 Hi there! I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to paint some flowers today, a Spring Bouquet. And it's named after, of course, the stamps that I'm using called Spring Bouquet from Studio Katia, which I haven't used before. And it has a Mother's Day and a Thank You sentiment. And I'll do the Thank You sentiment. I'm going to use some Distress Oxides, some Watercolor and my Misti. So if you're following along, you can get a couple Distress Oxide colors ready and your flower stamp. And I have some watercolor paper in there. And I'm going to start with my Pink Distress Oxide to paint my flowers with. If you wanted to do each flower in a different color, you could certainly do the same kind of a thing. What I'm going to do is wipe off the ink from the places where there's leaves. And I'm not being real careful with it, don't be religious about it. Just wipe off the worst of it. But you could do a couple different colors for the different flowers. But I'm going to do all pink ones. And I'm going to clean that off with a baby wipe. And then I'm going to do the leaves in some peeled paint that was picked raspberry that I did first. And I'm going to stamp the little bit of leaves. And again, I can stamp over top or ink over top of some of my flowers and then use my baby wipe to wipe it off because I can kind of see where the flower starts and stops. And if some color blades through to something else, it is not the end of the world because this is a really loose technique we're going to use anyway. The cool thing about the Distress Inks is that they do kind of melt away a little bit, not a ton, but a little bit with water. So you can actually paint with the Distress Oxide Inks if you want to. But I'm going to paint with my watercolors and mix them in. So use both mediums. And I'm going to start with each one of my flowers and go into some of the places where there's the darkest shadows on my flowers, which would be kind of the bottom or inside most parts of the flower and let the tips of the flowers be white. But I'm going to start by putting a little bit of that color right into those dark areas. And then I'm going to add some water in order to make that kind of blend into the white areas. Because of course, this looks a little silly as is. But I cleaned my brush and it has just a little bit of water on it. Not much. If you get it too wet, you're going to have just water gushing all over the place. So use just a little bit and you can wipe it off periodically. This is actually in real time. I don't do very many real time videos with watercolor because it takes so long to do things. And even with Copic and stuff because I don't do just a little bit. I do tend to do a whole lot of stuff. So end up speeding up things. But I'm just kind of joining some of the areas and I'm letting some of them remain white. You could wipe some of this off also with a baby wipe or a paper towel if you get too much ink on there. But look how those leaves are starting to actually turn into something that almost looks dimensional. Just by putting the color in the darkest area and then pulling some of that color just a little bit with your brush into the lighter area with that clean brush. And when we get to the outside petals, you want to put the color on the inside of the flower. So it sometimes feels backwards of what the inside flowers are but it's a whole science thing. I'm not worried about the light coming from the right or left necessarily. I'm just trying to make those petals pop and make them look like they're real. So the more you have a contrast between the dark in the shadow area and a white in the lightest area, the more dimension you're going to get. And if you're doing these flowers for the stamp set with another medium, just bear the same thing in mind. You want the darkest colors to be, you know, kind of nice and dark and that when they blend really nicely into a light color, they just start to look really dimensional and round. But this one is also a spring bouquet. So I think they're intended to be different flowers but since I'm doing them all as one, they look like they're in different directions. The flowers are facing different ways. So if they were roses or peonies or something they almost look like they're bouquet of the same flower facing different directions. And having different amounts like the one on the right has more petals that curl around the center and then the one on the left than doing right now is more of a spiral and kind of comes out from the middle a little bit. So the puddle of paint that I'm using is Quinacridone Pink. Works really well with the Pictor Hasberry. And I'm going to do just a couple colors on this, not very much in terms of massive color because I want to keep this one really soft and pretty and simple. All those petals at the bottom at the base of this flower, because the flowers pointing downwards, those are all going to be painted pink. And then they're going to slowly kind of work their way into the petals that are hanging down. And on this one I'm going to try to put some of the color on the petals that are hanging down so it looks like those are in shadow at the bottom of the bouquet. A few stripes almost to some of these petals so they feel like they're kind of that fluttery sort of, I don't know what you call it, sort of it's got folds in the leaves, if that makes sense, folds in the petals. And some of this didn't stamp really well. I left it in my Misti in case I needed to do any re-stamping though. And you can certainly do some re-stamping in any of these areas if you start adding too much water. Just wait for it to dry a little bit and re-stamp right over top of what you've got going on if you start losing that definition. And that will generally happen if you add too much water to it then that definition will disappear. I'm going to add some sap green now and mix up a puddle of that. And I want it to be really soft and have just a really, really soft edge to it and I don't want to complete necessarily the leaves. I want them to just be almost a frame for the rest of my flowers. I'm going to try to wipe some of that off because I got too much color on there and that was not wiping it off enough. So I dabbed off a little bit more with a baby wipe and softened that up. I'm going to work on these other leaves and notice that I don't have a line between where the flower stops and the leaf starts. So I have to kind of decide where I'm going to make that point. But when I leave that white area it looks like there's a white edge to that petal. So I'm going to finish these little stems on the buds but then I sort of felt like I needed something down on the left as well and at this point I can start adding more to it. I can add a background. I can add all kinds of crazy stuff. I can also add just a little bit of color for another leaf or two down there at the bottom and just a couple of strokes to finish it off. I just I wasn't sure where I was headed with it but I knew I wanted something a little bit more down at the bottom. I don't know whether I have this stamp turned around the wrong way because sometimes flowers when they design a stamp they meant for it to be turned in a particular direction and maybe that's why it felt like it needed a little something down there with the flower hanging down because that flower if you turn it another way could also be pointing upward as well as those buds. Now I wanted to add just a little bit of darkness to it but I wanted just a little more contrast so I put some Carvazole Violet into my quinacridone pink and I'm going to go into some of the very very very darkest areas not a lot of them. Don't don't overdo it because if you overdo it then you're taking the power away from the few areas where you're going to put these dark colors and I'm just dropping in just a tiny bit. Now most of this quinacridone pink is fairly dry so I'm almost painting over top of it but a little bit of it might start bleeding so I have to be extra careful if it's the color wants to move on its own I'm going to be careful not to put too much color down there so it'll start running all over the place so that's why I worked on my leaves first so I could kind of get a sense for where that was going but look how just adding that tiny bit of dark in the centers of those made a sudden difference in the depth. It really gave me some something to hang hang my hat on and sink my teeth into and look into those flowers you can almost feel the depth in the centers and then some of those petals down at the bottom just choosing a few areas to really add some of those deep dark colors underneath and a little bit more there on the bottom of the flowers to a little tiny bit on my buds. Buds tend usually to be darker than the flowers themselves but I'm going to add just a little tiny bit of that purpleish color there and I saw one more little spot there in the middle that might need a little separation so those two flowers kind of part ways from each other and for my finished card I trimmed it down added some layers of paper and popped that both layers from the top with some dimensional adhesive and added my sentiment and I matched the layering on the inside of the card as well. So there we go. If you would like to pin a still of this card you can certainly hop over to the blog and do that. Supplies are listed in the doobly-doo down below here on YouTube as well as over on the blog as they always are and I will see you guys next time. Have a really really wonderful day. Go make something beautiful. Bye bye.