 Hi there. I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to make some penguins as shepherds. I'm joining in with some friends to celebrate Ellen Hutson's 12th anniversary. So we're doing an Instagram hop and my card will be on Instagram. You can see how I laid out the Arctic pals there with some masks when I did my stamping so that I have the two penguins in front who are going to be my shepherds and the flock that's behind them, which is all of those polar bears. The animals are all in the same stamp set and yes, they are out of scale that way, which is what kind of made me think they looked like they could be the sheep that go with the penguins if the penguins were shepherds. So they look like little gummy bears kind of size that way. I don't know. It just struck me as funny. And one of the things I'm going to be doing this week and not on Thanksgiving, but the rest of the week, I'm doing a variety of nativity cards. Some of them are funny like this one. Others are more serious and it's in different mediums and I know how you guys like to have a whole week of something. So all week long just keep your eyes peeled for some fun and interesting nativity types of cards. Yeah, you know, sometimes I just come up with a theme and I didn't even know I had a theme going. So with this one, it stamped onto watercolor paper and you can see I'm trying to paint blue. They have so much pink in my brush that it just kind of kept the pink turning purple. So I had a little bit more blue to it. Something like this, you could just paint the sky, whatever colors you wanted, do whatever technique you want to just flood it with color. I just wanted to get it good and wet because I wanted to roll the color around. I love just watching color move and watching the textures that it makes and the lines that it makes and dropping other color into it and testing out like how what happens if I put more watery pigment in? What happens if I put thicker pigment in and just playing with it? And I thought I'd let it run down and see if it was going to run down past the stamped images and it didn't. It stayed where the water was. There's one little spot in the center that had already dried, so it didn't go any further past that. I don't have to fix that with a brush, but it's kind of interesting to see that it stopped where the water's edge stopped. I guess there's a saying, something like that, but just wanted to add some colors here and just tip the board around in different ways, add more colors, move it around and just play. If you were to choose a different stamp set to use for this, maybe you have a bunch of sheep that you can stamp and just use some masking to make them over a hillside behind whatever you're going to use for your shepherds and just have fun with the background. You could use distress inks, you could do airbrush back there, you can do all different kinds of things, whatever you find simplest and quickest. For me, watercolor is just the most fun right now. I'm really enjoying it. I know that I'm known for my Copic work, but boy, watercolor just makes my heart happy and keeps me learning because I just feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I love the whole idea of learning. That's what something like this helps me to do, is just learn what's going to happen. I have learned that I need to cut my watercolor paper bigger than my card front, and I have done that here because notice that it dries a little unevenly. There's extra water collected around the outside edges because it's pulling in from the outside from the board that's there. If you have your thing taped down, you're also going to have that. But what I find is if I cut my paper a little bit bigger, planning to shave that off using a trimmer, then I can just kind of go up to the edge and go crazy. If I have taped down, I'm going to end up with that edge around it and then I don't have any room to trim it down. So I just use a little bit of adhesive underneath to glue my paper down to my board. For the rest of the painting, I'm really going to keep it super simple. I put a little shadow underneath of my penguins, and I'm sorry, this is a little bit blown out so you can't quite see it. When the camera tries to look at the dark background of the board, it just gets confused as to what it's supposed to do with the light settings. But I'm putting a really pale color on my polar bears. And, you know, you can kind of put it on, wipe it off, just, you know, see how dark you want it to be. It doesn't have to be much at all, just enough to separate them from the snowy hillside in front of them. And then I wanted to add a little bit more extra color underneath of my penguins. So they have a little more presence that pulls them forward and the little polar bears are kind of pushed to the background. After I have all my card assemble, I've got it on a layer of black and on the card base, I stamped my sentiment and embossed it. And now I'm going to just draw on my shepherd's crooks for my little penguins to hold and then add some stars to the sky. You can make a north star by just making a crisscross and then making a kind of a diamond in the center to make it look like it's got a little bit bigger middle to it. And then I added a bunch of stars in the sky as well. So for me, this is a really simple card. It was a lot of fun to make and it makes me smile, which is a big thing in my world because smiling is a good thing. And we could use a lot more of it in this world. So this is, as I said, part of the celebration of Ellen Hudson's 12 years. We're doing a surprise Instagram hop for three days this week. So make sure you follow on Instagram and go see everybody else's cards as well. And I will see you again tomorrow with more in my nativity series for this week every day, except for Thanksgiving because, you know, we got to take a break. I'll see you guys soon. Bye bye.