that just makes me happy. So now I've gotten out a brush that I don't usually use here on YouTube. I tell you guys you can use a number eight for most everything, but little tiny images from Lawn Fawn are so small. One of the reasons I don't watercolor very often with them is because they are so tiny. So I've got a number six this time. It's the only time that I really use small brushes when I'm doing tiny details like this. And I even try with a larger brush just because it's really challenging to stay loose when you've got a teeny tiny brush. You get tempted to paint all kinds of things in there that you don't need. So I try to stay away from doing that. So I'm using the muted colors that John has in his palette for this book and for many of his books, it's just a palette he likes. I'm going to have to look up what colors he actually has in his palette because I do like a lot of what he ends up with. So in each one of these, there was little grasses on the ground in greens and browns and rust colors. So I'm just going to add some of that in several different colors to the base of mine and feel very pleased with myself for how this one came out. Maybe my wash wasn't perfect. There is some paint you can see collected on the left side of my paper because the wash collected over there on the left. However, I cut my paper bigger than my card. So I get to chop that part off and not worry about it, which is a nice thing when you're doing watercolor. Just leave yourself extra room so you can trim that off. So there is my card. I've got a double sentiment on it, zoom in by to say have a happy day. And then I painted another simple wash on the inside. So I have room to write a note, but it is also decorated. So there we go. Another World Watercolor Month post under the belt. I will see you again very soon. I hope you have a great day. Go paint something and I'll see you in a couple of days. Bye