 Well, hi there. It's Sandy Aldock and today I'm going to show you some technique ideas to use with Copics and your stencils. And these are from Pinkfresh. They're actually a set of stencils. Each one has multiple stencils in it. Hanging Garden is this one. The one on the right is Garden Florals and in the center is Seamless Floral Panel. And I'll show you each one of those. But before I get started, I thought I'd flip through my Copic Art Journal because I'm going to show you some tests that I did in here using some stencils. But the rest of this journal, at least the first 10 spreads or so, are from the Copic Art Journal class. So if you're interested in learning how to use your Copic markers in your art journaling and learn some crazy techniques, lots of this can be used on cards. It's not just for art journalists, but it's also a lot of fun for journaling. And the themes for each one of the lessons are all about being an artist and the life of an artist. So hopefully it's also going to be encouraging to you as you create things. Lots of them are very loose. Other ones are very doodly. And you could use stamps in this. You could do all kinds of things. It's an art journal, so it's very unique to you. And as we get back here to the end of class, we'll get to the section where I started playing with these floral stencils. This one I airbrushed over top of because I had some mess bleeding through from the previous pages. And then even the florals that I did on the other side bled through. So I kind of liked the idea they were soft. So I just airbrushed over it. I'll save that page for some doodling. This is the Garden Florals. And you'll see that kind of a technique shown. And this one, the stencil idea didn't work. I was trying to use colorless blender through the stencil to make these flowers and they were just blobs instead. So I made them actual blobs by just putting dots of colorless blender on the page and making it more like bubbles and wrote, just keep swimming on it. Because, you know, when you mess up a page, you just keep going. And this one is the seamless floral pattern panel. I wanted to see if it actually was seamless and it does join top to bottom. So you can make a long strip of it by just moving the stencils and working again. The left side, I used the same flowers, but I just did them in a random pattern. And the random pattern didn't work all that great because I didn't pick very good colors. But I'm going to do it all over that one too. That's what art journals are for. So now I am going to start with airbrushing. And don't worry, if you don't have an airbrush, there's non airbrush techniques coming as well. But first, I'm going to be blowing the airbrush color through the air gun. It's a Copic airbrush gun that's attached to a compressor and it just blasts the color through the holes in the stencil and layering them on. Each one of the stencils has little corner marks. So if you're using an A2 piece of paper, there's little marks you just line up. Or you could, if you want the whole thing to be shifted over to the corner and the left or something, just put some tape marks down on whatever you're taping it down to. And you can line them up in different places on the card rather than just right in the center. But they're also marked with what order they think they should be done in. And if you're using inks, you probably should follow their order. But I'm just using them in random order because Copic markers are transparent, so it doesn't really matter. So you can use these in whatever order you want. And you can also skip some. You don't have to use them all. But I'm going to try to use them all and be faithful to what they designed them to be, at least partially. But airbrush gives a very soft edge because the airbrush blows underneath of the stencil. Like it lifts up a little bit while you're blowing. So it doesn't give you a really crisp, perfect edge unless you put a product under it. I don't feel like doing that. I like things that are a little bit easier on me product-wise than that. So I decided to just keep going, just plow ahead and let it be soft. And then I started kind of having fun with adding airbrush background to it. You could add an airbrush background first, of course, and then do this stenciling over top. But if you do it afterward, then you can control it. There's another one you'll see over on the blog at the end of this. Be sure to check out the samples over there. Because there's one where I airbrushed around everything and I just left the centers of the flowers white. And that looked kind of pretty too. And I used heavier color with it. So lots of different options for how you can play with it. And this is really forgiving for people who are learning airbrush because it's clearly just very rough and loose. And I'm layering color over top of things. So if you have a spot where the airbrush really blew out underneath of one of the spots of the stencil, you just put a bit of background over it. No one will know. So here is the second technique. And this one is also with garden florals. These are the same stencils I just used. And I got a Swisper. These are things I got from Costco. They also have a Met drugstores and things for makeup removal. And I put a little bit of 99% alcohol on it. You could also do that with colorless blender. But the alcohol is cheaper if you can find it. And just started moving the color around using that. Now make sure you switch back and forth if you're going to use orange. Don't also use the same Swisper you had the green on or you'll get mud. But it's basically just wiping the color off the stencil and pushing it into the open areas. I discovered this technique years ago and I actually called it Copic stenciling. And I'll link you to that video at the end of this one. So you can see it. I used it with one stencil and it was just one giant flower. Which was a little easier to do than all of these little itty-bitty pieces. But it was the seed of this idea and I wanted to try it again since I saw all these sets that had multiple stencils in them. So you can see I got totally, totally different looks out of doing this. In the one of the right where you're pushing the color through, you do get a little edge, little strange edge in some cases because of the way that the liquid pushes through the stencil. But I don't find it bothersome. It's just different. It's just kind of a unique look for it. So this one now is called Hanging Garden. And if you don't have an airbrush, this is how you would do this technique. It's just color onto the stencil itself. Now I did try coloring into the open holes and that looked really bad. Like at least when you're pushing it through with the swisper, it feels a little more loose and organic, whereas it just feels forced when you end up kind of pushing it through with the marker strokes. You could certainly try it and with different stencils that might work. But here I'm just saturating, well not totally saturating, just making the swisper wet enough that it will move the color. If you just put the color on there and you use a dry paper towel or a dry swisper, nothing will happen because the color will just get stuck on there. And you don't want that. So make sure you put enough to keep it moving. But different amounts of the liquid will give you a different look. So sometimes they'll, they'll be smoother if you put more of the liquid in there. And again, make sure you don't cross contaminate your colors, because orange and green are going to make you a weird brown. Don't ask me how I know. It might have been that I forgot. Yes, that would be it. I forgot. And was using the wrong swisper at one point on one of these, but the black surface that I'm using underneath of this, by the way, is my Ellen Hudson Craft Assistant. And I like it better than the craft mats that are out there because it's metal and it's flat and it's always going to stay flat. It doesn't ever get wrinkled on me. And I've had several of those other kind of mats, just different kind of brands. And they eventually do get wrinkled. And maybe it's that I take very big care of my stuff. I don't really know. But this one, I can't wreck. I can't do anything to it. It's metal. And it's also black. So it gives me a real clear idea of what I'm seeing on my piece of paper, because I've got the contrast of the black edge. So I'm just going to add a couple different colors for the flowers here on the hanging garden. Now the hanging garden is a hanging garden. It does look like a hanging garden. But I also realized you could turn this one the other direction and it looks like a garden with flowers growing up from it. So you could use this one in either direction. And of course, there are gajillion ink techniques you can use with any of these. So this is just in addition to the possibility of using them for inking is just being able to utilize your Copics with them. It's always nice to be able to stretch your supplies and be able to use a different medium with any one of your different types of stencils and things. I do hope to do some stuff with some of these with watercolor as well. I used to do some watercolor stencil work by tracing into some of the areas. And I may do some of that. We'll see what kind of time I get. But this one came out really soft and pretty. I just thought it was gorgeous. The sentiments from both of these are from all of these, I guess, is you are amazing from Ellen Hudson. Link in the doobly do for all supplies, by the way. And now back to the book. I'll show you a little piece of how I did that seamless panel. I had put a piece of tape down because I just wanted to do that edge. And you can see the panel doesn't go all the way, you know, all the way across a giant area. And it also stopped short. And so I went through aligning all of my stencils in the same place, aligned with the left of that piece of tape that's on the piece of paper. And I had a piece of white paper underneath just so I wouldn't blast all over the rest of my book. And now you can see the second row here is where you can line up the second row of the seamless panel. So it's seamless. It joins the ones at the top are repeated at the ones in the bottom. So the purple flower that's only half of flower at the top is the other half of it is on the other end of the stencil. And so if you've got a scrapbook page or some long project that you want to do, then you could certainly do that kind of stenciling with this, or you can just random stencil. I mean, that's what I was doing on the left hand page. And in, you know, coming times in the next couple of weeks, keep an eye on my social media. And if I end up doing the doodling that I have in my head, if it works out, I will post that on social so you can see how it comes out. Because it was kind of a mess at the time that I did this, but nonetheless, I'm sure it will be fine later. So I hope this gave you some interesting ideas for ways that you can approach working with stencils and using some Copic markers with a little bit of a unique techniques. And that's about it for today. I will see you again very soon with another video. Make sure you attend my birthday party coming up. I'm kind of excited about that March 27. I will see you there for the live YouTube video. Take care. Bye bye.