 Well hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to show you three different ways to use one stamp set to make these beautiful wreath cards. Usually when I make a video I choose a medium and show you how to use that particular one to make a card. This time I decided I would show you three different ones just to get you some inspiration so maybe you'll try different mediums with your same stamp sets. So I use pink freshers oval foliage and it has this big oval and then it has one branch in it. There's a lot of different ways you can use it but I'm going to use it three different ways with three different mediums so I'm stamping in three different papers. So first let's take a look at this one I'm using distress oxide inks on watercolor paper and I wanted to create in all of these kind of a rich soft kind of wreath something that looks more realistic not you could make something here that looks perfectly stamped like all of the little leaves are absolutely perfect and line them all up and everything but I wanted it to feel very real like it was actually real branches making the wreath. So what I've done is stamped first in a kind of uneven fashion onto my watercolor paper and it's easy to stamp on even on watercolor paper because it's got all the texture to it anyway and then I started going in with a wet brush and I'm just kind of dancing around the leaves and I'm leaving a few of them being hard edged but a lot of it I'm going to melt out and that's the cool thing about distress inks these distress oxides especially that they melt out into watercolor quite easily and you don't even have to be real careful I'm kind of getting looser with my brush as I'm realizing how nice it's looking and I love the fact that it's got different levels of green in it already just from having stamped it kind of kitty wampus and then I heat set it just so it would dry a little quicker because I got impatient because I knew I had three cards to shoot and once it's dry I'm going to do the same thing and stamp a little unevenly but in different places that's going to give me a different dimensional layer on top so that I have a detailed layer on the very top and that soft layer showing through and it starts to really get some depth to it now you could do this with a bunch of different greens you could make a wreath out of all pinks and make a pink you know like a pink floral type thing but that's what I decided to do was a green wreath and then I wanted to add a little depth to it and I don't have the full collection of distress oxides I know that sounds like a crime but I only picked out a few of them that I thought I'd use so there you go and this one is going to add it's a blue but it's going to add some depth I wanted something that had a little more color in it and I just went around and kind of danced in a few details with the brush and I'll do the same thing using some picked raspberry to create some berries all over and it's really easy to just make little dots and each of the cards is designed the same they have the sentiment on a panel and then the whole thing is mounted on several layers of dimensional adhesive so next let's look at how you would do this in Copics it's a little harder especially for those who are used to thinking of Copics in a particular way but I'm going to do some second generation stamping first now most of you have probably done this it's a very old technique but stamp it off first on a piece of scratch paper and I've just got a sticky note there and then you'll get that half-stamped look that was so easy to get on the watercolor paper and if you find yourself pressing really hard on the ink pad then you know press a little bit more on the on the sticky note and get more ink off or press a little harder if you want a little darker edge on a few of them and that makes it nice and uneven so I'm going to go around with a YG03 and just put in some more thicker branches on some of these areas and that's going to give me that soft underlook like I had on the watercolor version and just go around the whole thing and you can add in branches where there weren't any because you can see how loose they are and you don't have to actually follow along and make them exactly the way that the the stamp was because the stamp just has one shape to it this also allows it to not look very regular because you're stamping uneven and then I took a YG00 and I'm just really pushing the color out a little bit further to give it a little more width because it was just feeling kind of skinny and scrawny and I wanted my wreath just a little bit on the denser side so adding a little bit of that in there and then going in once again on top of all of that with some more uneven stamping and I'm just pressing kind of at an angle on my little block so that sometimes maybe I just get the left half sometimes I just get the right half or just the tip and you can continue to re-stamp and fill things in and if you need to take a dark marker and fill in some of those blank places if you can't get the stamp to do exactly what you want but look how much dimension that has compared to just stamping it once in the beginning and then I took an RV14 and just made some polka dots to create that those beautiful pink berries and again same design and I just put the the sentiments on that panel about two thirds of the way down on the the wreath just to give it a little bit more off-center impact now this one is going to be possibly the most unique especially to those who haven't taken my colored pencil jumpstart class because this involves one technique that was taught in that class and if you are into colored pencils that's a really fun one because I show you a lot of different ways to use your colored pencils and get a lot of mileage out of them so here what I'm stamping with is VersaMark now I can't see very much of it I'm kind of guessing at my placement if your pad's really juicy you can look to the side and kind of see the shimmer and shine on it but you want to work pretty quickly because you don't want this ink to dry because the next step needs to have some wet ink on the paper not super wet but it needs to have enough and then you need a tea strainer I know a tea strainer seems like a weird thing to have in your craft room and I have this one there's a bunch of different kinds but I have this one that has just a little top that pops open and then you can undo it from its little little connector onto the handle I leave it on the handle just so I don't lose it because this little pink thing would go all different kinds of places and hide in my studio but then you take your colored pencil and run it across the surface of the tea strainer and get a little ball and push the color out of it you want to push the color out of both sides because otherwise you'll have green in there next time you want to use pink in your strainer and then lightly and I do mean very lightly brush across the surface if you press too hard then you're going to smush the ink as well as the pigment and everything and that's not going to be good and I ran out of pigment I didn't put enough on the paper so I'm going to add a little bit more and put it on the right hand side and it's almost like watching it reveal magically so now you can see why it wasn't really all that great that I couldn't see it because you can see where my gaps are but I'm going to layer another color in there after I get this done so I'm not too terribly worried about it if you press really hard around the area where the ink is you're going to get those little hazes so after I brushed it off you can kind of see that there's little light green hazes here and there and what I'm going to do is just take my kneaded eraser and erase off of those now if you erase over that pencil right now it's not going to work so well you don't want to erase on top of that but you can erase the stuff around the edges a little bit so now I'm going to go around and do the same thing and I'm going to use a secondary green so I get again that same two-tone look so that it looks a little more realistic I'm just going to stamp all the way around I'm looking especially for areas where I didn't get a lot of pigment the first time and get it all stamped up and choose a different kind of green this one's going to be a brighter kind of a spring green color and I'll use a different cotton ball so I don't spread more of the old color and again very very lightly a light dusting going over it so more of those newer stamping show up and if you want to you can do both greens at the same time just mixed to two pigments on the paper you can certainly do that and I'm going to erase some of the areas in between now you can go over this a number of times when you do powdered pencil like this it is going to be a little challenging for the card to last a really long time because it's powdered pencil it's not pressed into the paper so you may want to get some spray to spray on it to make it some spray fixative the kind I use let me see what my bottle says it's Krylon satin finish but there's a bunch of different kinds of fixatives that you can use to make it a little bit more permanent but I'm not really going to spray this one because I don't manhandle my cards a lot but if you're sending it to someone who manhandles then that might be something you'll want to do so I'm adding in I added in my berries I'm adding in a few little spots of richer darker green so that I can end up with that dimensional look again like I had on the other cards now the sentiments in this set are actually one of the reasons why I purchased this one and why it's probably going to stick around in my collection a little longer than a lot of other stamp sets might because they're really great little sentiments for a lot of different occasions there's encouragement ones there's ones you can use for all different kinds of things and they're they're a little more unique than a lot of sentiments and they're beautiful too they have some script combined with some some other text but this one just go in there and remember you're amazing I mean that's an encouragement card to give somebody before they do something wouldn't that be great to get before a big job interview and you don't see very many sentiments like that so I hope that seeing one stamped on three different ways is going to help you to think out of the box next time you sit down in your studio and start creating something think about different ways you could try it with different mediums one may work out better than the other but it's always worth the playtime and learning and experience and I'll see you guys again next time have a wonderful wonderful day and go make something beautiful to send out to someone to encourage them thank you much bye