 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to talk about dot card watercoloring. Daniel Smith puts out great dot cards and I thought I'd show you just how much paint you can get off of one of these dot cards and I'm using the Darcy's stamp sets. These two have these great little unicorns and then a llama and a fox. I'm going to be painting the llama and the fox in the video but on my blog you'll see some more cards using those stamp sets. I'm using the Sandy Allknock dot card. You can see these are actual dimensional dots of paint so they're dollops. They're put on manually so they're all different kind of sizes. They squish them as equally as they can but since they're done manually they bloop all in there the way paint will bloop and you can just take a wet brush, touch it to the surface and get paint off of it and I'm barely touching it. I'm getting just a little tiny tip of my brush on there and picking up paint color. I'm using the Quinacridone Burnt Orange here and painting my whole fox in. Now you can get a ton painted with one of these dot cards. If you paint cards you're doing just small things these dot cards can give you a good sampling of what some colors look like. There's not only this dot card with my 18 colors on it and this one has my name on it but there's other dot cards that are available too. I will list those as well in the description and over on my blog if you're interested in seeing some more because they have some that have the full set of colors and you can try them out before purchasing a tube because two paints seem like they're expensive. However, just so you know two paints actually work out less expensive in the long run than the like paints that are already in pans because you just get more color out of them. Anyway, I wanted to alter this burnt this Quinacridone Burnt Orange and I'm doing that by adding some sepia to it. Since there's only a little bit of paint here and I don't want to put it on a palette and then transfer it onto my stamp I'm mixing straight on the paper and you can either do what I'm doing which is mixing wet in wet so the color on the bottom is already wet and I'm letting the new color blend into it or wait until it's completely dry and do another layer of color over top of it and then you can alter that color underneath. So there's different ways to do it. If you've taken some of my watercolor classes over at art-classes.com links in the doobly-doo if you're interested then you'll know that there are different amounts of pigment to water ratios and if you use too much water in one it might bleed into the other making blooms and there's lots of discussion of that in some of my watercolor classes particularly in the watercolor backgrounds for card makers because I know there's lots of people that struggle with those blooms and how to keep them from taking over your watercolor. So here when you're using a dot card it's a lot a matter of managing the water and the pigment since you don't really have a well that you're in control of you're not mixing it on a palette somewhere just taking it straight from that dot you need to manage that. So here I'm putting down a good bit of the black color that lunar black spreading it out with my brush with just clean water on it adding a little bit more if I want it darker and then dabbing off if I get too much and I always have a Kleenex or a paper towel or something handy so that I don't end up with a whole lot of big old blobs of dark color that I can't manage and that it dries while I'm trying to get everything to move around. So even though this is sped up you can kind of get an idea of how I'm applying the color from the dot card onto the painting and then moving it with the brush and the water and throughout this I'm trying to use all of my colors so you can see what they all are but it's a real little expense to buy one of these dot cards and then decide later that you want to purchase one of these colors in a full tube or something. So it's a great way to try them out and not have to buy a whole tube of something that you may not really like that shade very much. Although it's a little bit hard here in some of these tiny areas to tell whether or not the color is really the kind of color you want that phthalo blue both of the phthalo blues the red shade and the green shade are some of my very favorites. You can't see a whole lot of that from just that little bow but there you go right doing what I can to share the colors with you. As I was thinking about what color to use for the little face on this guy I'm pulling out a little of my quinacridone gold because I wanted to look a little flesh tone facey but I'm mixing in a little bit of quinacridone burnt orange so I'm getting a little bit of a different color by doing that just tapping in a little bit of a darker color into a color that's already there while it's wet. Jump over here and do some more of my flowers spread some more of that color around and you can probably tell there's not a whole lot of color disappearing from that dot card I'm gonna get a lot of paintings done from that dot card. This is one of the things that I do take with me when I go places if I'm gonna do any flying I'll take one of the dot cards on a plane and I'll take my Bible journaling and do some painting that sort of thing so it's a real convenient little thing that you can take with you just let it dry before you put something else on top of it or your dot card will get stuck to something because it'll be wet paint for a little bit until it dries. You can also reduce these so if you have the paint tubes for them and you want you find that you love one of the dot cards that you've purchased you can always put another dot on there and add more paint to it so there are times when I have to replenish my yellows because I use my yellows a lot. Now here I'm using the pearlescent shimmer over top of these little critters because I can actually put some shine on to anything I want using that pearlescent shimmer and it makes it twinkle you can't really see much here but it does make anything twinkle you can mix it in on a palette or you can just paint it over top of things like I did after it's dry. I wanted to add a little bit of ground underneath of them little atmosphere around them mostly because I have that big white llama and a big white llama doesn't look as white when it's just against more white so I'm gonna put some color around it and it's going to transform it to make it look a little bit brighter and a little bit a little bit like it's different than the background so I'll put a little bit around the outside on both ends and I'm just going lighter than I want to first because I can always add more and I want it to be real soft but I can add another little bit of color if I want it to be a little stronger and it's always safer to go with lighter than to go with darker right away. So here is my finished card I kept it really simple and just layered it onto a card base and left it super simple and easy. You can see more cards made with these two stamps that's over on my blog. I colored these both with watercolor and I also did these and the unicorns in Copic so you can get to see both of them. Alright thank you so much for joining me for this video you can click on my face to subscribe there's a watercolor class there some more videos you might want to see and I'll see you guys next time. Take care. Bye bye.