 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and I'm going to do a Boca floral background. I think it's Boca or Boquet and I was sent some beautiful stamps from Pickett Fence Studios and this is one of them, A Bird of Paradise and I decided to make some Boca background for it. I've stamped it in some no-line ink. You can stamp it in any kind of really light ink onto watercolor paper and then I'm going to do the background first because I don't want the flower to bleed out into what's going on in the background and if I touch water to the watercolor pencil in the flower that might pull it out into the background so this will help me to keep it under a little better control. Just going to do a section at a time and get out my tea strainer, yes tea strainer for those of you who haven't seen me use this tea strainer for colored pencil or watercolor pencil. See it grates the color onto the surface of the paper, it makes very, very fine powder out of it and I'm going to use a couple different greens and these are by the way my Albrecht Durer pencils from Faber Castell, very nice watercolor pencils and I'm just putting little blobs of color on here. I had a picture that I found on the internet when I was looking for what color are bird of paradise flowers and that's where I saw one that had a beautiful Boquet background and decided to use that as my inspiration so just look up things like that and you will find all kinds of inspiration out there on the web and what I saw was that there were different levels of greens, there were like really bright yellow greens and there were blue greens and there were really dark sections because the dark sections make the light sections look light and then there were areas that looked like they were white white like really, really, really white white so I wanted to be able to put down a mix of different levels of color you know from the very lightest to the much more darker kinds of colors so I started off just doing a first pass over the entire background first with as soft of blends as I could in most of these areas knowing that I would go back in and add more later and so I'm using my brush with a baby wipe there to just tap off some of the excess water because I didn't want to add too much and get too out of control but blending so that the powder just turns into watercolor and doesn't stay as looking like powder. Now the powder you can do on top of water so once you have painted it already if you see an area you want to add more color to just grate some more pencil on top of it and you can move that around. The brush that I'm using is not one of my crafting brushes and I realized after I was all done with this that I had used one of my fine art brushes so I'm sorry to my crafters if you're looking at this and thinking what is that it's one of my nice Windsor and Newton sable brushes but if you were to do this on a card I would use a bigger brush for the background smaller brush for the flower and bigger I would say probably a number 12 this is a number 8 in the Windsor and Newton but fine art brushes tend to be sized a little differently actually probably companies entire companies size them differently but even though that's an 8 I would say use a larger brush you know 10 or 12 if you're using say the silver brand of brushes that I recommend for crafters because this one's expensive so once I got that first section done I moved on to the next section I'll speed this up a little because you saw how that worked and I'm just going to be looking at things like making sure the color is consistent going from one side of the stem to the other so that's where I was I'm kind of putting some of that blue green kind of color in there because I want it to look like it's continuous behind the flower so anytime you've got a background that goes from one side to the other make sure you create some kind of continuity there so it doesn't look like it just stops right behind something and I'm just going to move my way up the rest of the card and do the whole top section with a lot more light in it so I'm going to put some of the darker mid tone type of greens the yellow greens in it and then more of the color up at the top but leave a nice big open whitish area because that's what was in the photograph that I saw it was gorgeous to see that white light come through it might feel weird when you're doing this to think well I'm not doing something in every square inch that's okay let it just let it be don't don't stress out about it so I'm going to add enough water to get all of this moving and then once this is all settled I want to dry it even though it will lift again once I get it rewet I want to dry it so that I can start putting in some details using the pencils themselves so I began by just wiping off the excess color on the tape so that nothing crawls back into the painting and then dried it really really really well if your paper is even damp then when you go to put a pencil line in it it's going to stick and it's not going to be able to move very well even with good watercolor pencils like these albrecht doors some of us scribble in some areas I want a couple stems because that's what I saw in the picture and then start very slowly to work around some of those bokeh dots which I know how to say it bokeh bokeh bokeh oh my dog is trying to help she says it's pronounced wolf wolf so we're going to try for bokeh instead okay I went and calmed her down there was a squirrel outside that she had to let me know about so now I am fully safe from neighborhood squirrels so back to the background here I'm going to continue to put in some more of the stems a little bit here and there just not a lot and in a very light color so it doesn't end up being really strong but you can see I'm starting to put a little bit of color around some of those bokeh dots the bokeh when when a camera takes that kind of photograph and fuzzes out all that stuff in the distance and you get almost a twinkling of light you get all different kinds of edges you get some that are really hard edges some that are really soft edges and I'm trying to create some of those hard edges with the pencil itself I'm not going completely around any of those dots though at least not many of them I wanted to make them so that some edges fall away into the background and some are very sharp and that's going to be what's going to create that look of coming in and out of the light but if I do all of it using a brush and the pencil and watercolor pencil it's going to end up looking like it's got all hard edges notice as I paint around some of these areas they're very specific kinds of shapes like they're just the shape that I painted around them but I don't want all that to be hard-edged so I'm going to use a baby wipe and dab into some of these dots that I've already painted around and then I can also dab into some of the color that's already there if it's wet I should be able to lift it somewhat but the dots that I paint around are going to remain lighter than the ones that I dab out because every color is going to lift at a different rate some are going to lift really easily some of them are going to be a little harder to pull color out of but it's going to give you the range of depth that you get when you see a bokeh background in a photograph so once all that is done I dried it 100% completely again and started working on the flowers these watercolor pencils are really juicy I guess in terms of the amount of color that they put out which is really nice and I started layering the color in relatively heavily I mean I'm not using a super heavy pressure but I'm using a lot of color in here and using a mix of colors the flower that I was looking at had this one like the big fat petal and maybe there's a scientific name for this I don't know much about bird of paradise but it had a lot of green to it but it had like little yellow on one tip little red on another tip moving into some purple and blue and then into the green it was just gorgeous the way all this colors melted together so I colored them together and did a simpler brush stroke across all that color as I possibly could that bottom section I wanted to put more color in but I didn't want to wait and do it in a second layer so I used the powdered pencil again to drop it into that wet area because that I had already taken my brush over that stem then in the picture that I had there was one like shocking blue petal just an absolutely crazy blue petal that was so intense and it was contrasted with all the other petals because this was the only one that was this incredibly bright blue and that's another one of those places where looking at the internet is going to help you you're going to be able to get something that looks more realistic but notice how intense those colors are looking compared to the powdered pencil they used in the background because that's going to create that difference in the visual separation between the foreground and the background because the flower is going to be more intense that way and it really makes a difference when you're doing no line or implied line coloring like this implied line means you sort of know there's a line there but you know it because there's a contrast between the edges as opposed to a black stamped line so when I stamped it in that very pale tan gray color it ended up with the lines kind of disappearing and now I can reestablish them some of the petals that I saw in the photograph had red tips to them so I could extend these red tips any old way that I wanted because I wasn't constrained by the black line and I could change them up as needed in order to make the flower look the way I wanted it to look but I love these watercolor pencils they're so vibrant when you start putting the water over them it just lifts the color up and just really makes them strong and bright and merges all of that color together so it's nice to be able to go through and put all that heavy color down and then just run the brush over it to try to blend it and not have to worry about lots of layering I did decide I wanted a little tip of that yellow back on that other petal just to tie it in with the whole flower and I was just tickled pink with this when it was done I mean I was just so excited when this came out like did I really do that it looks like an actual bokeh background so I hope it's something that you might try I would definitely pull up a photograph and see what you can find to inspire you so you can look at the shapes and the way they interact with each other but I added it with some dimensional adhesive onto an orange card base added a little sentiment from a different picket fence stamp set and my card is ready to send to a person to whom I am grateful that's about it for me today hope you enjoyed this I will see you again very soon have a lovely day go make something beautiful bye bye