 Hey everybody, it's Sandy and welcome to my YouTube channel. Today we're going to do watercolor flower video number seven. I can't believe we're at seven already. So this is also for the watercolor blog hop hosted by Pretty Pink Posh. Lots of information on their blog about it and lots of goodies to give away, so go check it out. The card I'm going to do today is going to be on this Artistico traditional white cold press watercolor cardstock And it's 140 pounds nice paper like really good good good paper and it's on a block But I took it off and chopped it in quarters and adhered it with this delicate frog tape. This step is not going to rip my paper And I'm going to use my new whole buying watercolors. I'm kind of getting hooked on these really fast The little container is supposed to be for Travel and it's got those little pallets It has a little travel brush and this is actually a very good quality Travel brush. I haven't really seen any that are this nice of a brush. It's a number eight And the watercolors I'll show you more about them tomorrow But the watercolors are in these little trays with magnets on the bottom So they stay in place which is pretty slick, especially if you're traveling And I'm going to also use this big three-quarter inch wash brush To put water down first and this is a brush by the silver brush company So I'm just putting water across it and it's adhered down to this wooden cutting board just to hold it in place So it'll stay relatively flat and then I'm going to use the brush from the whole buying set and just start dabbing color on and look at how Beautifully this just spreads. I mean Tomorrow you're going to see some videos on watercolor. I'm finally getting around to really explaining What I've learned about watercolor and doing some tests and I'm going to show you exactly how A lot of different watercolor brands go on to different watercolor brand papers And how they spread and everything and this one just I'm I just find it delicious and looking at all of this This color just spreading and bleeding and blooming all over the card stock just makes me happy So this technique is called lost and found And what I have done I I was playing with this for like a full day before I got to this one Because I've just been having so much fun with it. I'm Just putting color everywhere and then after I get this whole technique done then I look for the hidden image I'm not really as I'm dabbing the color. I'm not thinking about what image it's going to be Like I just I'm putting color on and just having fun with it So later on you're going to see what image I pull out of it But you could do this and plan out exactly where you're going to put all these dabs of color So that's the only reason I'm explaining that right now So the thing is all covered now with paint in the way that I want it to be And I could just let it sit there and dry or I could do an extra fun step and that is to add some salt I know this is going to be crazy Paulina at pretty pink posh when I told her I did this with salt She's like, are you kidding me? You've got to be nuts And salt what it seems to do to this I read this on a blog. They didn't have any pictures of it But somebody mentioned salt as part of a technique and I went I wonder what it does to the paint And so I just started testing sprinkling it on If you leave it on for a really long time, it just keeps soaking up more and more and more of the paint And so you get these giant kind of blooms of really lightened color And I'm going to leave it on for just a little while And you're going to watch it Soak up the paint because the salt goes from being white to being colored you get these dark spots And if you start wiping it off while it's still wet Then you could get streaks of color So you need to be a little bit careful about exactly how You're going to handle getting the salt off if you let it dry entirely on there Those the white spots that you see growing around each of the salt particles Will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until it starts really taking everything over I wanted for this one to see what would happen if I just did some texture So I dabbed off a few of the extra spots of places where it was really dark And I dabbed off a few other spots here and there just to add some paper towel texture to it And then I decided You know, I just wanted to add a little bit more texture here and there and then I got out the heat gun because I wanted to stop the salt from absorbing even more of the color So it didn't really have the chance to do that full like giant bloom There was one that I tried and it just got so big it took over everything and then there was no paint left on the paper And it kind of does eat away at the surface eventually if you leave it on too long So you don't want to do too much of it, but it's really a fun technique to experiment with And it's not called the lost and found technique if you find that somewhere um The salt technique I I don't know what they call it but The lost and found idea that i'm putting forth in this is looking for what the image is behind all this when when this is all revealed So we're going to see that in just a few minutes So I got most of the the salt Somewhat dried because that's going to allow me to really gently rub it I've got a soft soft Kleenex and i'm just kind of trying to rub over top of the salt So that I don't spread color all over the place and that I don't rip the paper Because this is like I said going to eat away at the paper surface And you want to go really gently with it And if you wait too long, it could like really get stuck in the paper But you can see here. I've got a bunch of really interesting little splotches And what I started seeing was a path that little yellow spot was kind of the sun Trailing down and there's like a little trail and the rest of this is just piled up flowers So what's left now is to find the image that's in there And I'm going to just add some shadows to bring that scene out Now a lot of you may say I don't see that at all. I always see his splotches Well, you'll see that in a few minutes as it comes out There's a bunch of different things that you could end up seeing in there I mean this is like the cloud game when you were a little kid And you would look in the clouds and see a bunny rabbit or a kitty cat Look into something like this and see what you see And what are the the shapes you see? What are the the scenes that you might see? Is there a mountain? Is there a beach? Is it a seashell? There's so many possibilities for what you can see and everybody will see something different So I'm going to speed this up now so you can kind of see as it develops and as I add more shadows I'm just going to add them underneath like to add some depth to a few of the bushes And then I'll I'll do a little scribbling And I'm kind of trying to find some terminology to use when I start doing these things And I'm kind of calling this dancing like my brush is just dancing Around the flowers to add some depth to them And I'm just using colors straight from the palette In the whole bind set. I'm not really mixing colors except for layering them on top of each other So it's staying fairly pure to what the colors are in the set You could do this with of course any combination And you could probably do something somewhat similar with any kind of paints You don't have to have these like crazy expensive ones I don't know how well The initial Bleeding and blending will go with other paints and with other papers I'll I'll just put that out there So you'd have to play around with what works And what comes up with the right kind of shapes the right kind of colors the right kind of mix But the salt is supposed to work on everything because it was there was like one mention of it on a children's website Like children's arts and crafts things And another on an art journal page that I saw and I don't remember where it was It was just something that stuck in my head that I trolled past at one point and kept saying I got to try it And so when a watercolor blog hop came along and I wanted to come up with something really cool I thought I got to try this So it did take me quite a number of tries to get down to something I was happy with But I have lots more to share on this This I just wanted the first one to be super special So I'll do more of these in the future with some of the other things that I learned Because it's a whole lot of fun You may have even done this kind of thing when you were in school because this seems very much like a children's thing To add salt to something to see what happens But the adult and artist part is going to be in the adding of the scene and creating a little scene with it So I'm just adding More layers of flowers and greens And adding just shadows to things to allow those little white spots to be little flowers There's just so much you can do with these. I I'm like Having way too much fun with this and got way too excited when I when I started really seeing the scene appear in my head And back here. I wanted to add a horizon line with some trees in the distance And somehow make it a little bit of a I don't know so you can You can tell that there's Light coming from back there and that sort of thing And I decided to create a little road shape just a little curve So it would feel like Like there's a natural path there that you would walk down With just piled and piled and piled flowers on either side So all that's left is to put the card together So I'm layering it on some white and then on to purple cardstock And I'm just going to leave it pretty plain except for adding my sentiment section to it And that I wanted to use the pretty pink posh border die with this little stitching on either side of it And put it across the bottom. It's on watercolor cardstock. So it'll match the same texture as the paper And then I got out my Ellen Hudson stamp set. I really like this one amazing women. It's got great sentiments in it Presta sent to our girlfriends And I've got some mama elephant ink That I will stamp it in I'm gonna stamp it off to the side because I wanted to do something else on this This little um little banner across my card So I'll stamp my sentiment have all that in place And then I got out some silk ribbon And actually I attached it to my card first before I put the silk ribbon on and I attached it using power tabs So the power tabs go on the little backs peel off. These give it a little bit of dimension without giving it too much That's why I really love them and they're also super sticky So if you're putting them on any slick surface at all, which this isn't but Anything it's it's just going to stick to anything in the world So here's that silk ribbon that I mentioned that I got out And I tied a knot in it and I wanted to not have to tie a double knot because I didn't want it to be really thick So I'm adhering that with a quarter of a power tab on either side underneath of that ribbon. So all I have to do is kind of Flare it Fold it in half and cut it so that it would have two points and then it's adhered to That card base so that it doesn't have to actually be tied a second time And it's just a really peaceful sweet scene on a card and it's made with salt How nuts is that I just can hardly even believe that it worked as beautifully as it did And I'm excited to see what else I can do with this So here's a couple of the others in the watercolor series if you want to go check those out And I'll see you guys later This weekend. I've got a whole bunch of watercolor stuff coming up that I've been promising for a long time So be sure to come back. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye