 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Alnach, artist and paper crafter here with a special video. It's Extra Long and it's an advanced technique video for art impressions watercolor. Well, this video is the first in my November series of projects. Each day I'm doing a little thankfulness prompt because I need more thankfulness in my life. So I'm hosting a little challenge. You can do Bible journaling, card making, sketching, lettering, whatever you want and the list is linked in the doobly-doo as well as over on my blog and my Instagram if you want to join in. But today's prompt, the first one, was memories. And I thought I am thankful for memories of building snowmen with my friends and my sisters when I was a kid. So I'm going to use these art impressions little kiddos who are wearing summer clothes. Notice they're wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts and skirts and things. And I'm going to make them into winter kiddos. Now, I'm betting eventually art impressions is going to make some some winter kiddos for us, but they also have benches and boats and things that these kids are meant to be part of. But I'm going to put them on a bench, one of them on a bench, and then use the snowman for the center image. So they're going to be standing around looking at their snowmen. I have my watercolor paper that is cut out there and I also have a piece of vellum over it. And I want to show you how I'm going to set up the scene. So I'm going to use two of the standing children, one of the sitting children, the sitting little girl. And she's going to sit on a bench, and then I've got the snowman. And I'm going to start by stamping the images real quickly and loosely onto the vellum. And that's going to be my guide for the whole scene that I'm doing. So I'm going to put the little girl down here in the lower right hand section. And I'm just stamping with any old color. It doesn't really matter what color you use to put these things together. You don't have to mask anything out. Just kind of get them in place. Now this bench has another leg that didn't stamp in there. So I drew that in. And I also drew a little pile of snow to remind myself to put snow on the bench. And I'm going to use just a little corner of a sticky note to mask off the feet of the little girl. So she's clearly going to be connected to the scene. I could have just had her floating out there, and you can do that. But I wanted to kind of tuck things in a little bit. Got the little boy over here on the right hand side. They're both facing inward into the snowman. So they're both looking at him. And then I'll have the snowman in a place where it looks like their heads are facing. So they're looking at him. I had done this once before and I had the snowman too low and it looked like they were all looking past him. So now I'm going to do my actual stamping. And I'm noticing that it's not quite centered. And I could move the vellum over, but I thought, you know, I'm just going to leave it because it gives me room to trim it down a little bit and do some layering of paper when I get to my finished card. So I'm going to start by stamping the image in the front. And I want to line it up on the vellum and then stamp it with a darker ink just so I can see that it actually is in the right location. And then clean off that stamp of the dark ink. And then here's the magic of making her into a little pink jacket instead of having the little overalls that she's wearing is just to ink the outside edges. And you'll see how this works several times throughout doing all the little kids. And then I'm also going to do her hair and her face. The marker colors that I'm using are going to be overlisted on my blogs if you want to see those. But generally just do what colors you want to do. And whatever markers you want to do, lots of them work. And if you've done a lot of art impressions watercolor, which if you are looking at this video and you want to try it, I recommend doing some much simpler things first because this is kind of a really super advanced technique. And those of you who are ready to do that already kind of have an idea of what's going to be happening here. You'll know what kind of paper works best for you and what kind of markers work best. But I'm going to be using the art and graphic twin markers. These are the zig like markers. They have the zig kind of colors and properties, but a different nib on them. So notice that I just kind of paint it in her whole jacket area instead of kind of trying to make overalls or anything. Just painted it as a blob of color. Put some color onto the block so that I could pick some matching color up with my brush to be able to paint in more color. And then I can pull in some yellow and some browns for her hair as well. I'm okay doing both of these at the same time because the two parts of the image don't touch. But since I'm going to be doing another step or two, I wanted to heat set this just so it kind of stays put and doesn't get too mushy. I'm going to stamp over top again and look at the parts that change. I put a darker edge on kind of her outer edges on her two elbows. And then there's the two sides that you can actually take your marker and add a little bit extra in. So the two areas where her back goes up between her arms, you can fill in any areas. I added extra stamping around her hair as well. And now I'm just going to add a scarf. And it just a matter of filling in where her neck was and adding whatever color kind of scarf that you want. And then a little bit of it hanging out the other side so it's clear that it's a scarf. Heat set that before you put the vellum on. Don't ask me how I know that. Because I said I did have to do this twice. It was a lot of work to do it twice. But the first one I went through the whole process to practice it. Now here I goofed up something because I thought I was masking out the top of the bench and I didn't. So I decided I was just going to plow ahead and see if I could get this to work anyway. Make it look like a thicker bench. Because normally I would like to have wiped out that top line so that that would be the snow. But I'm just going to add more snow on top of the whole thing. And by the time it was all said and done I was okay with it. So you can see me trying to make sort of a wiggly line out of the top of it so that it'll look like there's snow kind of hanging over the edge of the wood. That kind of thing. Use my heat gun to dry it. And then I have this really light blue marker. And you can use a light one if you're just kind of sketching things in. And then use darker colors when you get to that point if you need to. So here's the other little girl. Her foot is still going to be touching that corner of the bench. So I'm going to again want to mask out just that corner so that her boots don't stamp in there. So I'm going to do just her boots and her hair first. So this is one of those images where you can do just certain parts of it and watercolor certain parts. So I added tops to her boots. Those are supposed to be naked feet but they are boots instead. And they've drawn them large enough that they'll survive as that. So now we've got hair and boots and I'm going to dry those because I don't want any of the other parts that touch them to pull that black color in. I'm going to do the same thing again with her clothing. And I'm going to color just the outside edges so that I can start making a little bit of a jacket out of that and get rid of those short sleeves. I'm also going to give her a green hat on top of her head. So I didn't color the brim of the hat. So on something like this I got a little bit, I have a little bit too much of that inside. I ended up coloring that sleeve with the marker. So I'm going to have to do a little bit extra coloring. And depending on what markers you're using and how well they lift, you may end up having to just wait a little bit longer, let the marker stay in there so that it will soften that. You can add more pigment to it, make it a little bit darker. And it eventually did cover up the fact that I left that sleeve in there. But you want to be careful when you're doing that. You may want to, if you're going to try this technique practice, doing just the images separately for a little bit before you try making a whole scene because it's a little much. You can easily screw one part up and then feel tragically upset that you haven't got the rest of it working perfectly. So I'm going to make her hand pink and her skirt pink. So that's going to be her gloves and her skirt. And then add a little pom pom on top as well as a scarf. So our little girl is all dressed now for winter. And I'm going to once again go in and firm up some of the spots, not all of them, but a few of the lines like on her back and the back of her legs, that kind of thing. I can stamp over top of that because I'm leaving it in the misty. If you don't have a misty, I don't know how you can get the stamp positioning exact to go back into place this way. But you can just draw those things in with markers rather than stamping them again. So I've got some darker pink going and I thought I'd add some darker pink to the little girl who's sitting down. And then I thought, oh wait, let me put some darker green on the jacket of this little girl. And that then started to hide the fact that I still got that little sleeve kind of under her jacket a little bit showing. So that didn't bother me once I was done with all that. It's got it all dried so I could test out that my little boy is in the right place and I stamped his boots in his hat. So he's going to wear black boots and a black hat. He's not going to wear a winter hat because he's a boy and boys wear their baseball hats all year round. So there you go. Stamped his blue jeans and then his jacket and he's going to wear a brown jacket. So same deal as before. Just going to color the jacket with enough, you know, going back and forth with it to try to eliminate some of those lines. Add more color to it and that sort of thing until it starts to feel more like a jacket. For some of them you might want to make it look puffier so make the area look larger but if you're going to re-stamp over something then you're kind of confined to where the stamping will be. So they wouldn't be able to wear big heavy ones. So here I was trying to add a green scarf and green gloves and when I stamped it I realized I had gone outside of where that little stamp line would be around his gloves. So I just brought his scarf down lower because I should have stamped the gloves first and I didn't. So there you go. But isn't this fun the way it's progressing? Kind of enjoyed this whole process. So check to see that my snowman is where it's going to be and anything that needs masks like right by that little girl's head. And I stamped him in that very lightest blue color and one of the reasons is because see those buttons? They have like a little area that you can make a shadow around them. If you just color those in black like they'd be little pebbles then you're going to end up with a big black blob on his belly. But if you do it in the blue first then you can put just a little bit of the black in later just in the center of the hole and then you end up with smaller little black rocks in the low guy. But again remember constantly to be heat setting in between as you're starting to add more layers because you don't necessarily want to go too crazy. So here you can say I'm firming up some of the areas with the stamping. I did first the left side of the snowman with the darker blue and then the hat and then the eyes and the buttons down his shirt and stuff. Adding more color to them. Picking up color from my little block palette and just slowly working on the different colors. Decided he would wear a nice simple blue scarf because the only other blue in this was the little boy's blue jeans. So this will bring some of that color in and smooth all of that out with the brush. Add a little blue band onto his hat there and then he of course there's a space missing for something and I'm guessing that's probably for Holly. So I put a little green Holly there and since I had some green on my brush I had a little to his scarf as well. So now I've got a couple of blues ready for the snow. There's that really light blue and if you're trying to sketch things in that really light blue will work really nicely to be just a soft color but you can also do it just with water. Just put some water down and then drop some snow color in. The cool thing about snow is that it's just crunchy mushy shadows of snow. So I'm putting definite shadows underneath each child and under the bench and then for this on one side of the snowman so that we have some definite shadows. The rest of it can just be footprints. So I'm going to add footprints and I forgot I was going to add a little bit of the a little heavier color in the snow on the left hand side of the snowman so we have a more distinct type of shadow going and then I will be working my way down to adding footprints in the snow because these kids have obviously been running around a whole lot and you don't end up with a nice smooth area around a snowman. So why not add a whole bunch of little footprints. Don't add too many but enough so that you you know you kind of have this cacophony of color down there which makes it really fun. The stamp set has some little branches but they wouldn't fit in this area the way I'd done it. They're bigger than I needed them to be so I just drew my own in just some sticks. I did it first in a light brown and then added a little tiny bit of a dark brown as well so they'd have a little differentiation in them and I didn't use my brush on them at all so they'd stay kind of sharp. I finished my card by trimming the panel down like I had earlier planned so that I had room for a black and a pink layer on a blue piece of cardstock for my card base and tied a little twine around the top nice and easy. Now if you're an Art Impressions fan and you also do Bible journaling you're going to want to pay attention on Sunday. I have a video coming up on my YouTube channel for Bible journaling and I'm going to show you how to use these stamps without any page prep and no bleeding through and I'm going to show you how to do it in my workbook. This is the workbook that came out with the book recently very exciting that we can practice on things but you can see I've done some things that did bleed through and I found a technique that did not, yoo-hoo, very excited about that because I don't like page prep but I do like my Art Impressions stamps. So there you go. Stay tuned for that. I'll have a link in the doobly-doo for that eventually and in the meantime go make something beautiful and wonderful and don't forget to click the like button on your way out of my channel and I'll see you guys later on. Take care. Goodbye.