 Hello, and welcome to day five in my six video series, the 24 tags of Christmas, making four tags a day that I give away. And you can comment here on YouTube or over on my blog or in both to double your chances to win a tag. I'm going to use a stamp set from Colorado Craft Company was not a Christmas stamp set, but I'm going to turn it into one. And choosing which of the dyes from Ellen Hudson that I wanted to use for it. And I've got them stamped in Versa fine onyx black onto arches cold pressed watercolor paper, starting by painting the background. Basically I'm painting the grout. There's grout in between bricks on a wall. So I thought it would be helpful to put some color down. So I at least have something there. And then if there's gaps in between my bricks, they'll be a little less visible if they're crooked or things are not perfect against a color. And notice that I didn't get them all perfect. They aren't all the same. Doesn't really matter. So this time I'm doing traditional bricks and traditional bricks alternate. So one row is offset from the other row so that the center of a brick is the ends of the bricks in the rows above and below. Sometimes that can take an awful lot of mental work when you have an image like a window interrupting it because you have to figure out where are you in the sequence and how bigger the bricks, etc. And it can be a lot more thinking than a tag is worth. So the rest of these I'm going to do as giant stones on a wall instead of bricks. So they won't be traditional bricks. I've mixed into that burnt sienna that I used for the previous tag. I've mixed in some blue. Happens to be a cobalt blue. You can use a lot of different blues to do this. But a blue and a brown are going to make a gray. So this is going to make some gray stones for this wall. Notice that I'm making them all different sizes and shapes and just skipping around the entire wall to get this color into a bunch of areas all over the wall, all over the tag. And I'm going just up to the edge of the grout that I painted earlier so that I'm just not doing the entire thing all the way to the tippy edges of the paper because that's where I stopped my painting. I beg your pardon for my lights. One of my lights is on the fritz and it's meeting replaced. I haven't gotten the new one in the mail yet. So my lights tend to just dim and brighten up. It's just a thing I'm dealing with right now. So then I added in more burnt sienna. So I have more of the warmer colored bricks, but they have a little bit of that blue in them. So they're not as warm as the bricks in the first tag. I added more blue so I can make even different, a different hue of the same mixes of color. So all of these bricks are going to go together because they're based on the same two colors that made them, but they're all, they all feel kind of different. So you get a really interesting feel to the wall. And I'm just skipping around different places on it and filling in gaps. It's helpful if you can think ahead to not leave teeny tiny itty bitty areas because with a stone wall in illustrative style, even though these bricks are probably bigger than what they'd be in proportion if this was a real window, it's going to look like polka dots if you make them too small. So don't get too small with them. On this one, I decided to use all one color for the stones. So I mixed up a bigger batch of it so that I could just keep going from one section to the other. And I'm getting less of the small stones, the teeny tiny ones having to fill in to the gaps because I'm doing it as I go. I can just enlarge one, you know, make it string out into a different area if I need to fill it in. So that's a little bit easier. And then here I'm using the burnt sienna color with a little bit of that blue in it. So it's duller than the brighter brick color in the traditional bricks one, but has just a different look to it. Even using some of the extra puddled up color to try to push it into a different one of the stones. So this is a really nice way to make a brick wall around anything that you need scene wise. Now for the window itself, I want to make the top and bottom portion look like they are snow. So I'm mixing a thicker mixture of the burnt sienna and the blue to make a darker gray. And I'm going to just go underneath where the snow would be and create a kind of dangling edge for the snow. So it's kind of lumpy in some parts and hangs down a little bit and then do the frame of the window all the way around in that same color. So it pulls the whole window together and now it looks like there's snow on it. This was not a Christmas stamp. And to finish the whole thing off, I just put a blue over the whole thing so it looks like the dog's inside. In this particular stamp, that might be an open window that the dog is looking out of. And I want to make sure he's inside and toasty warm while it's snowy outside. You could also add snow onto this with a white pen, but I decided I wanted just the bricks to be the thing that shows beautifully. All right, that's it for number five. Stay tuned tomorrow for one more in this series and then you get your chance to win a tag. All right, I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.