 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube with another in the 24 Tags of Christmas series of 2018. Every year I create 24 tags and I give them all away. So at the end of this video, I will tell you how you can qualify to win one of the 24 tags of Christmas. We are in video number four out of six. And I am using Impression Obsessions Beautiful Pine Cone. But I wanted to do just the pine cone. I didn't want to stamp the ribbon. And I also wanted to make this fade into the scene. I thought the image in my head was to have some pine branches coming down so that this little pine cone was just hanging in a branch. So I'm stamping onto watercolor paper with Versa Fine Onyx Black Ink, which is waterproof and wiped off the edges. I decided afterward that I wanted to have one hard edge and left the other one soft. And I stamped four of them because in each one of these I'm doing four so that it's a total of 24 tags to give away at the end. And I'm first painting them all with water just to get the paper wet. And while I did that I realized I should probably tilt my board up for this one with the kind of watercolor I want to do. And that's just a little embossing jar back there if you want to know about what height that is. Everything's taped down. Kind of I was thinking of leaving that white edge. I ended up deciding it was going to be better if I cut that off instead of just leaving it the white edge. But I'm using a bunch of colors that were already in my palette, which is one of the reasons I'm not showing because it's a mix of a couple different colors. And it doesn't really matter a whole lot. I just wanted to have some blue sky showing through the tree branch a little bit in some fashion. And then I wanted to add a bit of green so that it starts feeling like I've got something really washy. Now a bunch of you are going to think, oh my goodness, she's making a mess. What's she doing? Someone take this woman's brush away. But trust me, they're going to be pretty when they're done. I'm also using a one inch flat brush for this. And what I find, I want to do some more experiments with that flat brush because what I find is I get really loose because I can't use that round brush that I'm very used to using. I kind of have to just get washy. So I've been doing a little bit of practice with doing some large paintings just with that flat brush. And one day I'll be brave enough to show one of them. But they're at least fun to try. So I sprayed a little water on here so I could maybe create some water spots. And you can kind of get crazy with it do as much or as little of that as you want to. And then I'm partially heat setting not completely. So the paper is a little bit wet, but it's dry enough on the right hand side that the brown's not going to totally take over in that area outside of the pinecone. And I painted enough on the right hand side and then let it just kind of fade off on the left a little bit. I was planning on spraying it so wasn't too worried about what the shape of that looked like. I just wanted that that kind of fade off. But that one hard edge so that you you still get the idea it's a pinecone. If I still had stamped it like I had started with that soft edge on both sides, I think it wouldn't have read nearly as much like a pinecone. But I really wanted to keep this very loose painting. And I know a lot of people struggle with loose painting, but this will hopefully show you that you can just kind of be a little crazy with it and don't stress out too much. Pay attention to the most important things and don't worry about too many of the others. So I just kept the the brown a little bit in in the pinecone, wiped off some that that bled out beyond it. And now starting with a first layer of of green. And since I just sprayed it, then it is kind of wet still. So I wanted that semi washy, you know, kind of partially dry partially not dry lines of my brush. And I had relatively thin paint decided to add a little bit more brown just splotching a little bit into the pine cones so that I'd have a little sharper contrast little more detail in them and even dropped in some some straight sepia and threw in just that a little bit more for contrast. Now adding that contrast means that I am going to need to add more contrast to the pine boughs. You can't just add it in one place and not have something to balance it else wise. So now that the green is starting to dry a little bit, I decided to start adding a little bit more. But if you want to start adding a little more contrast in there, then you're going to need a little bit drier paper. So I want to just slightly drier um before I started adding more into the trees. And you can see through my big fat hand. Sorry about that. That's part of the problem of shooting overhead videos. It's often really great, but sometimes it doesn't work out so well. And I'm just holding the brush by the very tippy top. That's why my hand is so much in the way. Usually I'm at more of an angle, but I wanted to get those pine needles to feel like they're they're just kind of flicking in from that outside edge. The paint is mixed much thicker than what I had been using before. That's why I'm getting that dark color. And so I've got I think there's some sap green in there might be a little carbazole violet, but I'm going to add more carbazole violet as we get a little further on because I'm going to want even more contrast because what happened when I added those that sepia onto my uh my little pine cones is that I ended up needing more contrast. It created the need for more so that that pine cone doesn't completely take over. And this really starts to set the tone remembering all the time that watercolor is going to dry about 30 lighter than where it went down. That's just the way watercolor does because watercolor is thing that just dries lighter. So always remember that don't be afraid to go too dark because it's going to happen. You're going to be able to to lighten things up. There's a lot of colors you can also lift and that sort of thing if you have specific spots that need help. But I wanted snow to have rested on these and I'm using my white pen to just add some snow spots. Those also are going to add in a little bit more of the definition that I lost when I started adding in some of those dark colors. So you can kind of fix some of those areas if your color didn't get really kind of in the spots you needed. However, I don't know that you necessarily need to go in and paint every one of those little pieces of the pine cone with the proper shadow. On the blog today there's going to be another card that is done with this kind of technique. And I did kind of cut into each one of those little sections more. And so you can see the difference in how it's painted in that one with still a loose background but with more focus on the detail of the pine cone itself. So these came out I think quite beautiful. I layered them onto a piece of watercolor paper underneath and I think they're gorgeous. So four more winners qualify for these tags. If you leave a comment on my blog then you will get to qualify to win. And I'm excited to get these out to somebody. So do visit the blog. Link is in the doobly-doo as well as all the supplies used for this, etc. Except there's no recipe for palette juice. It's just whatever colors were left on my palette. So I will see you guys again tomorrow for another video. Bye-bye.