 Hi, I'm Sandi Allnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to use the Garden Charmers stamp set from Penny Black to do a little watercoloring. So it's spring time, spring summer is a good time to do flowers and birds, so I'm going to use the bird from this set, but I'm going to combine it with this branch of flowers. If I were to use some of the other flowers, I have to do some depth of field stuff unless the bird was just going to be honking big. So I decided to use one that was going to work size-wise. So I've stamped the bird and then stamped this branch of flowers twice. So I'm going to finish off the branches that the bird is on by using the same kinds of things that are in the stamp already. See those little buds on the branch? I'm just going to add a few more of those so it looks like it belongs, like it's part of the same image even though it's not. And now it looks like I have all one image in a garden with the bird. So I'm going to start by painting my flowers and I've got my palette with my dot card colors. A dot card is something that is produced by Daniel Smith for some artists. They ask you to pick your favorite 18 colors and this was like picking between children. So these are the ones that I had to choose. I yeah, don't tell the other colors because they'll be sad that they didn't get chosen. This is quinacridone pink and I've put some color at the center of the flower and then I'm using clean water to move the color around. I'm not using a ton of water. It's a damp brush, not super wet. And if it starts picking up too much pigment, put it back in the water and rinse it off again so you don't carry too much pigment with you because you want some white to show. In general, watercolor is best shown off when you have hard edges and soft edges and some deeply colored areas, some really light white areas and leaving that those edges and that sort of thing is what makes watercolor really sing. So allow yourself permission to not fill in every scratch. This is not Copic markers. We're not trying for perfection. We're trying for that that loose feel of watercolor, especially on a beautiful spring card like this. The brush I'm using is by the Silver Brush Company. I believe this is a number 12 and I am a firm believer. The more I do this, the larger brush you can get away with the better. So if you are looking for a challenge for yourself, go up a step or two in your brushes and it makes a difference, especially if you plan on someday trying to graduate to making a full-on painting yourself. That's always a fun goal to have and if you get used to painting with larger brushes, it'll be easier to think large and be able to paint large later. So now I'm going to add in the blue sky. I'm using Manganese Blue Hue, which is a beautifully granulating blue and you can make it really rich, but I'm going to start off with it fairly light and you can see with the brush, I just kind of suck the paint out of there and then put it on the palette so I can mix it to the consistency that I'm looking for. I'm going to just paint a bunch of color all over this. I am going to get richer later with the color, but the reason that I did the flowers first is so I don't paint the blue right over top of the flowers, but I can paint blue right over top of that green when I get down to the branches down below. Then I'll start off with my richest section of sky up here in the big empty corner, which I like to leave an empty area kind of on a painting or on a card, either one, but on a card, especially because I need a place to put the sentiments. I'm going to stamp my sentiment there later and I'm going to throw some lighter blue here in the rest of the clouds, leaving some white, but I didn't leave enough white for myself as I was doing this. But the good thing about watercolor is that it lifts nicely and especially when you're using a light color like this, as well as a light touch of it, it's very easy to just grab a tissue or paper towel and lift off a little bit of color. But it still has that overall blue hue, so I'm going to need to add more contrast in order to make that not look so blue down there. I'm going to start by kind of softening out a few of my edges on my clouds because cloud edges are generally not hard. And then I decided it's time to go darker. So while this paint was still damp, a lot of people say don't paint on damp paint, but I'm a believer in doing what works. And on something like this, I want the colors to merge together, so I'm going to just continue to paint that nice rich blue color so I get some really good blue sky and have a multiple cloud type of scene rather than just one big cloud or that sort of thing. So I'm just going to intensify the blue in a few of these areas. Make sure you don't stop at one of the branches carried over across so that it looks like that continues in the scene behind that kind of thing. So now that all that's dry, I can jump in and start working on all of my branches and painting them with sap green. Instead of transferring that sap green over into the palette, the mixing area, the mixing well, I just put some water into the pan itself and dipping my brush into that and managing the amount of it, since I'm now used to doing this, managing the amount by just wiping it on the side of the pan. For some people, that's not helpful. So if you're just getting used to how much paint is on your brush, how much water and that sort of thing, it's going to be much more helpful to mix in the well because then you can see exactly how you're mixing it. Is it more of the consistency of milk that you want? Or are you looking more for tea? Or as a recent instructor that I took a class from, he had names for paint all the way up to soup and all sorts of thick things as well, so he had very interesting ways of labeling the mixing of his paint. But I just dropped some water into the well so that I could pull it from there. Now if you do that, you'll notice some of mine have sort of like a little hole in the middle. That's because the water settles down in there and then as it evaporates, it sort of pulls all the air, all the water out into the air and then the paint remains. And often that just ends up with a little hole in the middle. Not a big deal. It does not make the paint any less paintable. Now it's something like this too. I'm going in as I'm doing this and figuring out that there were some areas that I missed a pink flower and that sort of thing. And there might be some areas where I painted a petal of a flower with my green. Do me and all of the other artists here on YouTube a giant favor and don't pick on whether or not there is a little piece that got misspainted. That happens from time to time. Don't beat yourself up either if it happens to you. Most people aren't going to notice but I have found that there are people here on YouTube who like to point out when you make the slightest little error that that a leaf got painted with the flower color or vice versa. Lots of the folks who are on YouTube are not veterans like me. Haven't been around a while. And you could actually by making a comment saying, did you notice that you painted that one thing wrong or that blood over there? Why did you leave that? It didn't work right. It looks terrible. If you say those kind of things to folks, they are probably not going to continue making free videos for you. So if you like having all this beautiful free education here on YouTube, do your fellow YouTuber friends a favor and just keep your mouth shut if you see those things. You know, it's just, yeah, just standing up from a fellow YouTubers out there because I see a lot of comments being made that are just not kindly. And on clumps of flowers like this, it doesn't really matter. I'm adding as you see an extra layer of that dark pink color and nobody's going to sit and analyze every single piece to see if it was a flower or if it was a leaf. It's just fine. Now for the bird, I decided to make him blue. I originally thought about doing a, you know, chickadee type of bird or you can do something with all different kinds of markings that you can look up birds on Pinterest or on Google to try to find exactly what bird you want to use. But I'm going to use some phthalo blue red shade and then drop in a little Indian throne because Indian throne is a really nice, rich dark blue. And I'm just going to add some of that and let it mush into the rest of the color. It's going to give that that rich pop of color against all of these black outlines and those beautiful pink flowers. And now I'm going to add a sentiment from this pretty pink posh set. Look at the beautiful script on these. Just love it. Add it on. You are amazing. Onto my card and put a couple layers of paper and made a five and a half by five and a half card. The painting itself is five by five. So there you go. There is my painting of this beautiful garden charmer's stamp set. Hope you enjoyed this and learned a little something from it. You can click on my face to subscribe to my channel, watch another video or go take a watercolor class over on my newly launched art classes dot com website. And I will see you guys later. Have a good one. Bye bye.