 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to watercolor a your weird card. I didn't buy this set only for the sentiment, but I do love the sentiment a lot. You're weird, and I love it. But there are alien ships and aliens and moons and all kinds of fun things to use on the card. So I made two alien ships flying around an asteroid belt, and those are the watercolor shades that I am using, and I will have those posted over on my blog, so if you want to see what colors they were. So I arranged it so that I had a space here for my sentiment, and I stamped that moon twice and used a couple extra of the praiders that they have in the stamp set, and did the two ships. I had to use two ships because they didn't all fit in one ship, and then decided to add a few other things to it. One is looking at where those objects behind the alien ship's glass cross the glass, because I'm using dotted lines for those parts inside the glass, because when you're looking through glass you're going to get a hazy view of whatever's inside of it. So I wanted that to be a little less prominent, so I'm just using dotted lines, and just drawing in my own asteroids. Yes, you can do that. It is legal. And asteroids, especially when they're like this moon that's just kind of lumpy and that sort of thing, it's not a perfect circle, you can just hand draw them. They don't have to be perfect. They're asteroids, they're rocks floating in the sky. And I was doing them this way for a particular reason, but I'll show you a little bit more as we go, trying to break up the background so that it would make it easier to paint. Because I wanted to use some indenthrone blue, which is a really nice dark blue color. These are all Daniel Smith colors in my 2019 palette. If you need to know what that is all about, you can always search for my 2019 palette. I think I always have a link in the doobly-doo to that as well. And those are the colors that I am using this year. Each year I tend to try to change it up, or every two years change it up a little bit and try some other colors and see what I love at the time. So I used a little bit of cobalt blue for the inside of the glass that is basically a lighter version than of the indenthrone. I could have used a watered-down version of indenthrone, but I decided to go for something a little brighter because through that glass you're going to see a hazy version of whatever you see behind it. I'm also leaving a little white outline around it so that it ends up looking a little more glass-like and standing out more. I decided to draw another asteroid in here for a reason, and that is so that I can break up that big blue background a little bit more. If you've ever tried to paint a large area, you always end up with that leading edge, that little front edge of the paint that dries faster than you want it to dry while you're working on some other area. If you can find a way to design your card, design the scene in some way that you don't have that giant area, and here I've trapped the paint in that section by putting a design element in the way and it breaks it up into smaller sections. If you don't do that, then you have to just continuously paint and you have to keep that leading edge wet. I can do the same thing keeping that leading edge wet here because it's a smaller area, but if I was trying to come in from two sections of the card especially at one time because sometimes it forks out and you end up with two leading edges, it can get really hard to juggle and then you end up with a dried edge and a hard line that you didn't intend to be there. But you just have to keep working at it, keep it wet, keep it moving until you're satisfied with it, and then let it all dry out. So it's important to think about these things ahead of time if you can break up the background into sections like this. So it came out nice and smooth like I was hoping, so that was a good thing. If it doesn't come out really smooth, add a bunch of stars with a white pen or with some white paint and no one will ever know that your painting didn't come out smooth. For my asteroids I decided to mix a little bit of Pains Blue-Grey with some neutral tint. I just wanted some color in them that would darken them up and leave the alien ships and the little aliens being the important part here and those would just be background asteroids and not really important. The lighting on these doesn't match because the one on the top has a highlight on the bottom and the one on the bottom has a highlight on the top because I'm assuming in my brain that the light is coming from the little alien ships. Even though there's probably some distant sun out there somewhere causing some highlights, I decided I would just make it come from the alien ships themselves and give just a little bit of dimension but not a whole lot. I didn't want to put too much effort into those without causing myself a lot of problems. He'd set those real quickly so I wouldn't end up touching them and could keep moving on shooting the video. Generally, I don't heat set any more than absolutely necessary when I'm working and not filming. I just walk away and let it dry for a few minutes and I also don't use tape. You might notice on my cards I generally don't use tape unless I'm out doing plein air and I have to hold my paper to my board. I just don't use it much because I don't find it helps me all that much. A little bit of ATG tape around the card, the piece of paper holds it down nicely, especially when we're talking about a card-sized piece of paper and it doesn't end up buckling that way and I don't end up with all that paint collecting around the tape. Sometimes you end up with the paint, if you get messy like I do, you end up with paint collecting around the edge because you've splashed over past the paper itself but I cut the paper just a little bit bigger than I'm going to use anyway. So I can just cut that off. If the tape cut into it by yet another eighth of an inch then I'd have that much less that I could have that little bloop and have to cut the panel even smaller. So I find that some adhesive holding it down works just as well, if not better, than using tape. I sometimes wondered if it's the tape universe that has fucked us all into taping down everything because I don't find that we really need it. So I'm using a little bit of the, let's see, this was neutral tint I believe I used for the metal on the alien ships, creating a little bit of highlight in the center of them, putting some darker color around the outside edges and judiciously trying to use my water to soften that center edge and adding just a little bit of dark on the left and right just to add a little bit of dimension without going too crazy with it because I didn't want that to steal all the focus. Same thing with those asteroids, I didn't put dimension in them. I left just that lip of highlight and dropped a little extra color into the craters and I didn't make them the whole craters or the whole asteroid look like it was rounded because I just wanted those to be background elements. And then it came the fun crazy time to add the color and I just picked some bright colors for all the lights on these guys, for the aliens themselves, and let them be the focus of the card. And for those who are fans of space things, I'm like a crazy Star Trek and Star Wars aficionado. I love any of those like space things. Kind of get me a little excited to watch those. And I don't know if you know this but H&I TV has Star Trek on all of the different genres of Star Trek. They have them on every single night of the week. So anytime when there's not anything on all those million cable channels and you like just want something to zone out in front of go watch an old episode on H&I. All right, there is my card and I've got it just on some layers and embossed that you're weird. I love it sentiment. You could even do some glossy accents on the alien glass would be really cute too. But there we go. Hope you enjoyed the video, learned something from it and I will see you guys again next time in the meantime. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share and go out and make something beautiful. I'll see you later. Bye bye.