 Hi there! I'm Sandy Olok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to paint realistic narwhals with distress inks, and I say realistic in kind of the ish sense because they're still stamps, and they're still cute, and I don't know that narwhals are actually this cute in reality, but it's an Avery Elle stamp set, not a brand new one, but I thought it would be fun to use this one because I have been on a kick doing underwater scenes. I have my underwater scenes class that has taken off and everybody's really enjoying it and doing so well at using their Copic markers to create underwater scenes, so I've been having fun doing that with watercolor and other things as well. So I've stamped two different colors on here, pumice stone and weathered wood, and then I went over it a little bit with the ink blending tool not necessarily to blend it, but to suck up some of that color because with distress inks they kind of pill up on clear stamps like this and I didn't want to get super heavy fat lines. I really wanted as light a line as I possibly could so I could really make this a little more realistic, a little more no-line coloring type of look. So in addition to pumice stone and weathered wood, I've added a little black soot to my palette on my glass matte, and I guess I'll talk a little bit about the matte. It's got this big side on the left that has the black and white grid. I'm not such a fan of it. It's very distracting to my eye. I like something a little planer there, but I'm trying it to see how I like it and there's some uses for which it's fine and here I have my misty around it so I almost have a little frame around my piece that's blocking out the rest, but it also has this little area on the right-hand side that you can see that has the grid that you can drop a little distress ink into for painting. I don't paint real often with distress inks, but when you do, it's a really good thing to have. So there you go. I don't have a full verdict on whether or not everybody in the world needs this glass matte or not. We'll see if I eventually keep it on my desk. You'll see in a few months whether or not it's still here or if it entirely disappears. Then you'll know. So what I have done here is painted just water into the back sides or the top sides of each one of the narwhals and I let the water sit there because I wanted to break up some of the ink that's there from the stamping and to add texture to it, the first layer I'm putting down is this kind of this weathered wood color and I'm stippling. I'm just doing kind of dots and then letting it get heavier around the shaded side and then lighter toward the other side. Since I let that water dry just a little bit, I didn't let it dry a ton, let it dry long enough for me to paint the other narwhal, then it's doing a little bit of blending in but a lot of it is going to just sit there as texture. Then I took some of the pumice stone because I wanted to make it a little bit more of a warm gray, but I also wanted that feel of the cool gray as well because when I looked at pictures of narwhals, they have grays, blacks and browns on the backs of them so I wanted a mixture of all the colors so that it would look kind of realistic and I'm painting that a little more heavily with the side of my brush right over top of that texture. With Distress Inks, the stuff you paint underneath will soften a little bit but a lot of that is going to stay. If you did that with watercolor, you'd almost want to do the texture on top but with Distress Inks, you can get away with doing it underneath and layering it that way because just the way that Distress Inks works, they kind of stick to the paper a little bit more than regular watercolor would. So I know a lot of people, and I have titled this, you know, painting, a lot of people think that Distress Inks are watercolor and you can do watercolor like techniques with them but they are not watercolor. They're still in ink and so it's a little bit different and the pigments react differently. So that's why there's different techniques involved in trying to paint something realistically with these than there would be if you were trying this in watercolor. If I tried this in actual watercolor, I would probably use maybe some Luder Black or some of the Primitex in order to get that kind of texture. That would be really cool on critters like these that have a texture to them. But with the Distress Inks, I'm just using two colors layered on top of each other and then to add some contrast because for me, contrast is what makes an image look dimensional, makes it look more realistic is when you get that actual contrast. So Black Soot is a good color to pull in here for those absolute outside edges that are nice and dark. And I'm even going to extend the line a little bit further with the Black Soot because that will fully cover up the stamped line that was underneath and it will make it look like that outside edge is the heaviest and darkest all the way around. There's a few spots where I want to add some of that texture back in, a few places where it might have gotten lost or didn't get added in in the first place. And the Black Soot is great for that as well as like the tips of his flippers and that sort of thing. Do the same thing on the other Norwhal. And I don't know if I mentioned it yet, but I'm using Arches Rough Watercolor Paper. I do like the rough a lot because it gives me a lot of texture and on something like this I knew I wanted lots of texture. Anyway, besides which I'm running out of my cold press. Yes, sorry. My words are escaping me. My cold press paper I need to place another order and get some more paper in. I usually keep several pads on hand so I never feel like I'm running out of anything with a lot of my craft supplies that are my go-tos. I make sure I keep a bunch of it on hand so that I don't feel like I'm working in scarcity because otherwise they get in a panic. If I think, oh my gosh, this is my last pad. What am I going to do? So I'm going to make sure I get good and stocked up on watercolor paper so I don't have any panicked moments and if anybody else is like that. But there you go. And here is the reason why I left this in the misty to do my painting because I wanted to put the faces back in and I could do that using a distress marker. So now I've got my stamp in there. My sentiment stamp is all done and I'm going to use a little block to do these bubbles. They're actually dotted bubbles in the stamp set which is kind of fun. So I'm going to then add a background behind it and I'm going to do something similar to what I did with the narwhals in the first place which is paint some water streaks and then drop color into the water streaks because that's kind of what I ended up doing on the narwhals is getting it good and wet and then putting the color in. With distress inks you can get some hard edges sometimes and if you want something really soft then put the water down first and then drop the color in and you'll end up with a much softer look to it. You'll still have to watch the absolute edges but at least the color will spread a little bit more and you won't get big blobs of color and in some areas I'll just mix up some really light gray color in other areas. I'll just be dropping some into the water itself. If you put a little bit of color right around their bellies then it makes their bellies look whiter so that's a little trick for you. So I just did some streaks down the center of the card didn't do the whole thing and just had those bubbles shining through and I think it came out really fun. You're a rare friend as rare as a narwhal. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did click that like button make sure you share it if you know somebody who needs to know how to do this technique and I will see you again next time. Make sure you are subscribed and click the little button right beside the subscribe button so you get this delivered to you by email so you're the first ones to see my videos. I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.