 Hi there, I'm Sandy Almak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to do some stamped watercolor with some stamps from the Stamp Market, a new to me company. They sent me a few stamp sets so I could use them for a blog hop today so be sure to click over to the hop after you're done watching to see all the other creativity going on. And I'm starting out by wetting my paper, just putting a light coat of water on it. Not puddled. If you do it puddled it's going to be too bad, too mushy. But I'm going to paint some watercolor, some Daniel Smith watercolor onto the actual stamps. I saw this technique used by Debbie Hughes and I've thought about doing it before but I thought oh that's not ever going to work. But she did a beautiful soft English garden and I thought about the art impression stamps that I use and why wouldn't this work? Because using marker to color on the stamps, which I've done plenty of times before, is very similar to this. It's just a little less reliable to be hard edged because it's watercolor so you have so much water you're putting in it. And the water that I've already put down on the paper is making this super soft and that's kind of the look that I wanted to go for was super soft. So wetting the paper first will make everything bleed out really nicely and be really soft because I'm going to do a nice big sentiment on top of everything when I'm done. But little by little I'll add a couple of details here and there. Not huge details just a little bit but I'm using very watered down paint for this part of the process. So you can see that the watered down paint in combination with the wet paper are very soft edged. But down here at the bottom I'm starting to get a little harder edges. It's not bleeding as much because the paper is dry. So you can sort of practice a little bit, get some scratch paper and try to see how wet your paper needs to be or how dry based on the look that you want. And I wanted to continue keeping that really soft look so I used my brush to wet things out a little bit. The stamps in this set are like those kind that you stamp on top and they build onto each other. So I'm going to use a couple of those to enhance my image now that it's a little on the drier side. It's not completely dry so things will melt in a little bit. And that one down there obviously that was the latest flowers that I painted at the bottom that pretty much bled out into the rest of the paint quite quickly. The ones that are drier above I need to move a little bit with my brush but it's real easy to do. Just don't use a lot of water. Just a little damp brush and move that color around. So little by little I'll just keep adding more details. There are more centers I can use for my yellow ones. You can put some centers on those. You can put lots more leaves and stamp a lot of extra detail in there if you want. I don't want a ton of detail. I just want a few spots so that it doesn't look like a total blob. And then I'm going to use my brush to move the color around because I don't want those really hard sharp edges. So just soften those out a little bit with the brush. And fill in some down at the bottom where I hadn't gotten any of the greens. And I am deliberately putting this on the right hand side of the card because I love the look of watercolor when it's against some fresh white paper. And leaving half of it white is going to be gorgeous. And then here is the sentiment that I'm going to put on top. And I had to stamp this several times so I put it in my MISTI and that is the last time so I could get it nice and solid. And I trimmed it down a little smaller than my card base and popped it up on a card base and left it really simple that way. Isn't that gorgeous? So the next technique is going to be more graphical because you might think, gee whiz, what is Sandy going to do with this one? Because there's all these hexagons, you know how much I love hexagons, they fit together. Somebody must have known I like hexagons and picked this stamp set to send me. So I wanted to see how this technique would work with that. So I've got them in my MISTI and I'm going to keep stamping on top of them so that I can kind of fill in the blobby areas. Because they, since this is a really soft technique, it doesn't tend to hold the edges really well. Like I said, you know, ink is going to work better, markers are going to work better, but paint is going to be blobby. But you can fill in some of that with your brush, but I'm going to leave them all really loose and let the whole thing, the whole hexagon pattern be soft with a lot of different colors in it and a lot of broken up edges. Just figure out a few edges to sharpen up with my brush, that sort of thing. And it was a really good experiment to learn a little bit about how watercolors are going to work for stamping. And that's one of those things that I love to do is to explore how dry things should be, how wet things should be, and I learned a lot on this hexagon I'm ready to stamp right now. Because I started out putting a couple different colors on it. So I threw on some red and threw on a little bit of some yellow and I thought, well, let's see what happens when they splooge together when I put two colors instead of using two different stamps. And then I threw some purple on one side of it and I thought, well, let me see if that fills in the empty area there and it sort of did a little bit, but then I started moving it with my brush and I wanted it to blend better. So I was thinking about it, you know, I could use my brush to do all that blending or let me see what happens if I just put some extra water onto the stamp. And all I came up with was that one little blob that I sucked up with my dry brush and it worked really well to get that whole thing to smooth out. So anytime you're doing multiple colors and you want them to smooth out, just stamp over top of them with clean water. How cool is that? So I proceeded with the rest of it, just making more hexagons as I went and playing around with different colors and just coming up with a beautiful pattern. Again, down the right hand side of the card only, not, you know, spilling too much out over into the left side, but there is a small hexagon there and I thought it would be kind of fun to have a few small ones mixed in with all of this and playing around with adding some blues in now so that I get a little bit different colors in here. You could do it all in rainbow order and that sort of thing to try to make a rainbow out of the hexagons, but it's just kind of fun to play around with them. Now here I started getting too hard of an edge down there, but it's really easy. Just throw some water onto the stamp and it just makes it a little more watercolor-y when you smush that on there. So it's pretty cool. Here I'm just kind of giving it a little sharper edge, but then stamping on top of it, just pressing on it makes it sort of fit within the realm of everything else that's already stamped on here like this. And I did try, just in case you wondered, I did try doing one where I had stamped water first to see if that would help in getting the paint to move, and that didn't make any difference. So that was on my test card earlier and that didn't do a whole lot for me. So then I'm going to continue filling in my pattern little by little. And on a few of them I'm spending the time to get some detail in there with my brush to make sure it feels like a hexagon, but notice that they don't all feel complete. I didn't go all the way around the absolute edge because it's going to give it a really artistic feel to just let them go and let them disappear into the paper, have some of them have beautiful sharp edges, others will have really soft edges. And I love that about watercolor that you can get all kinds of different edges with it. So fuss around with my little purple one out here. And then I wanted just part of one over top of this little one, so I did a big one on top of a small one, but I'm just doing it in a very light color, a light pink instead of something else. And depending on what kind of colors you use, you can get some interesting layering by doing hexagons on top of hexagons, which could be really cool. And then I painted just those edges of a few just to put a little bit of color on the very edge of the card. Now for the sentiment, if you do big sloppy watercolor like that, it's going to just make a big puddle. So the idea is going to be for a sentiment to paint with really thick paint. So that's what I did here. If you do too much blobby paint, if it's too wet, it's going to seep down into the spaces in between the letters. So it's really hard to get in there with a tiny sentiment and do this, but I'm mixing each of my pigments really thicker, like, well, not totally really thicker, but much thicker so that it sets up on top of the edge of the stamp on the highest edge. And that way, when I stamp it, see how cool this is? It just kind of looks like the word hello. I'm adjusting a few of the letters. They'll be a little bit wider because I'm trying to adjust for a little of the splooging because you're going to get splooging with this no matter what you do. But it's really fun to get a beautiful almost water colored sentiment like that to go with my multicolored card. And I did the same thing, popping it up onto a card base with some dimensional adhesive. So I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you'll check out the rest of the blog hop with all of the other stamps that are in the collection from the stamp market. I'm looking forward to seeing what else they have, what they come up with. And I will talk to you guys later. Links are all in the doobly-doo for both the supplies and the blog hop. Take care. Bye-bye.