 Hi there, it's Sandy Allknock and I'm going to talk about five stamping inks for watercolor and I'll be using a brand new stamp set from Ellen Hudson, these beautiful flowers. And it's inspired by this little swatch I did for a whole other project and I swatched the color over top of the stamped ink and got all these lines, those edges where the color pulled away from the ink like it was being repelled by it and I wanted to run some tests. So today's video is part of that testing. This is Canson XL paper and it's the same kind of stuff as Ranger's paper so that will do the same thing and you can see how the color, the watercolor is pulling away from the edges of the stamp. And you might think that's normal, if this is the watercolor paper you always use you might think oh yeah that's how it always happens and you can push the color around and try to fuss with it but as it dries it just dries away from the line and you end up with kind of a little mess. But look what happens with Arch's cold press. This is artist grade paper, it's 100% cotton and yes it's more expensive but if you've been throwing away a lot of watercolor paper because it's not doing the techniques you think it should, if you're seeing people do things on YouTube videos and stuff and you're like mine doesn't act that way, why is it not acting that way, paper is probably going to be the biggest single difference. I'm a big fan of good brushes and good paints but paper is probably your biggest wow factor in seeing a difference in your watercoloring. So I decided to test a bunch of different inks and the rest of these tests are all going to be on Arch's cold press just to have apples to apples. That first one was VersaFine Onyx Black, that last one I colored and then this one is the Inkon 3 No Line Ink and when you use No Line Ink the lines turn basically a gray color in the background. So you could paint all your details into the leaf and do all kinds of shading and make it look beautiful and you won't have a stamped line on the outside of it. And lots of people love that look. This one is an ink that might surprise you, Lawn Fawn's Jet Black. And I use that for my Copic and you can use it for watercolor. The only sad part for me is that I need to re-ink it because you can see it didn't stamp all that well because the bumpy watercolor papers are a little tough to stamp on sometimes and especially when your ink pad is running low on ink. So I do need to re-ink mine but you can see that the ink works really well even though it also works with Copics. This is Distress Oxide and Distress Oxide and the next one you'll see which is just regular Distress are both water soluble. So when you paint right over top of them, even if you sit there and heat set the thing, I suppose if you emboss it, it might not. But if you put water with Distress Inks, it's going to turn into watercolor. You can add more color to it. Here I just added more of that anthraquinoid scarlet that I'm using for the other ones to flesh this out and give it more life because you just water the color down that's already on there and sometimes it needs a little more oomph to it. And these pretty flowers are a beautiful red. Distress Ink, same deal, lighter color even comes off of the ink but maybe that's a factor too of whether the ink pad is juiced up. But once again, you can add more color to it. You could also with Distress Ink or Oxides, you can stamp it once, put it in your misty, leave it there, do all of your painting and then go back afterward and stamp it with a black ink on the top of it all. And that way you get all the softness of all of this painting portion and then you get that crisp black edge if you want it. Just wait till it's completely dry and that can work as well. So next I want to talk a little bit about shading. Just I know there's going to be some beginners who are going to watch this and I want to talk about how to get some dark colors blended in and how I'm going to approach that. I've got my anthraquinoid scarlet which is the lighter red. The second one I added was Paralene Maroon and I'm going to also mix up a dark red by taking some of the anthraquinoid scarlet again, same color and mix it with some Pink's Blue Gray. You could mix it with a dark blue or a dark green or something else. Test around and see what kind of colors you have and go back and forth. Add a little red, add a little more of the dark color until you get something that looks like a darkish red and then you can use that for your painting and you don't have to buy a separate color. Paralene Maroon and Paralene Green, there's a bunch of Paralenes that are darker hues that you can use for blending. And I know crafters like to have colors like that rather than try to mix them but you can mix them really easy. So I've put down on this dry leaf or I guess it's a flower. It's a leaf shaped flower. I've put the dark color in the middle and then used a damp brush around the edges to try to soften it and then it softened it too much. All of that just kind of dissipated. So I'm adding more of the dark color in the middle and when it's added on top of a wet area, the color is going to move. And then I can add in some extra anthraquinoid as well and intensify that color. And it's also going to help with the blending of the edges. And then you can go back in and add more of the dark on and on back and forth until you're happy with it. But just watch when you add a whole lot of water to something, a whole lot of paint like this, watch that it does not end up with blooms in it. And blooms are when all of the water, like you've added one swoosh of something that had more water than everything else in it. And the water separated everything else. You get a weird blobby thing. So I watched these and tended them carefully so that I wouldn't end up with those kinds of blooms to them. So on this one, I'm not going to wait for it to dry first. It's summer and everything's drying really quickly, so I had to work quick and put the dark color in while the rest of it was still wet. And that little turn of the leaf in the very front was already dry. That little light pink area was already dry. That's how fast things are drying at my house. It's crazy painting right now in this hot summer. But I'm just lifting now color rinsed and cleaned my brush, just kind of wiping off some of the excess water. So I'm not adding water to this. And I can lift up color around that lip if there's anything there. Or I can go back into any of the other color that's already wet. This bottom leaf was soaking wet because I put so many layers in it. And I can rinse my brush, dry it off and then lift color so that I get a little lighter edge on the outside and then darker color in the middle. Here is the finished one. I only did one of these all the way complete to the end. And I used a dye to add some texture to it. I really liked what this did. I almost was going to use black. I was going to insert black into those to make black outlines. And I loved it so much with just that perception of a line. It looked almost embossed. So there is my card for today. Check out the whole Ellen Hudson release. I'll put a link to it in the doobly-doo. You can see all the new goodies for summer of stamping. And I will see you again very soon. Take care. Bye, guys.