 Well hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I've got some airbrush backgrounds that you can also do with other mediums. I love playing with my airbrush, especially when I've got some solid stamps. So I got out my Tim Holtz glass mat in order to do this and have an area that I can really clean off nicely. And I'm going to use the Nativity set along with some of these Penny Black sentiments. Notice that there are secular and Christian sentiments in this particular Penny Black set. I'll have all of them linked on my blog so you can see them. Penny Black does really beautiful Christmas sentiments. So what I've done is stamped in some Copic Friendly ink, doesn't necessarily have to be for doing airbrush, stamped in Copic Friendly ink on Copic Friendly paper and I'm going to use my airbrush, which is this little gun thing is connected to a compressor that's sitting on the ground. And I put my marker in with the chisel nib pointing out and press the button. And color comes out. So there you go. And you can switch colors really easily this way. I love the fact that I can do this with my markers because when I was in college and we got to try airbrush once or twice, you had to put ink in bottles and then you had to clean it out in between every color. This allows me to go back and forth all the time to switch colors by popping in a different marker. And that just makes me so happy. I really enjoy that because I like going quickly. And most of the colors you're going to find if you start using your Copic airbrush are going to come out lighter on the paper than they are on the marker. Like if you were to actually color with the marker that RV09 if you know it is a really dark color and it's very light pink here. But I'm going to just keep adding colors so I have this beautiful glow growing out from that yellow right around the baby Jesus and start to work into that night sky. Now some of you guys are really fantastic with your Distress Inks and doing Distress Ink backgrounds. You can do the same kind of thing with this using this stamp set and just make nice gradations. I can't do that with Distress Inks. I'm terrible with that little ink blending tool thing. I can barely do limited work with it. So that's why I go for my airbrush because yeah some people are good at some things and some people are good at others. So I envy those of you who can just get out your little ink blending tools and go to town with it. So I'm switching now to my blues so my sky gets to be a really nice dark blue because I wanted to do some embossing on top of it. And yes, you can emboss on top of Copic marker whether it's airbrush or just regular coloring. You know, just let it dry of course ahead of time. You don't want to put anything on while it's wet but you can use your powder tool right over top of it so that you can do the de-static thing and the powder won't stick all over, etc. and emboss like normal paper. Now what you're probably seeing here, it looks kind of lumpy on screen. It doesn't look as even as it did in real life. So I called it good because I was very happy with what it looked like in real life. You'll see the photos later. And then I took some Eclipse tape and made a mask by just tearing it. I wanted to have a ground that felt sort of like earth rather than just a flat line. You could do it straight line as well. So I've placed that little torn paper down there and then I had one area that I didn't like to tear so I threw an extra scrap in there to fill that in. I wanted to have a little bit of that blue underneath of the black that I wanted to have down here so I put some blue down first and then went in with a nice heavy rich black because I have those black silhouettes and I wanted that black ground to complement it so it would really anchor the image on the bottom of my card panel. And the great reveal is always so much fun, just pull that off and voila. I did decide I wanted to add a little bit of the black to the top. I'm using an N10 instead of a black because my black chisel nib doesn't do very well with airbrush and if you use Copic airbrush much you'll know that there's some markers that just don't work happily. They just don't. Whether it's the chisel nib is old or that sort of thing quite likely is the cause but since I have all the markers I just switched to a different one that's similar and call it good. The stamp set has the manger scene with Mary and Joseph and the baby and the whole little roof that they're underneath and they also have these animals so I stamped the animals on the left and the right and it's a little harder to see here. You can tell where the double stamping happened when I stamped the animals right over top of the manger that was there and when I went over it with my marker a little bit and fussed with it I could get them to look like they were just one solid shape so it eventually did work out. As I said you're able to very easily emboss on top of Copic marker so just put down some of the powder tool on top of the panel and stamp with VersaMark ink. Press that down in the misty and then use some embossing powder and I'm using the wow rich gold embossing powder because it stands out really beautifully on a nice rich color like this and I ended up putting the star up in the upper right hand corner of the sentiment so I have the star up there as well. I first did it in white embossing powder and then I didn't like it so I ended up doing it again in gold so it's got two layers there and I did have to use my gold pen to fix it a little bit. This is a gold uniball Signo pen so it's very much like the white one but it's gold and gorgeous and I added a tiny highlight to the top of the manger so it would stand out against that dark blue. So I'm going to zoom through a couple other backgrounds that I did and explain a little bit of what I did for my inking technique or my airbrush technique with the same masking paper. So here I wanted to have some hillsides off in the distance so I started creating them first and just putting some of the same colors. I'm using the same marker colors that I did previously and boy I wish I could airbrush this fast. The other portion was much more like what normal speed is. This is just super fast so we could get through this and get to the card designs because I liked the fact that this shepherd and his little sheep are looking off into the distance. So first I created my sky way out in the far distance with the same kind of colors that I did before. Using the same mask just grab the same thing as you can tell and started putting some colors down in there for an intermediate hillside and that gave me a secondary color adding a little bit of the pinkishness and a little bit of purple in there to just give that hillside in the distance a really nice look to it. And then I wanted a little different torn shape so I did tear my paper a little bit again so that I could create that foreground again that heavy black foreground to go with the silhouette shadow type of stamping. And I think it really accents it well but notice again that I had the Copic marker over the ink and I just had to fix it a little bit with the pen to make sure that it didn't look like the hillside was going right through my shepherd. And again I stamped my sentiment in the same wow embossing powder and the star up there in the center and added some stars with the gold pen. Peace love and joy. So simple and so beautiful and so easy to do and again you could do these kind of things with your distressing or something if you're really good at that then rock on with it but otherwise the airbrush is a really fun tool to use. For this one I was trying to do the hillside a little bit in the reverse of what I did before. So I'm trying to create a star up in the sky but I realized if I'm going to stamp and emboss that star how was I going to have it show up because it wasn't going to really show up just against that yellow. So the other colors kept just kind of slowly creeping into the area where the yellow was. Kind of kept building them up more and more. I also wanted to have a nice dark rich sky this time so that that star really stood out. So this time I used my mask to to to make the skyline and just kept adding more and more color and getting nice and rich and dark and adding layer after layer which is the cool thing about airbrush is that you can keep adding layer after layer. If you're if you end up getting sploogey spots and they were not like I said earlier this sploogey spots looked better in real life than they do here on camera because of the way that the lighting picks up on the black mat. Not sure I like this mat I still haven't decided that it's something I'm really going to continue to use a ton but it does work really well for airbrush since it's really cleanable and stuff after you finish with your airbrushing but nonetheless now I'm going to move on excuse me to the second pardon me and move on to the second hillside and put more of the purples and pinks in there and create the darkness down below on the previous one I had the light above the the mountains in the shepherd scene and this is the opposite so I'm putting the darker color at the bottom and then I wanted to be able to create some real impact for my my camels and stuff so I wanted to give them some nice ground some letting the hillside they're standing on have the light from the star cast on them originally I was going to make some shadows coming down from them and I realized I was too nervous about messing it up after all this airbrushing that I did but I also had to find a way to separate out the kings on their camels from that background because the background got so dark because I kept airbrushing and airbrushing so I'm just using the gold pen to make a few lines in the highlight areas on the camels and that's actually one camel and king stamped twice but since I'm doing a little modification with my pen anyway I can kind of adjust them so they don't look like they're a duplicate of the same stamp and then just create a little tiny bit of detail so they pop out from the background stamp my sentiment and my star and then draw in a few more extra little stars so pretty all of these cards and so much fun to make it's just fun to make backgrounds and not have to worry about coloring objects so I encourage you to try something like that this is a great stamp set to work on that kind of a thing and practice doing some really interesting and intense backgrounds all right you guys take care and have an awesome day go make something beautiful and I will see you very soon with another video bye