 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to be talking about papers for watercolor pencil. I will be making cards in this video, but if you are not a card maker, you'll still learn something from the paper tests that I'll be doing. And the stamp is called New Baby from Colorado Craft Company. The papers are by Arches. I wanted to stick to one brand and I'm going to be using the hot press, the cold press, and the rough. We'll have three different textures to test out. And little swatches here to show you up close what these textures look like. The hot press is incredibly smooth. The cold press has a really nice texture to it. And the rough has a wider texture, meaning the peaks, if you think of it as peaks and valleys, the peaks are further apart, so you get a bigger texture. The water fills in all the valleys, if you think of them as peaks and valleys. And sometimes, depending on whether it's technique or whether it's the quality of the pencils, you need to go back and forth a little bit in order to melt it out. And that would be doing what I'm doing here to just push the color around so that it more evenly works its way into some of those valleys. And most good watercolor pencils will melt out to a nice white as you do a graduation of color. Here's the three papers with the stamp on them. First the rough, and then the cold press, and finally the very smooth hot press. And most stampers prefer hot press, I shouldn't say most. Lots of stampers prefer hot press because you get a crisper image. It's easier to get it to stamp evenly because you're just working with a nice flat surface. If you have a misty stamping tool or some other kind of stamping tool, then the other papers are not a problem because you just stamp them a couple times in order to fill in any gaps that didn't stamp well because of the texture. The watercolor pencils here are Albrecht Durer pencils. And they're a really nice quality pencil. They work really well. They melt out nicely. They're about the equivalent of Supercolor by Karen Dash. So those are kind of mid-range pencils. And if you're using mid-range to high-range pencils, you shouldn't have much problem with watering out the color. So when you add water to them, the color should melt nicely and turn into watercolor. Sometimes, as I said, you'll go back and forth in a few areas because some of that pigment will get stuck on the peaks and that sort of thing. But for the most part, good pencils will not have a problem with that. And of course, the more you pay for pencils, the higher the quality. That's kind of how life is, isn't it? Well, I want to show you these up close, but I want to, of course, finish off Daddy Bunny's feet first, just so you can see the amount of pigment that's on each one of the rabbits, the rough, the cold press, and that vast, vast, vast big difference with the hot press. There's just this really soft gray color as opposed to having more pigment in it. And as soon as I started working with my brush, I started seeing the difference because I can get a near-black color with just that small amount of pigment that was scraped off of my pencil onto the paper as I colored those portions of the image. And the texture is what does that scraping. Remember, it's shearing off a little bit of pencil as the peaks of the paper meet with the pencil. When you're talking about a hot press paper, you don't have much to shear off anything, so you don't end up with as much pigment on the paper itself. Now, that may mean your pencils will last longer if you use a hot press paper. I don't really know that. I have never tested it out. It would be teeny tiny microns of difference in order to measure, and I can't measure anything that small. And it's possible, but you also need to adjust some other things in order to get the amount of pigment onto the image. Because these two, I just quickly went over them and I've got plenty of color. Now granted, all of the color when you use any kind of wet medium like watercolor or watercolor pencil will dry back about 30%. That's just the nature of how it goes. So if you want a richer color, you need to put richer color down first. With this hot press, it hardly darkened at all. Like the other two ended up with spots that were nice and strong shadowed, and this did not. And that's again because there's not that much pigment left on the paper. You could accommodate for that by choosing darker colors if you're using a hot press paper. Or you could just use more pressure to add more pigment onto the paper manually. It's up to you whether you want to go to that trouble or get one of the papers with texture to make that process a little bit easier. I've used a warm gray for the daddy bunny and a cool gray for the mama bunny, but literally I could really tell no difference between them. I really thought that would be a really nice thing to do. It's to give one of them some warmth and one of them some cool. And yeah, apparently that's not a thing that at least is very visible to me. I'm used to other mediums that sometimes are more obvious with that. But I am getting some nice contrast and getting some nice depth and roundness to the rabbits themselves. And that's working out quite nicely on the rough and the cold press paper. And I love good contrast. That's just my thing. I know there's plenty of people who do not want that. And stylistically, they want very soft pastel kind of look. And it gets scary when you get adding dark color in there and you're getting a lot of contrast. So I can totally understand that some people don't like that. But using a wet brush to spread a little bit of color around the bunny's tummies just so there's something else there. If you have a background you're adding to it, you might want to leave the white and that sort of thing. I'm not planning on adding a background to these. So I wanted to have a little bit of color in there for the rabbits themselves. And again, this little bunny on the hot press paper has just very, very little contrast to it. And just much softer look. So again, you could go over, add a second layer of more color later. Or you could just use darker pencils, darker colors to begin with. If you want more contrast. So I am double timing the speed on coloring these little bunnies. And I thought I'd tell you my plan for the bunnies. These are new baby cards. And I was thinking, oh, that should be more cheerful than this. But I wanted more realistic bunnies because I like realistic bunnies. So they're all going to be neutral colors, right? But how do I brighten this up? Well, I plan to add green for the grass and a green card base so that they'll be neutral for my friends who's they're having grand babies. They're not having babies themselves. My friends are all of an age. We're not having kids anymore. But we are having grand babies in our lives. So I wanted to have a couple in my stash that were neutral gender wise. So I'll add some green. But in order to make these little bunnies a little bit different than the parents so that they would feel like they're just it's not more pure gray. I've added a little layer of brown in there. I just scribbled a tiny bit of brown into each one of the areas of the bunnies so that I would get a little bit more color to them. In some areas it meant that the bunnies were really dark, which was kind of fun. And I was concentrating on trying to leave some contrast between each of the shapes so that the bunnies were definite. And that sort of thing. So leaving some highlights on the outsides of them, that sort of thing, making that the baby bunny in mama's arms nice and dark so that the baby bunny stands out nicely, etc. And then finishing off with these. And you can see there's just a tiny bit more of brown in those bunnies. It's a little challenging to tell. But it is one way that when you have just a whole bunch of animals are all the same color, you can give them a slight different tone difference between them, just a little bit of a shift of hue that will change it up a little bit. So here's the rough, the cold press. And then finally the hot press, you can see the vast difference between them as soon as you get to the hot press, you can't tell a whole lot between the rough and the cold press. But you will see more of that in the ground that I put in beneath them. All this just a wash of green. And you could if you want to not deal with wetting this part out, you could just grab some watercolors and use it along with your watercolor pencils. So if you just want to do a wash of some green watercolor, then you could do that as well. I wanted to stick with my pencils. And the color here gets immediately richer, as soon as the water is added, you can tell the the kind of color that I'm getting. And that will be different on each one of these. The texture that you can get at on the edges of things is where I like using the papers with texture. And I mean that in terms of my watercolors, and just all the edge work that you can make happen. The hot press just tends to be very flat. It doesn't tend to feel very rich. And you also get not much pigment. The color there is just much less. And takes a lot more fussing to to move it around evenly. But nonetheless, I have three great cards that are going to be adding to my stash. And I'll zoom in here. I've left the little sticky note labels on them. So I remember what they are the hot press with the very smooth texture to it. Secondarily is the cold press the one in the middle. It has some texture to it. I love the brown in some of those bunnies the way that that stands out. And then the third one is the rough. And a lot of times I leave some of that texture in there. I like the texture. It feels like granulation that you get from some watercolors. So thank you very much for joining me for this. If you're interested in more information, there is a watercolor pencil jumpstart class linked in the doobly-doo down below. And I will see you guys later on. Take care and I'll see you in another video very soon. Thanks for watching.