 Well, hi there. I am Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter. We're almost at the end of World Watercolor Month and today I'm going to do some great outdoors watercolor and this stamp set is from Darcy's, the one on the left, and I'm going to do this stamp also with the other images. I'm only going to show you the one with the moose because that would bore you to tears to see it done multiple times but I wanted to show you mainly this scene because you can take any of your other stamps if you have other animal stamps and stuff and combine it with this mountain scene and just stamp it in there, mask it out and then stamp the scene behind it and you're good to go. You'll have a whole ready-made scene. I'm going to make a really fun sky scene and it's going to be kind of a you can consider it to be a sunset or sunrise, whichever, but often the clouds are really uneven in the sky. We try to make them all super even. In my blue skies class over on art-classes.com I show you a bunch of different kind of skies that you can create with your watercolors or Copic markers or you can take the class using both mediums and learn both at the same time and this one though is going to be in multiple colors, so I'm using some pinks and yellows and then I'll morph all of that into blues as I get toward the top but I pulled up a sky scene on Google and just kind of followed along to see what the clouds might look like. You can also do this by taking photographs, collecting photographs of your own skies in your own neighborhood and when you're on vacations and stuff and keep those for reference, but I like to do them from an actual sky if I can because usually it challenges me to try to see how I can replicate a different kind of sky. But I love, there's something I love about uneven skies and the way that the clouds kind of break up and change color. So looking up sunsets and sunrises and that sort of thing can often generate some really interesting cloud formations and also if mom's watching, thanks to mom for constantly sending me on Facebook, she's always sending me pictures that she finds on Facebook of beautiful clouds that are from other Facebook users that they post and stuff. So if you let your friends know that you like to do clouds then they are almost always guaranteed to help you out because when they see a pretty sky they will send it your way. So I'm just about done with my sky and I'm going to let that all dry and then work on the water down here and with water if you just create some in at least one area, some light areas and I'll be going over that with more color but as it gets toward the front I'm putting some reflections on the water by breaking up that color and not having it be solid all over the place. You could start some of that breaking up of it way back in the distance or you can do it just in the front kind of depends on what you want to do but I'm going to kind of clean up more of that and put more layers of color on all of this as it goes along so I'm kind of starting with some lighter colors and then I'll build it up over time as I water color through it. Now here I was getting a little chancey by putting the blue mountains or the tops of the blue mountains I wanted them to go from blue to green. Did that while the trees were still wet so a little bit of that is going to bleed but I am going to add more color to the trees later so that's still going to survive even though I did something on the risky side. And then I'm going to mix up some other colors and this is where people want a recipe for how to mix perfect brown or something. I just kind of grab a couple colors and start putting them together and I like to also mix colors on the paper so I was getting the edge wet so that I could try something and I tried putting some purple on the bottom side so I thought the part that's closest to me what if I did that and just played with it to see if I put some purple down here and blend that into my yellow this is just another way of testing your colors knowing that you can change it as you go just having that purple down there which is the complement of yellow one of the reasons that it they work well they make a brown together is that they're the complement of each other they're opposite each other on the color wheel then those colors are going to generally make each other more desaturated they're going to dull each other down a little bit. The grasses I'm going to put in a brighter green and I've mixed my sap green with some phthalo in order to make a bright green that's not super bright because I'm not into just phthalo by itself when we're talking grass but I wanted to also have some some of that sunlight casting onto the grasses so what I'm doing is taking a little bit of my lemon yellow and I'm going to put the lemon yellow at the top of the grass and let that blend together so that it looks like I've got little highlights there on my grasses but I did notice my grasses were starting to bleed now into my brown so that's that's me and the not waiting very long so I am going to have to fix that but you know I get used to fixing things with the impatience that I live with but I wanted to at least stop that green color from going further so I just dabbed it off with a tissue and then let it dry a little bit so I could work on that brown area once it's once it's a little drier and not risk having more of that green seeping in there still so I'm mixing some duller greens for the trees in the distance your colors in the distance are generally going to be duller than the ones in the front you're going to have more intensive color on things that are up close to you so that the duller desaturated colors are far and away from you and then I'm going to use some quinacridone gold for my trees and leave a little bit of white highlight on the right hand side that's facing toward the sun and doing a little bit of brushwork to try to make a little bit of a rough edge so it's not just a straight edge on each one of them but then I wanted to add some shadow so for my shadow I'm just going to drop a line of that purple all the way down the side and that's my carbazole violet and just dropping it down the side and letting it blend in and it's going to make its own brown as it as it blends and I can use a little bit more of the yellow to move it around a little more if I need to but on its own it works pretty nicely and makes a very natural looking color combination so now I can go over top of what I had before so even if I had practiced that purple and decided I didn't like it see how easy it is to just color over it because when you're talking about something that's supposed to be brown that's a great time to practice with trying to create mixes of colors on your paper is when you you're doing it with very light shades and you know you can always go darker with it if you need to it's now i'm going to add more intensity to my watercolor and I started by adding a kind of a blue green at the top and then more of the phthalo blue as I go down toward the lower section and I do have that little bit of sketchiness of the water down below in lighter color and so I can do the same thing now on top and it's showing through some of the lighter blue behind the darker blue and there's doesn't have to be super rhyme or reason to it you can align it with where exactly where the sun is but since you don't see the sun itself you just see the glow from the sun here I'm just letting the the shimmer on the water shine the way it is not going to stress out over it and then add more richness of color on my mountains and get them blended in so that they go from that light blue color down to uh or from the darker blue down to a lighter at the bottom just to give them a little more intensity and fun and now I I realized everything else was getting so bright that my colors in the front were looking kind of washed out compared to them so I added another layer of brown to the path and the rocks and you can keep adding layers if you need to to add that contrast and give it punch because it's the punch that's going to make a big difference in that that overall perception of the picture itself so now I wanted to show you the coloring of another image inside of that I've stamped each one of those four animals I'll show you all four cards they're all on my blog and pinnable for you if you want to check them out but I wanted to show you a trick for making some blended color on an animal so I started by mixing a big puddle of just a really rich dark brown made with sepia with a little bit of quinacridone burnt orange and I think there was a little bit of maybe a little quinacridone gold in there too but not much of it clearly because it's you know got a thick paint very heavy and you can work on just the head but I wanted it to dry a little bit before I did this blending technique so I'm moving on to paint the rest of it while I still have enough paint and mixing enough paint for the entire animal is always helpful and I was very thrilled that I actually have enough here to finish the whole little guy because usually I stop in the middle and then I have to make another mix and then it doesn't match and there you go so fortunately this time it worked out so I've got this kind of color that it's not really well blended I had that extra on his nose I'm going to spread that around before I get started but I'm rinsing off my brush and then just kind of wiping it off so I have a mostly dry brush still damp but mostly dry and then wipe off the paint that's on the highlight side so I want it on the side facing toward the sun I want lighter color and I can just pull that color off and I end up with a highlight on that one side and now if I go back in and I just do a very light coat or you know kind of a light touch up in a few areas with that color I can add a little bit darker shades in my dark areas if I need to but I can paint right over that now and in one part in the darker parts I'm painting over top of the dark color but in the light parts I can spread the paint around now and I've got a light color underneath so I'm going to get a very natural transition from the light into the dark once I'm finished but I've done it by putting that initial layer down wiping it off so that I have that overall dimension on him and then it's going to eventually be able to work through when I put the next layer on not sure how much sense that made but hopefully you saw enough to be able to try it on your next time you need to do some stamping and watercoloring I wanted his antlers to be really light colored so I put just a little bit of a light version of that same color and then using some water to blend it out and if it gets too dark which it was kind of feeling too dark next to this the sky that's behind it which you may notice looks a little different than the other sky because every time you do a sky like this is going to come out different it's hard to replicate exactly the same thing depending on what colors and how much paint you pick up from different areas but now I want to add shadows now that everything should be mostly dry and add shadows across everything with a nice dark rich brown or gray color and that's usually helpful to just pick a color and then go right over top of everything making lines that point toward where the sun is supposed to be and then it will give you that impression of having really strong shadows and put it put strong shadows behind each one of the main objects in the the scene as well so here I'm even adding and dragging some of that color up some of my trees so my trees also have some of that same strength to them so my finished cards I ended up putting onto little card bases with a black and a green layer and a yellow card base around them and here's a couple the other guys there's a bear that's fishing and a really cute little fox that I actually made a silver fox out of instead of the normal red fox and my moose and a little skunk holding a hot dog you have to mask the hot dog into his hand which is a little challenging but it worked and he's really cute so there we go all done with today's video hope you enjoyed this stay tuned for one more in our series here in world watercolor month I will see you in that video and it's going to be a special one so see you soon bye bye