 YouTube with B-Grob, Peg Robinson, and Shell C, we're doing a series of backgrounds, seasonally inspired backgrounds. Now, I got to be honest with you, I filmed a whole bunch of video for this, and then my bad, I screwed up and all the film is gone, and I don't know, yeah, anyway. So that's okay, because we're gonna, I'm gonna just talk you through what I did and why I did it, and then show you the finished piece of artwork I made with them. So everybody made a seasonally inspired piece of background, and then we scanned it and made it into a digital file, which I'll talk you through in a minute. This is the piece that I made. I am going to share a number of backgrounds with you all, and I did also with my collaborators, but, and all of them were made the same way. So they are just a painting background with marks on them made with found objects and homemade mark-making tools, bubble wrap, and bottle lids, and like these big squares here, this is a giant foam die, dice, you know dice, and this I think was a like a placemat, and just found objects, and I used colors that blended well together. You don't want, for instance, to use pink and green without letting the pink or the green dry completely first, because the two will make brown, but that being said, all of these are made with pretty bright colors. I didn't scan all of these, but I did scan some of them, and I used in the piece that I made, the pieces from peg and shell and bee, along with this one, and I made some black and white ones, but I ended up only using this one. Now these are just watercolor or drawing paper, cheap paper, and the black are done with Sharpie markers. This is the same paper with just plain acrylic paint, and I, what is the other one that I used? Just simple, just have fun and play. These were done a long time ago, like back in like 2008, maybe? These are done a long time ago. I don't, again, I didn't scan all of these for you all, but I did scan some of them, and of course, I cannot find the one that I scanned. No, I can't find it. I don't know where it is. Anyway, I scanned one of, I used one of these other ones in the piece. One of these brightly colored ones. I don't know where it is. Nope. Nope, no idea. Anyway, it's here somewhere. It's in the bin. It's with the film footage that I can't find, but I just painted the backgrounds with, you know, a couple of, on these old ones, I painted the backgrounds with a couple of colors, just loosely, sloppily, let it dry, and then I went over them and I would stamp our stencil on top of them. Sometimes the stencils I had in my stash, sometimes with found objects like the big dice and bottle caps and things like that. This, this here is the bottom of one of those plastic paper plate picnic holder things that you get like at the dollar store to hold your paper plate when you're like at a picnic, so it doesn't flop around. This is the bottom of it. I see these every now and then at the dollar store still, and I buy them, I wear them out, I use them so much, and I cut the edges off so the bottom is flat, but it's already got all these cutouts in it already like that. So I got all my papers, and including the ones from the other collaborators, I printed them out on plain old printer paper. I didn't do anything special. I have an inkjet printer. I just, the only trick was I let them dry for a couple days so the ink was good and dry. That being said, if you're going to do what I did with it, you want to be careful and not get them too wet or any more wet than necessary because the ink may run or could run. Inkjet ink is water soluble, and then basically what I did was paint over collage. So are you ready? So here we go. I am inspired by the artist Deb Weir's. She has a book on Amazon. I will link it in the description below. I took the papers, the digital backgrounds, and I printed them, and then I collaged them on here. I didn't have a plan in mind. I knew I wanted to do a face, but I didn't really didn't have a plan in mind. I just took pieces and collaged them down in random places, honestly. I did know I wanted a face, so I did put some shapes for where I thought the eyes might go and the lips. And then this collar just came. That was where the pieces landed. I don't know what that is, but I like it. And then I put another one here, and another one here, and I cut up, I tore up some of the pages, the backgrounds, and look, I made his hair, right? And his irises in his eye are some of the paper. That's not paint. That's paper. Very cool. And then I just filled in the rest with paint and markers. I have a bunch of paint pens I wanted to use up, and I used them to do his basic outline, let that dry a little bit, then went back and added some more marks, and just had fun with it and doodled it. I did calm down the background because the whole board was like this, and of course with the collage on it, it was very noisy. So I took some purple paint, and I actually mixed a little bit of it with a paint's gray to make it darker on this side, and then had it straight on that side. So one side's a little bit lighter than the other, so it looks like the light's coming this way. And I just used that on the background around him after I had kind of a basic map of where his face was going to go to calm down the background so that he stands out more from the background because he was really fighting with the background, and yeah, he didn't stand out nearly as much. He wasn't nearly as cute, but it's just painting and doodling and mark making. So it's just one example of what you can do with a digital background besides the obvious, which I also love to do, which is making cards and tags and using them in your journal pages. Now, if you're going to create digital backgrounds, if you have a piece that you've made that you want to scan and make digital, you need to do a few things. First of all, of course, the obvious, let it dry completely. You need access to a scanner. You really want to scan it at a minimum of 300 dpi, 600 is better, and then save it as a basic image file like a jpeg that's everybody can access that whoever you're going to share it with. I like to do these and originally started doing these for myself to create my own collage paper so I could leverage my art as Tracy Bautista would say, and if you don't know who she is, I'll link also her in the description below, and I will link her page because she's fabulous. She leverages her own art a lot. She would take copies and scans of her own art and use them again as collage paper or other fodder for other art pieces. She would even take parts of him and photograph or scan him and use him in his art and isn't he so cool. I'm going to step back just a little bit. So cool. So that's what I did with my digital backgrounds. I can't wait to see what everybody else did and I would love it if you went and showed them some love. Their links are in the description below and yeah let's see what we can do about leveraging our own art and getting creative with how we use it. I would love that. That's it for today. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe if you want to support the free content here on YouTube or over on Facebook. You can do that or follow me on any social media by looking at all the links in my link tree which is in the description below. That's it for today everybody. Go out and have a great day and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'll see you later. Bye guys.