 Hi there, my name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I can't believe we're on the last of the 24 tags of Christmas series for 2016. It's already the sixth video. Goodness gracious. Each year I do 24 tags, six videos in a row, and I give away all the tags. So make sure you leave comments in the doobly-doo as well as over on my blog to potentially win. The winners will be announced on my blog after all of these are done. I will give you a couple days to get all your entries in on all the previous ones as well. Today's tag is going to use the tree farm set, brand new from Ellen Hudson, and it's got this cute little trailer. Lots of animals, one of them has a sign, but lots of them have things you can make them wear. We can put hats and all kinds of stuff on them, dress them up, scarves, lots of lots of fun to be had here. And I'm going to stamp them onto some watercolor paper because I want to watercolor these guys and the way I'm going to set this up in my Misti is to basically pile up my little outfit that I'm going to put on the raccoon and then when I pick up the stamps then and ink them up then I'm getting them right in place. So they're going to work really well when I stamp my raccoon. He's going to work perfectly. So I'm masking them out. I just cut them out of masking paper, stamp them onto that, and cut them out with my scissors. I don't even need to cut out the full hat because I don't need to mask that whole thing and then my little raccoon here. I can stamp him a couple times to make sure he gets good and black, but if I'm worried that it's going to get too thick because it's going to thicken up all the lines on it potentially, I can go in since I'm going to watercolor and use a water color safe marker, which is a sharpie. Goodness gracious. I can't talk today. So I used a sharpie to just fill in the rest of the black on him. Now each one of the little critters, I stamped using the same kind of masking idea into a scene so that I could then cut out each one of these little sections to add to my tag. And I tried to nest them together so that I didn't end up with stuff that was going to be hard to fussy cut because I wanted it to be fairly simple. I think this little mouse and his scene is probably the toughest one to fussy cut. The little hedgehog here, he's going to be able to be die cut because he's all one stamp. I only had to add the scarf to him and the raccoon. I will have to fussy cut because he's got a hat on and the die would not include the hat, but you could also stamp the hat separately, die cut it and then glue it on to him. My bunny, I added the stamp of the sign by hand and I basically masked out his arm so I could draw his arm back in so that it would hold the sign. That was a little crazy on the masking side and sorry I didn't include the video because the camera did weird things while I was doing that, so hopefully it's not something you would even try because it was a little challenging to do. So I'm going to add a little bit of watercolor to each of the sections now and I have the colors listed there on screen. I wanted to keep a limited palette here so that I could not have a whole lot to worry about as I was getting my watercoloring going because when you're doing Christmas projects, I tend to find people want to get them done quickly. And if you just have a couple colors out on your palette, you can just pick them up and move around and color everything right away. If you were to make all raccoons or do all the hedgehogs because then you could just use the dyes and not have to do any fussy cutting, then you could just get a couple colors out and by the boom, by the bing, you could do the hedgehogs with some of them in red, some of them in green scars and alternate a little bit that way to get a little difference. Or you can paint some of the hedges in black and some of the hedges in the brown color. And I'll make my rabbit brown and you can see how with a lot of the paints, these are Daniel Smith watercolors, with a lot of paints you can put heavy pigment down to get a darker color and less pigment down to get a lighter color. You can pick it up and move it as long as it's still wet, that sort of thing. So watercolors are really friendly medium in terms of being able to move the color around. So his arm, I got a little too heavy there, but as I paint, I'll just go back and pick up color from there as I run out of paint on my brush, so I can pull it around and have enough to color his feet. If you're going to fussy cut these, you could also just splosh the paint on around the image. You don't really have to stay within the lines around the outside edge. Just cut that edge off after you're done. And with the little thermos here, I thought it'd be fun to try to make it look like it was striped and crisscrossed, so I actually painted a wash of the red over the green, so it gives you that real thermos-y feel. And each one of their sides, I just put a little bit of color in just because it's fun, right? I did die cut four of the tree farms out of some watercolor paper, and I used some stuff that I had something else on the back of. So when I finished, I die cut the same die out of a piece of white cardstock or heavy cardboard kind of and ended up just gluing it to the back, so that way it's a little thicker and a little beefier, but it also covers up the mess that I had on the back. I'm watercoloring these in. I realized too late, unfortunately, that watercoloring those red little lights was kind of silly. If you're looking for a way to color this quickly, then just slosh the paint over the entire area, and I'm going to end up using some, you can use stickles on them, you can use some liquid pearls, pearl pen, various things on those lights, and then you don't have to paint around them, because on this first one I did that, and I thought that was the hard way. And it usually takes doing it the hard way the first time before I figure out the easy way to do it the second time. So I will let you do it the easy way the first time. So as long as you're going to color them in with something that's going to cover it up, then you're fine. You could also leave the top as a white section and not color it in with a color of paint, and then you're not having to paint around everything so that you could paint in those lights without having a major issue. So I'm going to paint the stripes on my trailers with the same colors. And as I did the rest of them, I actually did some of them with red on top and green on bottom, some with red on bottom and green on top. Did I just say that right? Anyway, some of them are reversed the colors on. And for the door, I wanted it to look like it was a shiny metal door, so I just left a few white stripes across it and went across with a second layer after it was partially dried so I can add a little more strength to that color and make them look like they're metal doors on my trailers. So here's where I came in with my liquid pearls to just add a little bit of color right over top of those lights and no one will know that I painted right through them. It's just a lot easier when you're trying to do things quickly to not have to fuss around all those details. They're pretty easy little lights to add stuff to. And then I took some stickers and added it to each of the wreaths and then tied it onto the gift. I just taped a piece of string onto the back of the tag to tie it on. So lots of fun. These are just really cute and playful kinds of tags. Little time consuming, but you could simplify them as well by just using the tree farm trailer or just using the die cut images only and not adding all the scarves and things to everybody so that you have to do some fussy cutting. On the signage you can either stamp a sentiment or put the name of the person it's for and you can also then write the name of the person that it's for on the back of the tag to put that under the tree to identify the gift. Well thank you for joining me for the 24 Tags of Christmas 2016. This was the sixth in the series which you can click on any of the others to see those and go back and leave comments on everything to make sure you qualify to win potentially one of these tags. You can also go visit the 2014 or 15 series to get more tag ideas for your Christmas holiday preparations. Be sure to subscribe because I will be back on Monday with my normal videos that I do three times a week and I will see you then. Have a great day.