 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And I have a few fun backgrounds that I'm going to share that I'm calling Otterlicious, comparing alcohol ink backgrounds with Copic Re-Inker backgrounds. And I'm going to use this stamp set from Darcy's. It has a darling little beaver and a little otter who's laying on top of the water. So these are going to be water looking backgrounds. And there's sentiments that go with each one, but I'm going to use a dye for my sentiment because my backgrounds are really complex and I want them to stand out. So I'm starting with Yupo paper and just putting dots of the alcohol inks on the left one and mixing it with some alcohol blender solution and just dripping stuff on there. You can see how interesting it works. The color will keep moving until it's dry. So if you could just leave it there and let it dry and let it be all marbly. You can move it around, just pick the whole thing up and move it around. If you want to pick it up with your fingers, I recommend picking it up with gloves because my hands were all kinds of blue after this was all done. So you'll need to clean your fingers off really good afterwards, if not. So I have mine attached with a little bit of adhesive onto this. It's called a craft assistant and it's really easy to wash. So I like using it for messy projects like this. So I'm just shaking them around. The one on the left had started to dry, so I added more moisture to it so that I could start with both of them kind of apples to apples with a basic color across all of them. I'm leaving it wet, not going to let it dry yet and just add drops into it and see what happens with the drops. You can see they act a little bit differently as they start to move into the color that's already there. I have some blender solution, Copic blender solution that's in a mini-mister. Do not put the alcohol blending solution from Tim in that mini-mister. Don't do that. It's got some sort of a binder in it. I have been warned not to do this with that solution, but you can use Copic blender solution with your alcohol inks and do some fun things with them. What I started realizing was I could make something that looks kind of watery by blowing on it while it's still moving. So I would just turn them around and blow them and you can see as it starts to dry, you'll get harder and harder edges. So you can create some really interesting textures with these and just kind of turning it and letting them dry a little bit, turning it, moving things around. You can re-wet stuff, but I thought it was really fascinating to try to pull some veins into this by just blowing on it and that sort of thing. And it works really well on this paper to create something really crazy like that. Now I'm also going to add more to it so you can reactivate this stuff by putting more solution on it and I'm doing it with the Copic blender solution in the mini-mister. And just to kind of have fun and see what happens. These will never turn out the same. So you can just play with them and see what you can make of it. Try them with different colors, all sorts of fun things. On the Yupo paper, they do end up remaining really shiny. You'll see that at the end. And if any of these color areas that are really saturated with a lot of color, if they remain fully saturated, they can become kind of sticky. So you can go in and what I'm going to try to do on this one on the right, one on the left is pretty good. It's set kind of where I want it. The one on the right, I'm trying to break up some of those areas of heavy pigment because I don't want it to be sticky. So I removed the other one so I wouldn't end up ruining it after it was looking good already. And I'm working on this one with the Copic Blender or the Copic Reinkers. And the cool thing about this whole idea is that you don't have to buy the alcohol inks if you have Copic Reinkers for some of your markers. It's another use for them rather than just reinking your markers themselves, especially if it's a color you don't find yourself reinking a whole lot. So there you go. Now I'm trying them again, the same kind of thing on specialty stamping paper. And I'm just going to move the color around to get the whole thing filled up here and try again to do that thing where I get both pieces basically covering the whole surface and see how it works on this. You can do some really cool things. If you just keep turning it as it dries, you can create rivulets like I did with blowing on it. You can create those rivulets just by waiting until it dries a little bit and then move it around more and then wait until it dries a little bit, move it around a little more. But since I was trying to do two of them, I was trying to keep up with everything all at once here. And so there we have it moved mostly. And then I'm just going to start adding to them and using some of that blending solution in the Mini-Mister to start making some areas that are different and some cool puddles and that kind of thing. And I'm trying again to avoid somehow having too many big heavy dark spots because the big heavy dark spots are kind of going to be your problem if they don't end up kind of breaking up a little bit. On this specialty stamping paper, the surface is not going to be as shiny as on the Yupo paper, so it's not going to be as much a problem. But it's still kind of fun to just sort of play with these, let the color move around, drop a little more ink into them. And even though they both look different on the left and the right, they work about the same. It's just a matter of I've got a different amount of pigment on one than the other. I'd say they're both pretty equal in how they handle this technique. The thing I'm painting with here is using the stopper, the little thing that goes inside the Mini-Mister, to drop color in a few specific areas. So if there's a little spot I want to drop just one little bit into without spritzing the whole thing, I can almost paint with that. Just drop a little color in using that little bottle and let them dry, set them all aside. Now this is the crazy part. This was the fun one that I just went, I don't know if this is going to work or not, but I'm going to try it. So I had some Nina and there's a little blue on there just because I hadn't cleaned off my board very well, but that's not going to matter. I'm going to add the BG05 and BG09 or the two colors I've been using this whole time. So I'm just going to add a bunch of them and see what happens. And it did start to move. This pigment is suspended in all of that fluid. You have to get it wet enough that it's suspended. You can't just get it damp. It has to be a puddle as you can see. And I'm trying to move it around to see if that color is eventually going to stain those outside edges because it's almost like it's not sticking out there. It's only sticking in certain spots. And just kind of playing with it, rolling the color around just to see what's going to happen and then set it down flat. And I'm going to start adding to it and see what happens. Just adding a couple dots of a color. It didn't move right away, but as soon as I started to blow on it, it started to work. And this just got really cool. I was so excited about it because it makes almost this speckledy type of texture, which I was not expecting on the Nina. And I just keep turning it and blowing on those dark areas to get them to move around and create some hard edges, some soft edges and that sort of thing. Isn't that cool? I don't think I've ever seen anybody do this. If you have, then by all means, you know, give them a shout out, but I have not seen anybody try this because we all assumed this had to be done on slick paper. And it does not, apparently. So I picked it up with some tweezers because my whole board was getting saturated. My craft assistant was all soaking wet and the paper wasn't drying very much and I wanted to do some other stuff to it. So I got it kind of sort of dry, spread some more of the blender solution on it, and then started to see if I could add some more areas of interest so that I could add some more spots of dark color and just kind of turn it and blow on it and let that color move around. Then just imagine what you could do with all kinds of rainbow colors, all sorts of fun with a technique like this. You do have to be willing to have the big bottle of the blender solution and use a bunch of it. I know a lot of people are very stingy about using their art supplies. So this is not for the faint of heart, but it's very cool. The stuff that you can do with it is really, really, really cool. So I got this thing all completely dried up after finishing all of this texture on it and then stamped my otter on it. I looked for a spot where the otter was going to be in a lightish area. On a few of the spots, I was trying to take my colorless blender and erase a little color. It didn't do very much for me, but figured that'll be all right because I'm going to just deal with it. This is almost like coloring on a toned paper. So if you've ever tried coloring on some, like the... Oh, what is it called? Oh, the brown paper. It's not craft. It's Desert Storm. Yes, Nina Desert Storm. The colors are duller on something like this because there's already a coat of blue underneath of there. Some of this is going to displace the color that's already there, but it's really saturated into this paper. So there's not a whole lot that's going to disappear. So if you're going to stamp an image on top of it, then make sure you create a really light area that you're going to stamp your image so that you can actually kind of get it in there without having to displace too much of the color. And of course, you could always fussy cut it out or die cut it and glue it on top. But if you wanted to look like it's embedded in this beautiful background, then try to plan that out if you can and stamp your image right in the spots where it's the lightest. So my little otter has a heart in his little paws. So I'm getting that all colored up. Get his little tongue and his little nose. And then I started putting a little bit of color around the outside edges. And I'm using the same colors that I used in the background. So they'll kind of all morph together in there. That BG05 and later I'll use the BG09 just to add more of the wavy look around the outside edge. Go out with the darker color all the way around the outside edges. And the whole time I was looking this and trying to figure out like I want to make it brighter. I know I have a white pen, but what else can I do to try to brighten it up? Because it is very, it's kind of dull because of that blue shade that's underneath of all of it. But I got my water all set first because the next step I was going to do, I knew I needed to have all my Copic work finished before I jumped into the next step, which is adding pencil. Colored pencil can go right over top of Copic. And since I've done some pencil on top of Copic before I went, aha, there we go. We can adjust this now. And I can create all kinds of highlights on him and give him all sorts of cute shapes. So I'm almost giving him not necessarily a mask. I'm going to soften out the edges a little bit as we go, but give him a little roundness around his eyes and almost eyebrows. So he can look a little bit on the happy side because that's going to surround his eyes with some lighter colors. So they're going to pop out a little bit more. Can give some light color to his tummy and his little feet, that sort of thing. So you can go over these things with your pencils and fix things that you didn't get the shading right on, that sort of thing, as well as if you're coloring on top of saturated color like this, you can add a lot of detail. So I even went in with a black pencil to create some really dark on his head so that I'd have some real contrast in here because he was looking like he didn't have much pop of contrast since he started out with the, you know, the whitest part of underneath of what he stamped there is that blue with just a little bit of white for the highlight. And I do have a plan to add even more highlights. So gave him little pink toes and feet and little pink on his cheeks. And then went in with, of course, my white pen because my white pen is good for everything. I did decide to add a little bit more of the dark blue around the little waves where he's swimming just around those outside edges. And you can make them as hard or as soft as you want to and add more, even more of the ripples going out from him if you want. I decided not to go too far out on mine just to put some very light ones on the outside edges. For my finished card, I added the sentiment. I added whiskers with my white pen. And I put a panel that was a reject practice panel on the inside because I thought, you know, it wasn't good for a card front, but it'll work for that. And then I popped the whole thing onto some dimensional adhesive. So I'd have a little bit more dimension to the whole card. I colored a bunch of other otters to put on these other backgrounds. These are the ones that were on Yupo. Remember the shiny one that sometimes stays a little sticky. Those weren't too bad. And this is on the specialty stamping paper. And you can see it's much duller than the Yupo was, but still very, very cute and looks very, very watery. And these were some other practice ones that I did. And you can see the shininess of the heaviness of that pigment. And they're not too sticky. They're not unusable. They're just a little bit on the tacky side. So there you go. There's my cards for today. Hope you enjoyed this. If you did, click that like button. Subscribe if you haven't. Share it with somebody who loves otters. And try out some crazy backgrounds. And I will talk to you guys next time. I hope you have a great day. See you later. Bye.