 Hi there, my name is Sandy Alnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today we're gonna do some foxes in love with my inktense pencils, which are watercolor pencils. And we're also gonna combine it with watercolor. These are some stamps from WPlus9. And even though it has a snowman in it, you can certainly use a snowman or the fox who has the scarf on, but I'm gonna use it with just the foxes who are any time of year foxes. I love stamp sets that we can keep out any time of year because you can have them around and make some Christmas cards once in a while. I always put all of my Christmas stamps away in the closet with the Christmas decorations. And then I don't have anything if I feel like getting ahead on my Christmas cards. So that's a bonus, right? So the inktense pencils are watercolor pencils, which means you color onto the paper first. And this is Arch's watercolor paper, the cold press. I have switched, and you may have noticed in my videos, mostly to cold press, because most people would complain at me about the rough. And I really do like the rough the best, but for some people it's too much texture. So you can see there is a lot of texture here. I have a really sharp pencil, but I'm not worried about making it all smooth because look at what happens when I take my number eight round brush and add water. And when you're blending color, I put two colors on here, a yellowish color at the top and then an orangy reddish color down below. When you're blending colors like this, you want to put the water in the lightest color area first and let that color sit there and then dip into that darker color. Because if you go from the darker to the lighter, it's all gonna turn one shade. So if you wanna have some shading and some differentiation in color, that is a helpful way to go about it. So I'm gonna just finish up on my little foxes here. And you can see some areas, I am scrubbing at it a little bit with the brush. Now, by scrubbing at it, I don't mean I'm taking a big old hard brush and scrubbing. I'm just working at it and trying to get that pigment to lift up off of the paper. Because the pigment is, the reason you get that texture is the pigment is sitting on the raised portions of the textured paper and it's not sitting down into the lowered portions. So you're basically coaxing that pigment off of that raised surface so that you can get down into the lower surface. And I'm constantly managing the amount of water that I'm using as well because the amount of water will help to loosen some of that. But it also, if you have too much water, all of it becomes one color and that's a problem. You also wanna make sure that you don't touch areas with the pencil that are already wet because then you won't be able to move the color at all. Intense pencils are generally stated and I have stated this before and have found out differently are generally stated to be permanent once they're dry. So you can't move them again. You can move them a little bit because I've had some instances when I thought that was going to not be a problem. They do this much less than regular watercolor pencils. Regular watercolor pencils, you can rewet and the color will just automatically pick up and move. On my hearts, I'm coloring it so that I have little highlight areas. So these look like balloons and they're really soft pink because I'm using a lot more water and a little less pigment. Didn't really heavily saturate it with the pencil. And then I'm gonna give them a little pink basket as well. And I'm gonna put a layer down here first and I'll add a texture onto it later. But the layer is going to put some basic shading on it so that I get a little bit of dimension before adding the texture later on. And you can see I've got a little heavier pencil at the bottom. So you can do that with two colors or you can just do that with heavier pigment in one area than in another. So that is all done. Now I'm gonna add a darker brown for their little feetsies and inside their ears. And I've waited until the rest of the orange and yellow have dried because if I touch the water to all of this, it's all gonna bleed together. So you have to manage carefully what you end up doing in terms of how long you wait for one part to dry while you work on another part. I wanted to give them a little less of that white look in their faces. So I've put a little color around the outside edges of my little fox white areas but just a little tiny bit and then I'm using a good amount of water to move that color around and pull it around and give them a little more of a, I guess a little dirty look on their faces. And when you're trying to blend into white, it's important to use a good bit of water and I'm gonna be using water across the whole piece. That's gonna make sure I don't have a hard edge but you can also dab off some of that color once you have all that water down as well to try to soften that edge. Now I'm gonna go in since the balloons are good and dry and I'm gonna add a little bit of extra color so I can add some intensity and a little bit of shadow areas. And here's where I'm gonna go in and add my texture sort of like I would do with bricks but I just wanted to give a little bit of a flare to the basket so there's a little more detail in it and then move the color around on both my balloons and on the basket. With these pencils, since they don't move as much you can do a lot of work over top of a dry layer of color. It's a little harder to do that with regular watercolor pencils because they lift up that color underneath them but this allows you to really add a lot of layers. And here I'm gonna add a little bit of brown and you'll see how adding a little bit of brown can make a really big difference in some of this. In these tiny little spots that I'm putting in here that's the dark brown it's the same that's on their toes and their ears. And when I add the water you're gonna see just how much impact that little bit of contrast has. It adds a real depth to it but I waited until after it was all good and dry so I can add just a little bit around the very deepest darkest shadow areas because that's a really intense color. These inktense pencils for the most part are more intense color than you'll get out of regular watercolor pencils if you like a really soft look then watercolor pencils are definitely the thing to use instead. So I'm gonna get all of the edges as soft as I can and then start working on the rest of my design. I wanted to have some hills and clouds and things and I thought I'd show you guys a way to do this if you don't like to draw or you don't think you can draw. I'm using some dies from Lawn Fawn which will be linked in the doobly-doo down below to draw clouds and to draw a hillside. And then I'm gonna take my regular watercolors and this is a sap green color. I'm gonna paint my trees on here and there's different ways you can paint tree shapes. These I'm gonna do with their points down. You can sometimes do them with the points up but points down also works. So there's a lot of different ways you can paint them and this is just with pine trees. There's all different other kinds of trees of course and I'm just gonna put a whole row of trees behind this. Now if you don't wanna paint trees, you could certainly just paint a hillside of grass down below and skip the whole tree thing. I'm also not worried about where it's ending on the left and right because I am going to trim this down a bit and make it a round card. So I'm only really worried a lot about the center of this picture. Getting down now to the final trees around this side. I am keeping them down below my sky and as I thought about this later, I realized it would have been helpful to paint my sky first because then my trees could travel up over top of the sky but you know, better thinking about it afterward than thinking about it before, right? Sometimes. So to paint the sky, I'm taking my manganese blue. I think that's manganese blue and I'm painting upside down so that I'm putting the pigment down with the tip of the brush right next to where that cloud line is and then painting lots of water elsewhere. So that's gonna carry that pigment and I'll end up with just a nice little cloudy area. Now I'm gonna take some of that same green and work on painting a little bit of ground underneath of them. It could be a snowy scene since we are in winter but it also can be used anytime of year if you add a little bit of green and then it's gonna seem a little bit more like a year round scene instead of snow. So I'm just about done. I'm gonna dab off a little of those edges so that I don't get hard edges on my grasses and add a little more intense color. The paper is pretty dry but I can add a little more of that intense green right down there by their feet. And now for the card itself. I've got a large circle and then a small circle is cut from the folded card base and I've put my image onto a layered piece of black card stock and now I'm gonna stick it, trying to line it straight onto my card front because I wanted that large circle with the bow sticking out from behind it. So I've wrapped the bow inside the card base, that little piece of ribbon and then I'll tie the bow on the back and then secure it with some adhesive from the front. And that is one way to do a little bit of a bow. I wanted something that will hang down but not completely over top. And since I could tie it to the card base, that allowed me to be in control of how much of it peeks out over the top. So there is the finished card all round and cutesy, isn't that adorable? And one thing that I always like to do on my cards when I'm doing round cards, you may notice when you make them, they fall over because they're round and they roll, but if you take a little piece off the back and just chop off a horizontal piece, then that will hold your card standing vertically. Nice little tip for you. So thank you so much for joining me for this video. If you'd like to click on my face, you can subscribe, you can click on one of the other videos to see more of what I've got going on here on YouTube. And otherwise, I will see you guys another time, have a really fabulous day. Thanks for visiting, bye bye.