 Well, hi there. My name is Sandi Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and we're going to make an utterly great birthday card today using some Daniel Smith watercolors and a new stamp set from my favorite things. With all these odors in it, aren't they adorable? My paper is 12 by 5 and a half, and I've scored it twice at 4 inches and 8 inches, so it's going to fold into a tri-fold card. But I'm painting it before doing the scoring so I don't end up with paint gathering along that folded line. So I am drawing some lines with a watercolor pencil, and then I'm just going to start painting using that as a guideline, because you can do it with your brush, but for some people it's a little less intimidating to just start with a pencil. And a watercolor pencil will just melt into the paint anyway. You can adjust from it, you can move the line up and down if you didn't like the curve you drew it first, but at least it gives you a place to start. Now I'm going to do a couple things to this background. You can stop at any point if you're happy with how your paint's coming out, because I had some issues and I was trying some other things, and some of them worked, some of them didn't, but you can just go from the top to bottom, or from the bottom to top, and just have a plain radiation of color, and then proceed with the card from there, or you can do some other things that I'm going to do with the water, but I'm going to remove some color by just tapping away a little bit, not even worrying about being perfect about it, but tapping away some of the color from some of the important elements, like some of the otters, but I'm not worried about getting every little bit of blue out of there, because they're going to look like they're underwater if there's a little bit of blue going on. Now here you can add another gradation from the bottom to the top. If you're good at gradations, this is great practice for something like that. This time I'm trying not to get too much color inside of my otters. It's a little more challenging, as you can tell, to paint them. It's harder to get it even, which is why on the first pass I just went across the whole thing. I could have done that again, but I thought I'd see how much more difficult it is to do it from the bottom to the top and dancing around the otters, and boy, is it more difficult. So I did not paint too much around there when I get over to the right-hand side, because I wanted that to stay lighter, so that I could end up with some area to write a note in. But I'm even trying to go around this fish. Why I did that? I don't really know, but there you go. When I'm painting, I just start doing things. We see what happens. So I'm going to carry that water all the way across, so I don't end up with a hard edge. And then I'm going to just kind of keep an eye on it as it's drying to see if I have to move anything around if I start getting any blooms or anything. I took some quinacridone burnt orange for the ground at the bottom. You could use any old browns that you want down there. I'm just going to use two different colors down here. Be careful. My blue paint above it is a little bit damp, so I had a little bit of soft edges appearing, so just be aware of that. Don't get impatient like me. And I'm going to add a little sepia to that. The sepia is going to do some granulating, which means it's going to get some of that natural texture that it has in it. So I wanted a little bit of texture in the sand anyway, so I decided to add a bit more of that. I'm just going across the top and then dragging some of that color around. It doesn't matter. It's ground. It can be nice and uneven, just to add something down there at the bottom of the river. So next up is going to be some manganese blue for the sky. It's a nice pale blue. The blue that I used in the water was phthalo blue red shade, and it also would work for the sky, but I wanted a different color in the sky. A little hard to tell in the video here how much different it is, but it's just a little warmer, I guess, potentially than the color in the water. And I am going to add a lot more to the water, so I'll get a little bigger contrast. So I scumbled that brush, but I also dabbed off some in order to create some clouds along that horizon line. So then I decided I was going to try adding some intensity to that color in the water, but I thought, let me see what happens if I add some lines in it, because when light goes through water, it tends to come through in some kind of columns. Sometimes it'll come at an angle, but it's a little easier for me to think going straighter. So I'm trying to just leave some lines. I'm painting around them, basically I'm painting in negative space around where those light lines would be. And just kind of going back and forth to make sure I don't have any blooms going on. My reason that I got some of the blooms and why my color keeps changing on me here and there is because I didn't mix up enough of the same color. See all of a sudden here it gets darker. What I had done was mixed color in my palette, just plain old phthalo blue red shade with a particular amount of water, but every time you dip your brush into water, it's going to change the mix between the water and the pigment. So you want to just get one mixture, you're going to just keep dipping your brush into that, don't rinse it, don't do anything else, just keep using that same mixture, fill your brush entirely with it, and then you won't have this issue. But you know, do as I say and not as I do. But I'm still, you know, fussing to make it work, still working at it, stretching that color down, trying to go back in and that middle area right there started getting even more blooming going on. So I said okay to heck with it, I'm going to go another shade darker. So I went over it all again and mixed up more paint so I could do that. It's going to give me a lot more intensity, which is going to be more fun in the long run I think, but it was not part of the plan that tends to happen when I watercolor. So for many of you I noticed in the comments that you tend to like it when I do something and screw it up. Sometimes I do that deliberately so I can teach you something, other times I do it just because stuff like this happens. It's just the way it is. So sometimes you get that and you get to see the joy of me trying to fix something. So I'm still trying to recover some of that area on the right hand side. I finally decided to wipe off some of it with a Kleenex before proceeding. So once everything was good and dry, I started in with just plain sepia on my otters. I'm trying to make it so that their bellies are white and around their noses is a little lighter or whiter. They're not necessarily white because they're in the water, they're dirty. They're not going to be particularly white animals. But I'm trying to create some depth by having some color around the outside edges. So whatever medium you're coloring with, you want to just kind of have that gradation toward the center then it just makes them look cute and fuzzy. And where some of them are over top of some of the blue, it actually even looks like they're in the water because of that blue. So I'm not even concerned that some of that blue is still showing through. But you can just get heavier with that color and it'll cover some of that blue up and you won't have as much of it. But you can see I put my color around the outside and then I take a clean damp brush to spread the color. So right there that arc around the top was just pigment and then it was a clean brush used to wipe it down and pull that color around. And I'm constantly managing the amount of paint, the amount of pigment, the amount of water, all that kind of stuff as I do my painting. So taking some off, putting it back on, etc. over and over and over again. Get around here to my last little guy, spread that color around and I'm just tapping in extra color on top of it so that it just starts to gently bleed in. And while that's drying, I thought I'd put some color into my rocks and then I'll do a little bit into the fish because that'll keep me busy while my other stuff is drying. This sap green tends to get lighter and brighter when you wipe it off. So I'm doing that with each one of my little fishies. And then I can go back in when my little guys are dry and add more in. So this time I'm adding some texture in their faces. So I'm putting some color around the outside edge and then with a dry brush, I'm just pulling that color toward the inside so I get little lines and that's going to look like fur kind of. And I liked how I was getting that little darker contrast so I thought I'd add some more to their bodies and then even more to their heads and give them some real strong contrast because that made them pop on the on the card in the painting. And I really liked that a lot. So I started going around and adding more to all of them and I even mixed in a little bit of black with my sepia to just make it that much darker without losing the water colorness. You can end up adding a lot of pigment and make it basically acrylic paint by using what's called mass tone. You're basically hardly using any water. You're just, you know, trying to get that color so dark. It tends to stay a little more watercolor looking if you do it in layers like this. Just keep going over it a few times. And that's what I'm trying to do is retain that watercolor feel while I'm still getting a lot of that richness and contrast. So here's the finished cute little card, which was really inspired. I love otters and I was inspired by my trip last summer to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. If you've never been, please do go. I did add a little bit of red to the heart with a little guy sitting at the bottom. Forgot to film that portion. So there you go. Hope you enjoyed the video. Click on my face if you want to subscribe and get more videos from me. I do about three a week. There's more on the screen that you can click on, including the watercolor class on my blog, which has been a lot of fun for learning about watercolor. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Have a great day.