 Hello there, it's Sandy and I have some tips for your watercolor pencil scenes, but I also have the new release from Colorado Craft Company. I love working with Anita Jerome Stamps, so I'm going to show you my cards first and talk through them and then I'll color one of them for you and be giving you tips along the way. So the snow bunnies, I did some watercolor powder pencil in the background and then watercolor penciled the trees. So I did not wet the background, I only wet the trees. That makes sense and hopefully it will by the end of the video. Next up, we have the kitty cats under the mistletoe. I had to draw my own mistletoe, but misto is really easy to draw and you can make them lover kitties. Next we have the happy dance critters. This one was more of a challenge because I was trying to use a scene from one of the colored pencil classes, the rainy days class, and I used the colored pencil technique in the background, but I had to use water in the foreground to make the two separate from each other. I just was having trouble with it and I couldn't erase the watercolor pencil so I ended up having to draw it in white pen. Next up is the mouse bearing gifts, bearing cheese on top. So he's got some lucky friends who are going to get his gifts and I used one of the storybook scenes in a different medium. Yes, there's no storybook scenes in watercolor pencil, but you can use them if you take the other classes and just figure out how to translate them into a different medium. And then we have the cats ready to knock over the plant and this one is doing so on the porch outside and the trees are from one of the storybook classes. And this is the stamp set I'm going to use because there's a dog that looks like Gialo and a dog that looks like Vienna. Given that we just celebrated our gotcha day, our fifth gotcha day, it seemed like the thing to do. So there's Gialo looking at the birds. He is my bird and squirrel hunter extraordinaire. And Vienna is the one who would walk herself given the chance. She cannot be even close to an open door or I won't see her for hours. So she's the one I'm going to color. I'm going to use my super color pencils and the great thing about watercolor pencils is you can use them for watercolor techniques and color pencil techniques on the same piece. And I'll show you what I mean by that. First is the shading on the dog. Just going to put some gray down toward the bottom. I know the pencil looks like it's blue, but it's actually a dark gray color. And in order to blend it, I'm going to use a brush with just a little tiny bit of water on it. I'm using it on drawing paper. So I don't want to use a lot of water or it will warp, but it won't warp when it's on drawing paper if there's just a barely, barely, barely tiny amount of water. Since the dog was a really limited thing, I thought I could use the brush on that one. And I decided not to use any water on the leash because it was just so tiny. It's hard getting a brush in there. Even for the ground, I just scribbled some color and used a baby wipe to move it because the baby wipes hardly going to put any water on the paper. So I can just mush it around and not have to worry about it and not be warping the paper. On top of the wet pigment, so there's some moisture there from the baby wipe, I started putting in leaves. And these are not polka dots, they're like hash marks. Think of them as commas on their side or something. I've seen a lot of people try to do things with leaves from my fall classes and it just, it makes me crazy because they're not, they're not polka dots. And I'm going to talk a little bit more in the tree about how to join them, but you just don't want them to be real even. You don't want them to be spread out in even. So let's go for a colored pencil technique. I've used this numbers of times and I teach it in my colored pencil jumpstart class, using a tea strainer to grate the pigment of one of the pencils for the sky. And I'm just using a cotton ball to move it around. If you were to use water in this, you're then going to potentially generate blooms, that sort of thing. If you're using watercolor paper or you could warp it if you're using drawing paper. So I'm just going to mush the color around with that cotton ball till I'm fairly pleased with how it's laying down. It's very soft. And then going to work on the tree in the same way as I did with the ground. Just going to mush over all of that color with the baby wipe first and then start putting the leaves in. Now here's where the tip comes in to try to not make it look like polka dots. I was trying to figure out a way to explain it and I thought instead of having each leaf individually separated from each other, the goal is by the end, think of it this way, have every third leaf at least touch another leaf. You don't want every leaf to touch another leaf necessarily. You don't want to be ritualistic about it. But think about every third leaf touching another leaf and you might get a little less of the polka dotted look. Because especially in Copic marker, I see just a lot of people that end up with things that look like polka dotted trees, which are really cute. But they don't blend at all that way. So here I'm able to blend, since it is watercolor pencil, I can blend that color by just tapping on the surface of the three colors that I've put in there for the leaves. And not pushing the color around to completely mush it out and fully blend it, but just tap it and it gives them all a little softer look. Then I went in with the side of the dark reddish pencil. This is the russet pencil. And I'm trying to create clumps. You can see how there's different clumps appearing because I'm coloring all the russet in sections and leaving some sections of light color. And then choosing a few of those russet sections to make even darker with the brown. So that starts to give the tree a little more flavor of being a tree instead of just being polka dots. And tell me if that makes sense, because it's not making sense as I'm saying it, but it's the best way I can figure out how to explain it. So next is just add some leaves falling from the tree more tightly up at the top toward the tree and then loosely as they come down. And don't put too many leaves in there because then it could look like weird confetti, which could also be strange. But here is the finished card along with all of the other beautiful cards that you saw at the beginning. They're all individual over on my blog. So you can go check them out there and see what they look like individually. I'll link you to the stamp sets as well as the coupon code for just this weekend. So make sure you go check it out and I'll see you next time.