 Well, hi there. It's Sandy Allnock with a magical gnome card. Now this gnome is not going to do anything magic, but he's got some sparkle, got some layers, got an aurora borealis with a bunch of fun stuff that you may have in your stash. I don't really know. But I'm going to start with the Trinity Stamps, stamps that with this cute little gnome holding a lantern. I loved the let your light shine, of course, for a sentiment and this dye for the background. We're going to be using all this stuff and more. What I started with was taking a piece from my scrap stash. Now if I screw something up, I just throw it in the scrap stash in a little pile so that I have extra pieces of watercolor paper to try things on. It doesn't even matter if it's already wrinkled paper because you're just going to practice on it. In this particular case, I used a flat piece because I knew I wanted to make layers out of this stamp. And in order to do so, I'm going to need a couple of them. And I started by painting the first one in full. Just with my first instinctive colors, whatever I felt like coloring with at the time, and then I'll assess it to see if that's what I really want on the finished card. I painted his hat in blue and I was trying to figure out what color I would like it to be in and what color my background was going to be. I knew I wanted to do a glorious sky behind him, behind that grid. And I wasn't really sure what was going to look best on top of it. But it didn't matter because this was just going to be my base painting of the image itself. And I start by painting a light or mid-tone kind of color, adding in some dark shadows and then taking a dry brush and kind of lifting off some color so I get a lighter area. And on something like this, it's a real forgiving stamp. It's just a gnome and he's just cute, so don't worry if you don't get a whole lot of shadows and highlights in there. But it's real easy to get the shadows by just dropping in some darker color. On those red mittens, I dropped in some of the blue that I had left over in my palette. So don't worry about, oh my gosh, I have to have a dark red color to go with my red. Nope, you can drop anything in there. And then the lantern, this is a good one for practicing the control of your brush because it's lots of little bitty details and that one might be something that you'll want to just practice your brush strokes and how you can control your brush. I'm using a number eight silver brush, the black velvet line, which is what I recommend for crafters. It's a synthetic blend, so it's part synthetic and part natural and it does a pretty decent job and they're at a decent price, which I know is important for crafting. So I decided on this one, I was going to give him a white beard as if he's a Santa gnome and I painted all the light color in there and then dropped in some darker gray. I'm putting all the shadows on the left side since the light's going to be coming from his lantern and that just gives me a kind of simple way to do the shadow across the whole thing. Then when it comes to doing the next one, I wanted to do some layering. So I began thinking in my mind, what in this picture is in the front? Well the lantern is in the front, so that one I'm definitely going to paint on this second version and of course if there's something you didn't like on the first version, you can take another piece of paper and layer it right over top and pretend you meant to do it, so that would be great. I wasn't really thrilled with how the shadows did on the gloves. They didn't look as vibrant and red, so I decided this time to just leave the gloves in red-red and I changed the color of the hat because I realized my sky, I wanted it to be a night sky and it was going to have a lot of blues and stuff in it, so maybe a green was going to stand out a little bit better, so painted the hat in green. Also notice I'm not worrying about staying inside the lines because I'm going to trim these out. Every single one of these is going to be cut out and that means I don't have to stay in the lines, which is always a good thing. I wanted to pop his nose, so his nose stands out a little bit more and I actually added a little bit of the red and then did a little blending with the yellowish color and a little bit of water so that he didn't look like he had a reindeer nose because it's not quite that red and added a little red to his cheeks on the original one. And then I thought just for fun, I want to see, since I have a third one stamped on this scrap paper, what if I gave him a red beard instead of being a Santa Claus gnome because this might actually make the lantern look like the brightest portion of the image of the whole card. And so that would be the only place I'd leave white, which I thought was going to work. So I used some yellows and reds and browns and just did the same kind of thing that I did with the grays, but did it in a different color way. After everything was all dried, I did some fussy cutting. Now, your base image, unless you're going to use this one for the beard, you can actually whack off all the sides of it and only cut them out on the one that's going to be the one in front. So the beard in the front, I've cut out all the little twirly bits and you can, of course, decide if you want to cut some of them off. You don't have to have them all. And then I went around it with a marker. You can use any kind of marker at this point. Tombow marker. I just grabbed a Copic marker to go around the edges so I didn't have a white edge showing and then just started using some double stick adhesive to add dimension to each one of these and glued them all on top of each other and built up my little gnome. Isn't he adorable? And just add his lantern on him and he's now got boots that stick out. He's got hands, little mittens that stick out, the lantern. I'm going to put some glossy accents on it. So I have some shimmer on that. Put some stickles onto the fur around his wrists and a little bit on his hat and a little bit on his little boots and he is adorable. He's just absolutely adorable. I love this guy. I love his big nose sticking out. And I almost love that his cheeks have disappeared into the hole in there. So then it came to painting a background and I knew I wanted a sky. I wasn't really sure I was going to come out with anything great, but it's just another scrap piece of paper that was whacked off of a big sheet of a painting that didn't work. So I just cut it down to bigger than the size I needed and started throwing in a bunch of colors, a darker blue at the top, a lighter blue at the bottom and was just trying to figure out, OK, what the heck am I going to do? I need more color. This needs to be darker. So I added more color and more color and I thought, wait a minute, I've got all these powders, just lots and lots of powders. Now you might have brush-o powders. You might have color bursts. You might have all kinds of things. I've got these powders from Tonic that have shimmer in them. So Storm Cloud is one of them and this one is really dark. I think I added a little bit too much, but it did work. And you just tap it on. Now be careful because it's easy to go overboard. The first couple taps, you can't see it. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, my gosh, it's going to be really black. So I also added some Golden Sparkler, which is going to have a metallic to it, a real like shimmery-ness. And I thought, OK, let's tip it and see what happens. And it started running. I sprayed it with water a little bit to help it run a little bit more. And you know how the Aurora Borealis gets those vertical stripes? I was kind of getting some of that. I wanted the top of the sky to be a little more uniform. I didn't want those stripes across everything. So I painted a little bit across it with my brush, threw a little more color along the bottom and just tipped my board back and forth just to see what would happen. I stopped it short of letting it run completely across everything because I didn't want to go too crazy. Added a little more from the bottom so I could kind of push a little bit of color up there and just played with it. This was a total experiment. I had no idea what it was going to come out like in the long run. But why not? It's a scrap of paper. It's kind of fun to see what happens with stuff like this. Now, I dried it, but I didn't dry it completely because I wanted more of that Golden Sparkler. The movement of all the paint and everything had kind of disappeared it except for in that light streak. And I wanted some of that to be the stars in the sky. So before it was completely dry, I sprayed or sprinkled a little bit more on and then went back in and he dried the rest. So it was nice and completely dry. And all of that gold really stayed shimmery after that, which was really cool. And once I put this grid over it, which was also cut out of watercolor paper, I was like, that totally looks like the Aurora Borealis. So he's walking along whatever this this lattice work is with his light looking at the Aurora Borealis. Really cool. Just need to trim that down. But I also didn't want this big white trellis thing. And this color looks a little sickly. It's actually New Gamboge. I don't know what happened to the color on the camera. It's New Gamboge with a little bit of Aussie red gold. And then I threw some of that Golden Sparkler powder, the shimmer powder on there, just to add a little something, something to it. And then when it was all dry on the back of it, I put a bunch of dimensional adhesive, peeled it off and stuck it on and had the most glorious window for this little magical guy to look out on. Is that not cool? Oh, my goodness, it's so beautiful. I wanted to stick him on here, but I didn't want yet another layer of dimension. So I put the dimension inside the grid so he could stick on to that. And that wouldn't add one more bit by sticking it on top of the grid. And then put the whole thing onto a card base and look at the sparkle that you can see both in his shoes and his hat and the background and that little bit of shimmer on the lantern. Oh, my gosh, wicked fun. And the sentiment, I painted half of it in the same colors that I had done for that background and let it fade out to the right. And that's it. That's my card for today. I hope this was entertaining, even if it doesn't inspire anybody to try something quite this crazy supply links are all in the doobly do that golden sparkler stuff is very cool. I'll see you again very soon with another video. Take care, guys. Bye.