 Hi guys, it's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to be coloring some friges with clean color pens and I'm going to show you how to blend some of the hard to blend colors because there's some of them that are just not wanting to break down with water. This hard board is what I'm going to tape my paper down to. I recently bought this in a couple of sizes and this one is a nice big one which allows me a lot of room to work with it and it's also really thin so it works better than the cutting board that I had been using and I have my Frisia from Altenew taped down already and I wanted to do a blue background. These blue pens if you're familiar with the clean color pens the blues have been really tough to break down with water and they end up not blending really softly until I figured out that you could dip these suckers in a little bit of water first and the color the actual color in this marker is much darker you're going to see what it looks like in a minute but I can pick up a little bit of water and that edge gets really soft and then if I add a little more water to it then it does break down with water and is spreadable where if you've tried to use these blues before that's one of the things I get a lot of emails about like how do I blend these blues for a background because they just end up with a hard edge that doesn't soften but look how soft that gets so if you dip the markers the the ones that are in it giving you the fits and dip those into water first and start by coloring them on the outside edge of wherever you want it to blend out to white and I'll show you again this this whole thing in another section but here you can see how light you can get that color any of the markers can be turned into a pastel this way just by dipping them in the water first you could put the water on the paper first and I tried that as well but it didn't work as well as giving me the control of dipping the pen in the water you do have to be careful that eventually it's going to get darker as the pen runs out of that water on the tip so you can see it's getting closer to the finished color when I don't dip it in the water so I just keep dipping it as I'm trying to get that soft edge and then when I want it to really blend out to white I just grab a brush and start pushing some water across it and I'm able to get a really soft washi look so here I'll show you again how light you can get it and then it just gets darker and darker and darker as you get toward the dark section so start with the lightest area first this is kind of an interesting way to approach using these markers and I want to try it with some other pens that I've found that I don't like to watercolor with and would this make me happier in using them but when I figured this out for the blues I thought aha I think this is something I should share because I know that lots of people have trouble with that but I'm just kind of I wanted a little soft focused area around the top of the flowers because my flowers are going to be really intense I looked up some friezes online and they come in all sorts of different colors so you can google for what kinds of color combinations you might want to use but there's some really intense red and yellow ones and I wanted a background color first but I wanted to make sure I got the background color in before coloring the flowers because I didn't want to accidentally start mixing the two if they they touched each other and the blue is going to have less damage to do to the red than the red is going to have to do to the blue if that makes sense so I'm starting with my lighter colors first and then I'll go in with my my darker and more intense colors in the flowers once I get this all set the way that I want it but you can see it's just giving me lots and lots of control and I'm a control freak that's just how I roll I own it I live it I like having my color go exactly where I want it in many instances and even though I'm trying to get a really soft washi look I'm able to do that with even these blues that that have struggled in the past with trying to get them to blend so finishing up this little area up here in the corner and I was trying to decide how far I want that color to go out but now that I at least have it around the flowers I can decide later if I want to add more blue to it on the outside edge so I just did a little touching up in the middle and you can see that that blue right there in the middle that's the actual color of the pen so you can see how much lighter I was able to make it and let it be soft but even that area now it's it's a little tough to blend just because it has so much of that that pigment in it but I can blend those outside edges quite easily so after getting all of this little watercoloring and and I was just kind of fussing around the edges to make sure I didn't have any hard edges starting to develop I started heat setting it because I want to make sure I had this good and dry before I start on the flowers and you could even leave it I would even recommend leaving it a little while don't try working on it right away because if your paper is even damp then you touch that red color to the edge of that that blue that's a little bit damp and you'll have some bleeding going on really quickly because all these colors have to do is look at water and they get all excited and they want to go play so I'm using a really dark red around the outside edges I'll have all of the colors that are listed by number in the description down below if you want to know exactly which colors that I used on all of these and then I'm going with a medium red the the flowers that I found online have this sort of arched shape on the inside of the petals sort of a rounded semi oval thing semi circle I guess you can call it and that's going to be a yellow color and so I'm going to just color the outside portions of all of this I debated whether I start with the yellow first or do the yellow later and I don't know which one is smarter or less smart but in this particular case I decided I was going to go for the red and then I I'll add the yellows because I have two different yellows that I wanted to use for this because the inside yellow on the photo of the flower is very bright and then it goes through almost an orangey color so what I'm doing is breaking down a little bit of the red into it making it orange by going over it with this yellow I could just scribble off a lot of that yellow and that would show up more as yellow but then I went in with a really bright yellow on the inside and you can see it's pulling that orangey color toward it so it's giving it this really rich creamy yellow and that's my favorite yellow my Y17 yellow so that's the color I was really looking for that's what really attracted me to that picture of that particular frisia and I'm going to add some more detail to it as well but I wanted to get this base color in there and I'm just scribbling off on a piece of scratch paper off camera to clean off the red from the pen so you're not going to damage your pens by doing this but if you want to make sure you're not pulling more of that orangey yellow color in you need to scribble it off so you don't end up with a whole lot of mess all over your the rest of your piece so I'm going to use two greens for the stem of my flower so I'm going to put my lightest color on first you can also start with the darkest because literally with these pens it doesn't matter a whole lot but I found that I could flick with this really easily while the lighter color was still wet and you can see how soft that edge is because it's flicking into the wet pigment of the lighter color so it didn't even really need any extra blending with the lighter pen but you could go back in with the lighter pen and soften that out even further so again I got it really really really dry because I wanted to go in and add detail and I'm mad at my camera because it focused on my fingers rather than my my painting but you can still see the detail that I'm putting in I took the really dark red and I just started making little flick marks from the outside edge to the inside of the flower because these have these little little petal striations on them and that added a bunch of detail and then there's a few stripes of the medium red inside the yellow and they just just a little tiny detail in there can make a huge difference all of it radiates out from the center of the flower so that was just the direction that I made sure I focused on for each part of the flower and just for fun I probably could have colored right over these centers had I known that I was going to use my signal pen on that but I didn't so there you go beautiful beautiful frigia flowers I took the blue clean color pen and I cut off a small strip of the paper on the right and then watercolor it to add a little extra element to the card and that is it beautiful watercolor flowers here's a couple more watercolor flowers if you're interested in seeing some more of those I have a whole series of them and these will link you to the playlist so you can watch lots more if you're interested and I will see you guys next time have an awesome day all the supply links etc are in the description below bye