 Hi there, it's Sandy Almak, and today I'm going to talk about making layering stamps realistic. And I'll be using this beautiful swan from Altenew to do this, and talking about in general how you can do this with your layering stamps, and colored pencils specifically. So I'm starting with stamping the two swans. You can stamp the beaks, or you can draw them in. I was tempted to draw them in because I just have the worst time trying to line things up. I am just terrible with that. I started though by getting out my Trinity Modern embossed frames, I think is the name of it. There'll be a link in the doobly-doo with the supplies. I cut the smallest one for the panel that I'll be working on, and for some reason I zoomed way in on my misty while I was doing the stamping. Sorry, you can't see more than this. But I stamped this swan's first in Mint 2B from Catherine Pooler. It's a light greenish blue, and it looks really blue against blue paper. And that I wanted. I did end up adding a little bit of twilight, which is a grayish color, very light gray, on the bottom edge, just tapping some onto the stamp. And then I wanted the whole thing to feel more white. So I stamped over it in Lawn Fawn's Yeti. Now my Lawn Fawn Yeti pad needs to be re-inked, so it didn't do a whole lot for me. I had to stamp it a couple times to get it to work. I just wanted to soften the colors that were under there so that they looked less strong, which you can't really see on video. It's hard to videotape. But here you can see at an angle what I ended up with once I put the bird's little beaks on there, which are not in the right place. Because as I said, I have such a hard time getting layering stamps to line up. But on these, I figured at least there's only one stamp for the body. It's not like I have to line up all the feathers several times, like you do with some of the stamps and with flowers. But I started by taking all the areas that didn't have ink, and you can do this with your flowers, whatever flowers you're stamping, whatever area has no ink in it. Once you get all the stamping done, fill that in with white, but then extend it past that edge, right where that that hard edge begins is where you want to just blend it and make it softer. And then you can go in with a white pen and add your whitest highlights. So here I'm adding a lot of feathery texture on top of the white pencil using my white gel pen. Whatever ink is in a good gel pen, and I think of it kind of as an acrylic of some sort is going to be whiter than what a pencil would be. So it's going to give you another layer of highlight. If you're working with flowers and you have multiple colors, then find a coordinating pencil that goes with each one of your colors and soften the edges where they blend into each other. And you'll start to get more realistic blends of them. And I've tried filming at an angle to see if that was helpful in seeing what I see when I was trying to color. It's a little hard to tell here, looking at it straight on. Hard to get that to film properly. But you can see how it's got hard edges until you start to add some of that softness around those edges. And it's just like magic. It starts to look realistic. I decided not to stamp the orange in the beaks because I could do that real easily with my colored pencil and not screw it up. And once I started adding water underneath of them, remember that when a bird is sitting in the water, it's not flat. Unless you're looking at a totally flat line. But we have a little above view of these swans. So you're going to see the contours of their body a little bit in the water. I'm adding just a very slight blue here. It's a little darker than the paper, but not by a ton. And then I'll add some ripples in the same shape that the birds are in. Whatever their their bottoms look like. That's the shape of what ripples they would cast out outside of themselves. I'm adding some reflections in white. But technically, if you look at a reflection, it won't always be white. I won't even get into the science of how and why, but it is what it is. So I'm going to add white because it's a card and I can do that. I decided I wanted a little more contrast, too, because as you try to see shapes, the reason you see shapes when you're looking out at anything, look across the room, you see shapes because there's negatives and positives. There's darks and there's lights. And in order to see them, you need to have some contrast. And I wanted more punch on this card. So I added in the background here just a little section. Sorry, it's off camera again. I was just having such a bad filming day, but I am adding just a corner of greens and dark blues so that I can then start to bring that into my scene. I want to just a loose corner. I didn't want to make it look like I was really working hard at creating a full scene. But what I realized after adding these greens and kind of faking in a few ripples was that it was taking too much attention. It was too strong in terms of texture. So I got out my gamsol, which I keep in a little container and a blending stump and dipped it into the gamsol. Now I put a cotton ball in there so that my blending stump doesn't end up getting soaking wet and drippy. And on colored paper or even white paper, if you're going to use it out in an area where you have no other color, you're just going to use it on the paper itself, you'll get an oily stain. But in an area like this, where it's dense color, none of that is going to matter. You're not going to see it. So I'm able to blend these colors and make them really soft and make it kind of disappear into the background. But once I get to a certain point, I'm going to stop adding any new gamsol to the blending stump because I'm moving out into the area that doesn't have solid pencil on it. So as I move to the left and start dragging color and start working on pulling in the ripples and trying to soften some of them, I'm not adding excess liquid to it. Because I don't want that oily stain out here. And you'll see in a few minutes when I start working on the green area above, you'll see just how much right here, how much of the gamsol is still left in my blending stump. I can still squeeze more out of it to make even lighter and lighter and lighter pieces of the reeds to continue that, but let it slowly disappear. But just be really careful when you start using it in a big open area. I'm also not going to use it on the swans because the swans now have crisp edges and crisp feathers. That's in nice contrast to the softness of the water and the softness of the reflections and everything. So I'm not going to use it absolutely everywhere in order to have some nice contrast between the elements in my picture. So there is my finished card. I did a crazy thing with my ribbon because I tore the paper. I tore the card stock of my layers and covering it up with this nice big bow seemed to be a good thing. Now, I can't mail that big honking not. So it's going to go to a local person that I can drop the card off for since I can't mail it. But yeah, once you have an error in your card, just think about what you can add on to it that you can rescue it and maybe just send it locally and not have to worry about paying a whole bunch in postage. If you're at all interested in more information on coloring on colored papers with Copic markers or pencils or anything, feel free to look at the playlist that's in my playlist section of my YouTube channel or on the page in my blog that is linked down below so you can get lots more inspiration. Thank you so much for clicking the like button for subscribing and for sharing this with a friend who might want to color some swans and I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.