 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to talk about getting started with water-based markers. This is at the request of a couple of brand new stampers who wanted to know what they can do with their water-based markers. You may or may not have the brands I'll be using to make these cards, but I want to show you a little bit about how you can test your markers when you get them to see what kinds of things they can do, because I'm going to test them out on a couple pieces of paper. And I'm going to write on this piece of cardstock, just regular cardstock, not watercolor paper, just to test out and see what the markers are like. Most of the water-based markers will have some kind of a brush nib, and then they'll have a writing nib or bullet nib on the other side. This is the Tombow marker, the dual brush tip markers. Use those a lot. And these distress markers I decided to use just because I wanted to have three, and I only have these three brands left in the house. I have given away lots of markers because I don't use water-based nearly as much as I probably ought. But the distress markers had a really fine point. So when you're looking to decide which brand you want to buy, you might look and see if you find samples of somebody who's written something with them so you can see how thick or thin that line might be. The Zig Clean color markers are one of my most used, and I found that out recently when I went and did an assessment on my channel and pulled together all of my Zig marker videos. I'll talk about that a little bit later. But this one has an actual brush nib on it. But notice that none of this really moves on regular cardstock. And when I say moves, you put water on it and it doesn't do anything. At least it does barely anything. But when you use it on watercolor paper, that makes a big difference. And this is the Tombow marker that I'm trying here. I put some onto the Canson XL. It's a student grade paper. It has not very much texture on it. So the markers are going to work a lot better on this paper. If you're just getting started, I would recommend the Canson XL. It's an inexpensive paper and it's going to work pretty well for you as you get started. The distress markers are a different type and long story about them, which I won't get into since they're not made anymore. But they blend a little bit differently. Everything blends and lifts a little differently than anything else. The distress markers, you can see I can take a brush and basically lift off color so I can get a nicer blend, that sort of thing. Whatever brand you have, test it out and see whether or not the color lifts off the paper. The Zig clean color markers are really juicy color. They are very, very intense bright color. And here I'm trying to push the color back into the dark areas so I can get a really nice contrast between the dark and the light areas. But be careful if you start doing this because if you start fussing with it too much, I can even make it almost be all one color by moving it all around. So whatever marker brands you've got, test it out and see whether or not you can get a, going from a very dark to a very light. See how that goes. You could also take a piece of plastic or a plate or I use a 89 cent tile, I got it at Home Depot. And I just put a little color onto that and use my brush, touch it to a little bit of water. And voila, you've got sort of watercolor paint. It's not watercolor, so I just want you to know the stuff that's in these is not actually watercolor, but it's water soluble ink. And that's one of the reasons why it doesn't have all the properties of regular watercolor. It's because it's a water soluble ink. Now this marker, this Tombow gets a nice edge on this artist grade paper. It's a cold press paper that has more texture, but it doesn't lift very much. You can still see the lines where I scribbled. The distress marker does a little bit better. I can go over it and sort of fuss at that edge. So whatever marker you've got, test it and see what that edge is like and whether or not it's going to lift on the paper that you're using. And then, excuse me, the Zig Clean colors. You can see the texture on the paper right now. We haven't seen that yet on any of the other papers because they were very flat. The more textured the paper, the more you're gonna get a really nice, watercolor-y sort of broken edge. And that's one of the things I love about watercolor, but some people like the look of having really soft blobby edges. And it's entirely up to what look you want to get. But again, I can take the pigment from a plate or whatever else and paint it onto this paper. And I still get a different edge around the outside than I get on the Kansan XL student grade paper. Next is another step in texture. The arch's rough paper is rougher than the cold press and you get even more texture. But again, I can't get the Tombow to move very much. It moves really fine on the student grade paper. It just doesn't on the bumpy paper. So when you're choosing your papers, take that into consideration. But of course, I can paint it from the palette, from the plate or whatever I was using and get a really rough edge. You can see what the edges look like on that. If you like that look, then get yourself some rough paper. And test out each of the markers. I'm just gonna swoosh a couple of them on here and see what happens. Sometimes you can put the water down first and then add the color in and you might get a nicer blend. So it's another way to try to put the color down. And what I find is when I put the water down first, I can sort of practice and see where I'm gonna put it. And if I don't like where I put the water and just let it dry and start all over again. But I'm gonna throw some of these colors in here and see if I can get this one to blend from a color to a white. I just used a dry brush. I wiped my brush off on the towel that's next to me so that I could get a nice blend going from a little bit of a medium color into a white. So you can practice with different kind of papers that you may have. I also have a conversion chart available. It's a free one. You can download it from my teaching site. And I compared Tombow, Marvy, Zigg and Distress. And again, that was when Distress was still around but it's not anymore. And I'll talk about that a little bit more later on. So now let's get to the project that I wanna show you because that is where I'm gonna actually use these techniques in real life. I'm not a swatcher. Swatches only tell me so much so I like to use things in real life. And I'm gonna use some stamps from Hero Arts and it's just a couple of fish. And for making these umbrellas that I'm making, I just stamped on a square because I was gonna cut out hexagons out of these anyway so I didn't need to fill a big sheet of paper. And I put the color down. This is the Tombow marker. Put the color down around the top of the fish and then use a brush to move the color. Just have a little bit of water on there. Play around with how much water gets your markers to move. Different markers do it differently. The Zigg clean color, you put a tiny bit of water and they just get all excited. Other markers need a lot of water to move and they're all different. So that's one of the reasons why I haven't done this getting started video because I can't give you any rules about it. So I thought I'd just give you some ideas on how to test it. I can also use two different colors. I'll put one color on the top and one color on the bottom of the fish and then I can blend them together using water. You can also blend colors touching them together but these Tombows don't do that as well as the Zigs so I'll show you that when I get to those and you'll see how that works. But here I can get a really nice soft blend by just putting water in between the two of them and I get a nice transition of color. The Tombow sets, there's like a gajillion of the markers, lots of different colors and they come in smaller sets as well as, I think, I don't even know if you can get a full, full set of all of them but you don't really need a full set either. Just get a set to start with and start playing around and whatever other brands as well. There's tons of them out there at this point. I mean, there's just, everybody comes out with their own version of them. So this fish, I waited until the pink dried before putting the yellow on and then if I wanna enrich the yellow, I wanna put more in but I don't wanna wait for it to dry so I can put more over top. I can put some on the palette and drop it in while the bottom part is wet and then I can get moving on finishing the rest of the picture. I'm also going to put some stronger color on this fish so that I have a contrast between the areas where I use soft water blending and some really direct, you know, just marker right on the paper and coloring the whole thing in with it. I'm even gonna put a little bit of a teal color in a little few shadow areas to try to get a little bit of shading on the fish. So you can see how you can blend those two together just touching each other and be just fine. Now this is the background. You're probably not gonna do a whole lot with backgrounds if you're just getting started but when you're doing something like this, I try to find areas where you see the point of the angel fish and the bottom fin of the pink fish are really close together. Find a place like that to start because you wanna try to leave the edge that you're working with very wet and just keep painting and painting and painting. Don't let it dry if you can help it because that's gonna keep you from having lines where the sections cross over each other when you touch a dry area with wet paint. There's a few areas on this side where I ended up leaving spots and did it on purpose so you can actually see how that works. When I touch the new color to the dry area, I get a line. So you can with some markers, fuss with them and try to move that color around. Sometimes just put a little extra on top and you can get it to blend but this marker set doesn't do that all that well but I do have a solution I'm gonna do at the end of this coloring session so I will show you a little trick if you have an area that doesn't work really well you can add something else to it but I'm gonna set this one aside and start on the one with the distress markers. Now this set of markers, sorry again that they don't exist but this set you can see how you can color a whole big background area and not really have a lot of scribble lines showing. It's fairly smooth given water-based markers lots of them don't do this well at all because when you do a whole line of color and then you do the next line of color and they touch that's when you get that crossover and you get little messy areas but this particular brand of markers did pretty well at this so see what yours does just take a larger area and try to color it in because that's gonna help you to get to know the marker brand that you bought. You're gonna understand a little bit more about the kinds of things you can do and whether or not you can do direct coloring like this or if you have to rely on doing more of the painting work using a brush. So I'm just going to keep going all the way around the image. The size of the brush nib is also going to matter a little bit. I can't really tell you that there's one good or one bad. I just know what each of my markers is capable of and that helps me to make choices when I'm trying to decide what I'm going to color with for a particular image. This brush nib is able to get into some of these tiny areas. I could turn the pen around and use the bullet nib on the other side, the writing nib, to try to get into some of the nooks and crannies. But I'm pretty confident in how this brush end is working to get into some of the smaller areas. And again, it's a card. I'm not gonna beat myself up for making little mistakes on any card anyway. So don't do that to yourself because coloring's supposed to be fun and when your nose is right down at the surface of what you're coloring, you're gonna see all the flaws. So I just want you to know that nobody else is gonna see it. It's just you because you're looking at it really closely. Most people are gonna hold it at arm's length. They're gonna enjoy it. They're gonna be happy that you sent them a card and that is really all they're gonna be thinking about. Well, when I was looking for colors to use for these, I found one Hawaiian shirt that was online and decided that I would use that for my color inspiration on this one because one of my students, Karen, has challenged me to do a Hawaiian shirt type of inspiration on a card. That's why I'm doing this anyway. And I found so many ugly color combinations on Hawaiian shirts and I know that the designs are just a cacophony and the color is just all over the place. So I found one that had a blue background with like a weird kind of green like this and then there was a pink, like a salmone pink. Not colors I would ever put together in a million years, but it was fun to go to the internet and get some color inspiration and try something I would never try. And for the kind of card that I'm making with just a small piece that's going to be in this whole feeling of being a Hawaiian shirt, it's gonna work just fine, even if I'm just cringing at these colors with each other because it feels like Christmas, like a pale Christmas along with a night sky or something. It's just, yeah, it made me think all different kinds of weird things while I was working on this. So there you go. I also am using on this only these few colors. I'm not using all the colors because I have a big set of markers, just limiting myself to these, but in some areas I'm using water to move the color around so I get a lighter version of it and in other areas just using the full strength marker. So that also is gonna give you a variance in what you're going to work with. You can stretch your markers and make it seem like you have more colors just by using both full strength marker and using some water to move the color around. So I can get softer pink corals to go with all those darker pink fins. So there's that one. And now on to the one that you're probably gonna get most excited about because these are for crafters like the most exciting thing. I remember when they first came out everybody just got so thrilled with them. I'm not a bright color kind of gal necessarily. I can appreciate bright color and I do love it but it's not my go-to. So these are not a marker that I use all the time but when I went through all of my videos and I've been doing that recently just going through everything and sorting all my videos, putting them in better playlists and kind of tidying things up making sure all the links work because I have a lot of broken links. Long story about that one. But I've gone through my videos and I've put together a blog post. There's a blog post on my blog from this past weekend where it's just all of my water-based marker videos and most of them are with these zig markers. So the thing that these markers do really well is what you just saw me do. I'm gonna put down some purple and then just right next to it I'm gonna touch some orange to it and that's gonna make them blend together. These markers are highly pigmented and I don't know what it is about the inks in them. They love to blend better than any markers that I know. And I should have to say, I don't know all of these other markers that are out there now. There could be other brands that do this kind of blending. So if anybody knows any of those brands then drop a name in the doobly-do so other people can find some other ideas on what kind of markers they can get. But the zigs are sold everywhere. I keep seeing them all over the place. So you should be able to find them. They come in small sets and big sets and they're just a whole lot of fun to play around with. You just need to be careful if you're gonna use them with water. I prefer not to use them with water because look at how gorgeous this is. Who needs really pale color when you've got this much color at your fingertips? So when I color with them, I typically don't get into the whole water thing. The brush nib on these is not an actual brush. It's not like hairy bristles. It's plastic, so it's a plastic type of brush. And if you get any color on it from another color, worries more with the yellows, that kind of thing. Yellows can pick up other colors. You can just easily scribble that off on a scrap of paper or on a baby wipe, that kind of thing and just clean that off super easy. So they're not gonna really hurt each other if you start blending them together. But you can take almost any color and blend them and they don't even have to be next to each other on the color wheel. I'm focusing on things that are next to each other on the color wheel. If you're new to coloring, that's a great way to choose your colors. And you can download any color wheel off the internet, just Google color wheel. And you can see that orange and yellow are next to each other and that'll be next to reds. So those will be colors that'll blend together really well and greens and blues are next to each other. So the next thing I decided since I was looking at references for Hawaiian shirts was to put black in the background because I saw a really cool one that had intense colors like this, but it had a black background. And you can see here that the zig markers, when they're all juicy, just like any marker, when it's not juicy, you won't do it so well, the zig markers can really color in a solid large area. You do see a little more of the brush strokes with this, but again, I'm going to be doing another step at the very end that's going to hide a lot of that. I'm really big on hiding things that you don't like about what you're coloring because I almost always have an area that needs some kind of repair or fixing. It's one of the reasons I even started doing scene cards in the first place because I would color out of the lines and then in order to not throw it away, I would just put a tree back there, hide whatever place that I had goofed up. So I'm always looking for good techniques to do that. And we're going to learn one more technique before we finish the coloring on this so that you too can hide mistakes if you make any and that sort of thing. So I'm going to get this all finished up and then the next thing we're going to learn is lifting. Lifting is when the pigment that you put down, whatever the pigment is and in this case, it's ink, then the pigment sometimes and sometimes not will break down underneath of that water. Now, sometimes with some brands of marker, you may find you need to let it sit there for a bit for it to work. So test it out on a piece of scratch paper and see how well it will lift. I'm just going to put bubbles all over the place and then see what happens when I take a paper towel or a Kleenex or something and dab it off. And look, I've got bubbles. How easy was that? I'm going to try it on each of the other brands and see this is something that you can test with whatever markers you've got and see what happens when you do that. Does the color lift off? Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. And it worked with the Ziggs and here we're going to do it on the light blue one. But I know that this marker brand doesn't lift all that well. However, I'm trying to lift white out of a light blue. So I'm not going to see very much. So I'm really curious to see how this will come out. You could put some of the dots, some of the bubbles over any areas that didn't work out great. That's a wonderful way to hide things. It's just put lots of bubbles in them. That's why I love doing underwater scenes because bubbles heal all kinds of ills. So now that I've got all those colored, I'm going to use a dye to cut out a hexagon shape. These are dyes from Ellen Hudson. Once I had all three cut out, I stacked them up and I was trying to do them all three together and drew lines across them so that I could use my scissors and cut almost to the middle with each one. I kept trying to wiggle around on me. And this was going to help me to make an umbrella that lifts up just a little bit on the card. You could do this with just the same simple shape or you could cut them into triangles and alternate. You get two cards out of each one. If you alternate each of the triangles. So that could be fun too. For the water, I just cut a piece of blue by hand and then cut a piece of cream to use cream or white in order to make the foam on the water. And then I put a double layer of the dimensional adhesive in the center and then regular adhesive, just a tape runner around the outside edges. And you could decide where you want to put yours. I wanted mine hanging off the edge. You could leave it hanging off the edge and then cut the card down. So the card base is smaller and the whole thing fits in an envelope. Or you could do what I'm going to do which is going to be to chop it all off but you could make your card much smaller so that the whole shape of the card has that umbrella hanging off. I'll just turn it over and whack off the top and the side. And all I have to do is add on my little final details on each of my cards. So doing the same thing with each one of these. I've decided to put a little hole in the middle while using a hole puncher to put a little center on each one of my umbrellas so that they will be marked as having a pole in them. The last step that's left for finishing up is to use a brown marker that has a bullet nib as well as a white gel pen to make sand on top of this sand colored paper and then stamp a sentiment on it. And then they're all done and cute. I also want to make you aware if you are interested in learning more about all the water-based markers, there is a post over on my blog that has tons of ideas. Some of them may work differently with different brands of markers but you can check them all out. That's about it for me. I will see you again in another video very soon. Take care and have a marvelous, marvelous day. Bye-bye.