 Hi! I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube with my 24 tags of Christmas for 2019. You knew a watercolor tag had to be coming so I decided this beautiful stamp from Impression Obsession. It's called Holly Candle. Would be a perfect one to do some glowing light using watercolor and I'm only going to use a portion of the image. I'm going to make it a smaller tag because this is way too big for a tag but I thought I'd paint the whole thing so you could see how I would do it if I did it on a card and then I'll trim it down for my tags. So I started with my new Gamboge and then I'm adding around the outside edges of that some of the Aussie Red Gold and then I'm going to add some red around that and just kind of keep going and getting darker and darker with my colors and that's going to create a glow around the candle flame so that the candle flame ends up being the thing that's in the center and really bright. I'm putting some yellow down at the bottom because I want to have some reflection on the table of that color. So I'm going to grab some Perline Maroon which is a nice dark red color and start adding it to the outside and the thicker the paint is the darker it will get so I'm going to progressively use more and more and thicker paint as I go to add that dark color out there and going around that handle of it I'm not going to stress out about it too much because I am going to be trimming these down but you need to go around it carefully enough so that you don't end up whacking off the handle there but the handle will be dark since it's away from the light. So now I'm going to start going back in with more color and adding more more reds and golds toward that center portion so I can kind of keep that that center bright and let the the darker colors be toward the outside edges and I'm just kind of splattering the colors on there. I did have somebody ask recently on a video that it doesn't seem to be like I change or wash my brush in between each color I just go ahead and dip from one to the other and that is true. You can see from what I'm doing my dipping of the brush into water is more for water management than it is color in most cases unless I'm totally changing color and then I'll do that but if I'm putting a color right into another color I don't worry about it and if one of the colors gets contaminated I just you know get my brush really really wet and wash out that that little paint pan and that usually works fairly well so I just keep working at it putting extra layers onto this so that the color starts getting richer and darker and the the more paint I put on here the darker that will be but I also want to be aware of not doing too much because eventually it's going to get so saturated that everything will bleed like crazy so I'm kind of letting that center section dry out a little bit as I'm working on the outside edges and then vice versa. I'm using a baby wipe to pull off a little bit of that in the centers a paper towel gives you a harder line because it's dry but a baby wipe will give you a softer line because it's got a little moisture in it so now I can add once it's all dry my green onto the leaves and I'm leaving highlights on a few of the leaves that are up close to that flame because I don't want the highlights to be on other parts of the holly leaves just on that top part everything else will go darker and darker green as I go and just keep adding more colors into it so I had a little bit of periline green to make it super dark that was green appetite in the first place and next up I'm going to add in just a drop of the nickel azo which is my favorite thing to brighten things up so that's going to cast a little bit of a yellow onto some of those tips of the holly and pain's blue gray will be my color used for the the candle holder and the candle handle is over on that right hand side and again the color that I used at first was very light because it had a lot of water in it and then I added more pigment to make it darker but again I'm going to hack that off so I didn't really worry about painting it real accurately because it's going to get cut off of my tag nonetheless so if I were making just tags out of this and I did this for the other three instead of painting the whole thing I just stamped it onto the tag the size it was going to end up being so I didn't end up having to deal with all the rest of the painting of the outside of that background because that was a lot of work so there you go I'm putting a light wash of the pains on the candle itself with leaving some highlights on it because that's going to make the white of the light around the flame even brighter and then a little bit of nice red dropped into those berries with highlights of white left on them and after trimming I just added a layer of black underneath of my tags to really make that color pop very fun making these so I hope you enjoyed this little video and if you're interested in potentially winning one of my 24 tags leave a comment here as well as over on my blog today and all week long and I'll be picking 24 winners to win the 24 tags that I'm making all week and I will see you again tomorrow take care bye bye