 Hi there, it's Sandy Alhack, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm gonna make an alien birthday card and we're gonna beam up some fun. I bought this little stamp set from Lawn Fawn and I thought it was pretty cute with all the little aliens in it and the spaceships and stuff and I had a number of ideas for how to make the beams come down from the spaceship and I decided to try it in watercolor. You could do this card or the the thing that I'm gonna be working on with this card can be done with other mediums. Just color the background, however you're gonna color it, color your monsters because the focus on this one that you're gonna I think really like is how to make the beam work and especially if you are like me and you struggle with trying to get a watercolor background to be nice and even. It's not an easy thing to do. My board that I've got this paper on is at an angle. It's about a 30 degree probably angle or so. So you can see the paint is kind of collecting in the bottom of whatever paint is wet and you want to keep that wet for as long as you can. As long as that is wet and your hope all your paint is wet, you're gonna have some freedom to adapt things a little bit and to add more color back in if you need to, if you have some unevenness, but on something like this it's not gonna matter a whole lot because if you have some kind of lumpy background in the sky or anything just make it plouts and don't worry about it. Don't stress out about it too much because the cool thing is gonna be the beam and whatever's under the beam is not gonna matter a whole lot for your coloring either. So if what I show you in a few minutes for the beam doesn't work then don't worry because it won't be prominent. So I'm taking some indenthrone mixed with a little bit of phthalo blue red shade and mixing up kind of some sky color and painting right through, as you can see, my spaceships and as I'm getting lower on the card I'm adding more and more water to my paint making it thinner and thinner and I'm gonna paint right through everything and I know for some people that's gonna be like, oh my gosh, she's painting through everything. Don't worry. Painting through everything just like I painted right through the middles of the spaceships because those are the parts that I want to be white and I want to have some light highlights on my monsters down here but it's so hard to paint around all the monsters so that's why painting through them works really nicely and notice what I did with the strokes that I'm doing right now is I have a few spots where paints collecting and I'm just pushing it around. While all this paint is still really nice and wet, my paper is sopping wet, I can still move it. I still have room to adapt. So my next thing was to get a baby wipe and I'm just gonna keep turning it kind of off-camera and that's what I'm doing while you're waiting for me to my finger to come back so that I'm always wiping with a clean area and I'm making basically the beam coming down from the sky. You could stop at that and just let that be the beam, but I'm gonna show you something really cool in a minute. I also decided to make the ground underneath and kind of join everything right at the bottom where all that very very pale blue pigment stopped. I just added some ground underneath and a little bit of it is going to kind of bleed up into the monsters. I'm not worried about that because I'm gonna paint over it. With watercolor, whenever you have something that's gonna be darker on top of whatever the lighter background is, you always want to just paint right through it. Don't worry about it. Just go right through it and don't stress out about trying to paint around, especially all these little arms and legs on the monsters. So my next step is to take some, this is I think phthalo blue and a little indenthro, maybe a little bit of that carbazole violet that's in the ground. Whatever colors you're going to use doesn't really matter a whole lot and I'm just going to paint over each one of my aliens leaving a highlight on the top of each section. Even though we all know that there was some light blue color in there, when it's next to a darker color like this darker color in the shadows it's going to look like it's a highlight. So what we're creating is contrast and it doesn't matter that it's a pale blue in there instead of a really strongly contrasting type of color. And I've got a little bit of that, the bleeding coming in from the bottom where that purple moved up in there and that got me just sort of playing around with my brush and adding a little more color to my monsters because I thought they could stand to be a little bit darker. This is a night scene and I want to have my monsters be really strongly in that light with that beam of light coming down. So then I'm going to reinforce that color on the ground and finish off the rest of my little monsters over here on the left for my little aliens. I don't know if our aliens monsters are they both the same would you call them both the same? I think they're, they kind of work that way. Now what I ended up doing here was mixing a lot more of the pale blue in that monster and I was like dang it I wish I had done that more because I really liked that color in the mix with the background that I had gotten going. I liked that it was a little stronger, a little bluer, a little brighter. So I'm going to use that in a few minutes to to kind of change the color of a lot of things and just do some glazing over top. But while that stuff at the bottom is drying, I did a little heat setting to try to get it to stop moving. So if you have some watercolor that's, it looks like what you want it to look like, heat set it to get it to stay there. But if you want to let it keep moving then let it keep moving. My board by the way is still at an angle here. So if you're seeing paint collect at the bottom that that would be why. So I'm painting the glass on these little guys just leaving a couple highlights on the tops there. I was thinking I wanted to have this light blue down at the bottom I do change my mind later in the card. So you'll see how I handle that. But now I'm going to take that brighter blue color and just glaze over what I already did because it's drying lighter. Watercolor always dries like 30% lighter than what it went on has. So I have lots of room to add more strength of color now. And as I always say in my videos, I wish cameras could really pick up really well what the color looks like. I just have never been able to seemingly adjust my color settings so that it looks like what it does in real life. But it's fairly close. Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades like my dad used to say. Another dad-ism makes it to my YouTube channel. So adding this extra layer of color adds the contrast as well as changes that kind of overall blue color to a happier blue. And a little brighter and more intense and I thought I'll add a little bit more of that to the spaceships as well. So next up was of course adding a lot of stars in the sky and if your sky came out lumpy like a lot of watercolor skies will come out because until we get really practice at it we don't end up really good at this. Then just put a lot of stars in there. You can have a sky that's full of all kinds of stars. Okay, here's the magic. Let's take a ruler and go down two sides of wherever you want that beam to go. Just on the left and the right hand side. If you mess up, which I did at one point because my right hand side wasn't at the same kind of an angle as my left hand side and I just put a piece of tape over the back and made my cut again because the inside of it isn't going to matter. Then I took a piece of vellum and I'm tracing on there the actual shape where I drew my little lines and then I'm going to increase that. I'm going to make my folds outside of the cut lines. I'm just going to use my little score buddy to make a score in each one of those those lines. Remember, they're not the ones that are right on the edge of where those cuts were made. They're a little outside of it because if I want this to curve out beyond the little little beam here, I need to have the front panel be bigger. That vellum panel has to be wider in order for it to make a curve. Then I tuck it in the slits and you can see that the top of it on the front of the card will lift up just a little bit and you can still see the monsters through it, the little aliens. Isn't that cute? So I added my sentiment on there by stamping on top of the watercolor and just added all of this onto a very simple card base because once you put all this into it, you don't have to embellish like crazy, but you could. I also thought this would make a really fun Christmas card, add a Christmas sentiment about having a Christmas that's out of this world. So if you're a crazy person and you like to make crazy cards like that, I might have to actually make one. Maybe there will be one on my blog today. Who knows? All right, I will see you guys later. Have an awesome day. Go make something amazing and I'll see you next time.