 Well, hello there! My name is Sandy Allnock, artist and papercrafter here on YouTube, and I am excited to bring you the 24 tags of Christmas 2015. This is day two, and I am going to be sharing this tradition of making tags for Christmas and doing a big giveaway over on the blog. So be sure to click on the link in the description down below to go find out more information about that. Today I'm going to be coloring with Copic markers, and I'm going to be coloring on a surface I've never tried before. That's one of the things I love to do is try out stuff, and I'm going to use this stamp from Clearly Besaudet. It's a really cute little house, and I wanted to try out coloring on wood. These pieces of paper are wood surface, kind of a veneer, and they come from Ellen Hudson, and they're really fun. I was very surprised that it actually worked. There was an expectation that I had that they would bleed like mad, or they wouldn't stamp well, and lots of other thoughts that I wondered about, and lo and behold, look at how nicely that stamped. Very detailed, and it worked just perfect. So I'm using the Misti to do this, and all I have to do is line the stamp up one time, and I can just pop all of my different tags in there in order to stamp them all one after the other. Just ink them up and stamp away. The coloring, again, I found it very surprising because I thought I was going to have issues with bleeding. If you think about wood grain, wood pulls the grain and pulls the moisture from the rain, etc. along the wood grain, and I assumed that it was going to drag some color along with it, but it did not seem to, so I want to test and find out what else I can color on this with. I think that would be kind of fun to do some explorations of in the future, but the Copic markers seem to work fine. There's a slight bit of bleeding, so it's not as crisp as, of course, doing anything on paper, but if you have a really beautiful rustic kind of wrapping, maybe use some raffia and put this on some homemade baked goods, or put it on a craft-wrapped package that has maybe some snowflakes on it or something, so there's a lot of really simple things that this kind of a tag on a piece of wood would be so elegant. And even though I'm not a big tag maker on a lot of my family packages, because we just use those multi-packs from the dollar store or wherever in my family, that's just kind of our tradition that we do. We don't decorate them up, but I do this for special packages. If I'm going to go to somebody's house and go to a party and bring them a little gift, I like to do something extra special on things like that. And after doing this series of tags for two years now, I might get to the point this year where I'm going to start making tags for all my family for Christmas. That's kind of a goal I have. I don't know if I'm going to make it or not, but I'm crossing my fingers that I'm going to get to that this year. We'll see. I got to go look and see what I have for wrapping paper and which one of these techniques that I'm showing you this week might work for that because there's a whole variety coming up all week long. And there are 24 in the series that I'm doing, as you can see, a little variation. So here I'm just going to change up the colors on each one of the tags and showing you what it looks like both on the birch and the cherry so that you can get an idea of which kind of paper you might even like to try this on yourself. I want to attempt some more fancy coloring on this paper as well and see what kind of fine art projects might be had by creating something using this kind of paper. So I'm adding some little details here and there with something like this that's going to be so unique colored on a piece of wood. Nobody's going to be looking and stressing out about your light source or anything like that. So you can keep the coloring on this super simple. Even on that one in the center that has just the slats covered colored, I just put a line underneath each slot so it looks dimensional. It looks like there's some some dimension to it but there's really not much to do there. And on each one I'm using the same set of colors. So the whole group of colors are, you know, the same ones for all of them. So you could line up a whole bunch of these and just mix up all the different combinations or you could customize this to make it look like your house and whatever color your house is painted or if you're going to use this for a housewarming or a party gift or something like that make it look like their house. Wouldn't that be something that they would love to have like a little custom picture that looks like their house? Of course with the cookies or the brownies or whatever you're going to bring for them because that would be an awesome treat to deliver to anybody as well right? Alright so here is tag number four and they all look ever so slightly different but you know again it's one of those ideas where you take a simple concept and stretch it four ways. One of the things that helps me when I do four versions of one thing is I get to explore the different color combinations and see which one I like better. So after doing this I might decide that I want to make a whole bunch of them that all look like one of these instead of you know making them all look different so it's a way to stretch your supplies try making something look different from the same materials and learn something a long way you know which kind of house do you like better? I really did like just coloring the slats just these lines underneath each one of the slats in the house and I think that really gives it an interesting look and you know that might be something that I will play off of in the future. Tuck that away as an idea to keep for myself. So I'll add a little bit of a red door to this one I've always wanted a red door on my house I did put a new wooden door in my home recently and it's a very strong contrast to the rest of my house but I didn't get a red one and there's a little part of me that wishes that maybe I had done that. So now I went back to the MISTI and I want to stamp my sentiment now you can do a whole bunch of different things here I've got it lined up and I'm lining it up nice and squarely with the little grid on the MISTI the new ones actually have the laser etching I'm using one of the ones that didn't have the laser etching and just stamping it you can stamp more than one time and so that you can either fill in areas that you missed or here I'm just stamping all of them in a row and you can add a second color so on some of them I added an ombre look by stamping a darker red on the bottom I do like to add a nice finishing touch to my projects so on these I decided to take a little bit of distress ink and just run it around the edge of each one of the tags because that's going to make sure there's no little stray bits that show up on the front and look messy or anything and then I decided wait a minute I didn't put any steam or smoke coming out of any of these chimneys and how cozy would that look so I decided to do that I'm taking a gray marker and just adding a little swoosh and then a second one a lighter color and making an intertwined smush so it's just a little a little swoosh that goes up and it's a really fun little thing that you can add to any stamp that has a chimney on it now I'm going to use some Copic opaque white in order to make the snow there's a lot of things you can use for the snow and this is one of the large jars there's two jars there's a small one and a large one this one is starting to dry out so if you have one that's starting to dry out I think it's just a thing that it does I'm not sure that I've sealed mine quite properly trying to move it out of the way so you can see what I'm doing but I'm using a brush to do it I'm using my silver brushes to create just a swoosh of snow along the bottom and painting that on with this Copic opaque white it's supposed to go over Copic marker so that if you have white areas you want to paint back in you can do that but what I've found is that it doesn't really cover red entirely so just a word to the wise if you are trying to cover red it's not going to completely do that because it's going to end up being pink just like anything any kind of white gel pen you go over with red Copic or over over red Copic with the white it generally does bleed through that's just something that red does but I'm going to add snow in different configurations on each one of these little houses so sometimes it's going to have a lot of snow sometimes a little snow you can make it look like whatever the snow looks like in your neighborhood and if your roofs I mean I would look across the street at your neighbor's roof and see what the snow looks like is it at the top is it at the bottom is it completely covered you could cover the entire roof with snow and not have to color that underneath as well so here's the finished tags and I just tied a little piece of some silk may arts ribbon on the tops of them and call them done so here is a playlist at the top and as the videos go live this week they will all be in there so you can click there to see more videos there's also a playlist for last year's tags if you want to check those out and I would invite you to click through to my blog using the link in the description down below to get more on the supplies still pictures and information on the giveaway make sure you subscribe and hit the like button if you enjoyed this video and I'll see you guys tomorrow take care bye bye