 Hello there, it's Sandy All-Knock Artist and Paper Crafter and today I'm going to show you how to paint this beautiful Poinsettia card for the Sunny Studio Stamps blog hop. Mendy invited me to join in on the blog hop and when I saw this layering Poinsettia die, I thought that could be really interesting to do with watercolor. I've been looking for a project in which I could show you Cascade Green and give you some tips on using a color that's not in your palette. I see a whole lot of people who love to buy more and more and more palettes and more and more half pans and really I don't know that you necessarily need that. So I'm hopefully going to save you some money in this video. So the first thing that I'm going to do is just start throwing some of this in a background for my card. And the cool thing about Cascade Green, it's not in my regular palette because I don't normally have a use for this kind of color but I recently was at an event at a paint store and tried it and it was just like, oh, this is fun. This is just kind of crazy and wild. This is also the same color as Christmas green if you ever see that but it turns from this green into a blue and you get both colors out of one paint tube. It's just kind of fascinating the way that it works. So I'm putting down kind of some splashes of color, different thicknesses because I was experimenting to see how thick or thin does it need to be to turn really blue. The painting that I did, which I will post over on the blog, that one kind of just turned into this really super pale blue background. I was just playing with it and that's what I encourage you to do with any new paints that you get. If you buy a new color, just do something like this with it. Try it with different amounts of water. Try it with super thick paint, little like kind of watered out dribbly paint, drop paint into each other, see what happens and just play with it. And if it's something that you think, oh my gosh, I'm going to do that all the time, then put that in a half pan and put it in your palette and get rid of something else that you haven't been using. Here I decided I wanted more texture in this. I wanted the background to be super interesting and I waited for it to dry and then started splashing and flicking paint and all sorts of things on it and trying to make an edge for it. I wanted one corner to kind of be bright and the other corner to be rich and dark and full of texture and I was just goofing around and really that's what you can do. I was looking for any areas that looked hand painted because I didn't want to see brush strokes. I wanted everything to look like it had just broken up that way. There are some paints that do that naturally that granulate out and do things like that. This one doesn't move quite that much so I was doing little tricks to kind of make that happen. I was tapping with a baby wipe and then it was like, oh, now I've got little pop marks on it so I had to add a little bit more back in. I just picked it up with the baby wipe and tapped more on and it just starts to make it look more granulated by doing that and I can add in really kind of some specific spots and create the kind of background I was looking for. This isn't meant to be anything, it's not meant to be any kind of particular imagery is not supposed to look like a garden even though it does but there you go. I put it onto a layer after it was dry and set that aside and I'm using the leftover paint from what I had used first and notice I'm using an 89 centile from the hardware store. I did not go to great lengths to have that. I just keep it in the drawer and when I have a color that's not in my palette I just drop a little on there and I'll keep finding a couple other projects to paint while I have paint on there. Here I had to add a little bit more because I decided I wanted to add a thick drop of it right in the middle of each of these and then just let them splooge out as necessary because I'm going to use these for the poinsettias and I wanted them to have white tips on some of the areas and colored tips elsewhere and I wanted to see those broken water coloring lines and I wanted to let the blooms happen so that was kind of my thought behind this. I had little circles because that would give me some control over it. I picked a circle that was bigger than the largest circle in the dyes so that I could drop them all in. I'm trying to kind of center them around that middle dot so that the centers of the flowers end up being the darkest and then tape them down and ran them through my Gemini Junior to make a whole bunch of little pieces. You can make a gajillion flowers this way. You can make just a few flowers any old way that you wish and then start layering them. Now I know that Mindy has a whole layering guide to go with this and you can follow that or you can do what I did because I did not have the guide and I just started randomly pasting them on and they looked great. So there you go. You can choose by whether or not something has a white tip. Do you need a white spot in a particular flower and then just layer them on top of each other. Now you can use three layers. You can use two layers. I just used two because I wanted to put little centers on them. There's a little round center and then a little round center with holes in it so you get a little texture there and I'll show you how I did that as well. But I wanted that in the middle so I just did two layers so that I don't get this whole card being super, super thick. So I took a scrap of the paper that I used for all those circles and on the top half I painted some iridescent gold and on the bottom half I painted some really thick cascade green. And then I punched out those two little pieces and the quick stick is a great help in trying to get a little piece like that to lift up with my big fat fingers that wouldn't work really well. And I'm using the Kinect Glue from Gina K and I punched the holes by the way with a very old Tim Holtz tool. I call it the Poke Tool. I think it's called a Craft Pick which is kind of not a good name for it because it should be called the Poke Tool because that's what I always look it up in order to link it and nobody else calls it the Poke Tool. So there was a Season's Greeting set that Mindy also sent me and I decided to put that in here and I found a spot where my white embossing would work. I used my powder tool to get rid of all the statics so that the powder only sticks to the right place and then got out my little embossing powder. I put my white and my clear in a big container since I use those the most and I buy a whole bunch of them at once so I have a big container and I use a spoon from Dairy Queen. Shhh! That's a good reason to go to Dairy Queen. Tell them you've got to go out for craft supplies and get yourself an ice cream and you get a little spoon like that. So he'd set that and then the little word Seasons goes up on top and I was thinking that was not going to show up quite so well in the white embossing. So then I was stuck with trying to figure out I don't have an ink that goes with this. I have some inks that are kind of related. There's Aquatini from Catherine Pooler, kind of one of the closest that I might have. I tried stamping that twice to see if it showed up dark enough. Not quite. I wanted it a little darker so I layered in a little bit of Distress Oxide. Just barely touched it and then put it back down because I liked it and I touched it again to get it a little darker. You can make your own inks that way and your own embossing powders. By using clear embossing powder over that and then you end up with two things that look like you've matched your sentiment onto your embossing and everything and it all works just beautifully and no one knows except you and I that I fudged that. So I put a black on black mat. The top section is separated by some dimensional adhesive from the bottom so it's a nice raised black mat. And the flowers after all that effort I know for some people it's going to make them cry but I cut off two of them with right angles to them. You can do that in a paper trimmer but for the video it was easier for my fingers to just whack them off with the scissors and then glue them on. I put them on with dimensional adhesive and after all of my wanting it not to be thick now it's going to be extra thick but there you go. That'll just be an extra stamp at Christmas and I put one in the middle. It's lovely, a very simple card, beautiful dimension on it and only using that one paint except for a little bit of gold for the centers of the flowers. So I thought that was a really pretty card so go enjoy the rest of the blog hop you can find all the links over on my blog both to the hop and the supplies and the supplies are also just in the doobly-doo if you don't want to go see all that and you just want to go shopping by all means go get that dye because it's really pretty and it would be gorgeous in a lot of different colors done with the same kind of technique. Alright I will talk to you guys later have a lovely lovely day. Goodbye!