 Hi there! My name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I want to talk about masking complex scenes. I do this a lot on my cards and most of the time I don't show you the masking. I tell you things like stamp the images in the foreground first and I get a lot of questions about which one is in the foreground. How do you know what order to do your stamping? So I'm going to talk about that with these four cards. I'm not going to show you the coloring because the coloring is off the charts crazy ridiculous and took me forever but I do want to talk about the masking portion of these and show you how I did that using my MISTI. So my first thing to do when I am going to use a whole stamp set because I like to stamp and color all the images if I can is to stamp them all on some masking paper and this is Judy Kinn's eclipse tape and it comes in six inch and one inch rolls and I like the six inch because you can get a lot on there and I'm going to just kind of place them wherever I kind of think I want my scene to start. Now this one is kind of straight up I knew exactly I wanted to have this little family the little deer around the daddy deer. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with that log and I eventually decided it wasn't going to go in here at all. So I'm going to take my MISTI and place my this is my scratch paper like my master in here and I'm going to adjust a little bit if I need to before I start any stamping because it's easier to do with your masks than it is going to be if you start doing any of your stamping and don't ask me how I know that because yeah it's just easier trust me. In this positioning you can also figure out which one wants to be in front of which one so this little guy on the far right hand side is going to be behind. I want the butt of that one to his left to be in front and I'm going to put the ground underneath of the ones in front down lower and the ones in the back will be up a little bit higher and then I'm going to take all of the images that are in the front that aren't getting in each other's way and I can fit on here and stamp them all at the same time you could certainly stamp them separately but I'm going to stamp them all at the same time if you don't have a MISTI you could place these and use whatever positioning we have for them to be able to get this this kind of a scene set up but certainly much easier with a MISTI. So I'm going to place my paper in here my finished paper this is my Copic Mina since I'm going to use Copic markers on this if you're using watercolor paper just put watercolor in there and stamp it with the appropriate ink I'm using the Mento since I'm using Copic markers but if you're using watercolor paper use a waterproof ink and now I'll take my masks and place them over top of the images that are in the front because the ones in the front are the ones that I want to block out so nothing stands over top of it notice that I didn't trim out the feet don't need to trim out the feet I'm not going to be masking that portion so don't make yourself do a lot of cutting that you don't have to I'm going to use the other half of the MISTI to set up the other deer and if I were using two MISTIs which I do often then I could actually set up four parts of a scene but here I'm going to do two and I want to make sure I don't get the clouds and the other deer onto this piece of paper so if you're going to do this and you don't want to to get the original stamps onto this piece of paper when it's upside down then just put a post-it note over it so you block that off now I can ink up my two little deer and when I stamp them they're going to appear to be behind the other deer since the others are blocking it off and you won't be able to see anything that's stamped behind those masks if that makes sense you could take all this off all the masking off and peek but I trust that it's going to work so I'm not going to peek I'm going to use the bottom half the MISTI again instead of grabbing another one so I've removed some of the stamps from the left hand side from the acrylic and I'm going to place my trees and my bushes and stuff in here notice the trees are masked for right now in one piece I will have to trim them out so that I can add more bushes because I did decide to do that later but again don't cut out more than you have to if you don't need to why bother doing extra work so I'm going to place my masks over top of a deer that I just stamped to make sure that they don't get covered up by any of the inking work that I do and then I can stamp my bushes and my trees and as I was looking at this I thought it would be kind of nice if there was another clump of bushes so then I cut out my trees so they were individual and my bushes can go in between the trees you could actually draw that little portion in between if you didn't want to cut them out and all I have to do is what I did before on the other one slide it over and then I want to figure out exactly how far I want to slide it I want to keep the space on the right hand side about the same as the space on the left hand side so I'm going to slide it over until I'm happy with it and then I can ink up that stamp and stamp another set of bushes notice that I did remove the trees so I don't accidentally stamp the trees and then press that down remove all my masks and I've got my scene if there's any spaces where my masking wasn't perfect or things didn't stamp I can fix that with a Copic Multiliner or you could use a Sharpie if you're going to use watercolor with this I just finish off and here's images that didn't apply exactly work out and then color away now again this is way too much coloring for most people and I don't even know if I will ever do this again because it was a lot of work that took me forever but it was fun nonetheless so I like to put scenes behind everything these would be really adorable with just the deer and no leaves underneath them they would be just as adorable I think so please don't feel intimidated by the scenes that I've done you find these cards and go ahead and stamp a group of images together to make a scene okay now I'm going to speed up these next ones because now that you've walked through the basic process you can sort of get an idea of what I've done this one has a bunch of Vikings in it there's mama and papa and a son and a daughter and a dog and a baby who puts a helmet on a dog clearly decided does how cute is that right so I'm trying to figure out exactly where I want to place all of these and I had an idea in my head to do a dock that they're all standing on a pier because there is a boat in the stamp set I thought it would be nice to have the boat in the distance and they were all either waiting for someone to come home or the whole family was going to go on a trip who knows what was going to go on here but I'm trying to arrange them in some sort of fashion and you can see how easy it is to just take these little pieces of sticky paper and arrange them we can move them in limitless ways and figure out exactly what you want to do and turn the whole paper sideways and do a vertical part whatever you want to do is certainly possible at this stage as I was doing the boat in the background I was starting to think about a way to add some dimension to the card which you will see but I decided I was going to do that on a separate piece of paper and pop the stuff in the front so stay tuned for some fun in just a few minutes so on my my good paper the first thing that gets stamped is the images in the front baby and doggy were in the front so I stamped them first and then I'm going to do three of the family members turn them around on the other side of the misty so that they all get stamped in there onto the same piece of paper that the masks are already in place for the other ones place those masks and all I have to do is place the son and the mom in addition to get the dad in there didn't have to add the mask for the daughter since I wasn't going to do any stamping over the top of her now I've got a new piece of paper that I'm going to use for my background and I've stamped my boat place my mask in there and then get my mountains in place and I'll stamp the mountains now I wanted to do a row of mountains so I'm going to do the same thing that I did with my bushes in the last one I slid it over so I could get the mountains on the same line to do the front piece what I did was draw a pencil line across it and my my pier started there and then I trimmed it out a fussy cut right around all of their helmets and all of their heads I know it's crazy ridiculous and sometimes I just put too much love in a card but I like to do it and I do this for fun I don't do it because it's quick I do it because I love to do it and it's going to make somebody happy but here's a close-ups you can see exactly how that plays out when there's a little bit of dimension added just on the people in the front in the front in that foreground okay now this is an easy one because there's two stamps that I'm masking together I played around with with whether the three little guys are in front or the single little ogre is in front and decided the little guys would be in the front and so all I have to do is the same process use my master to line up where my big shrek goes and get him stamped in there and then have fun coloring for the rocks in the background of this one I did a video on doing this kind of rock work with watercolor and I did the same process here except with Copic marker so I will link you at the end of this video to the watercolor rocks so you could do this on one of your cards because it was fun to just give them a little bit of a scene behind that they're coming out of their cave it's good doobie bod so much fun now some other stamps in that same stamp set were witches and there were three witches from a couple different fairy tales but I thought it would be fun to make them friends so I arranged them and it kind of got the placement of where the feet would be on each one of the little witches on the left and right and was able to stamp those two witches at the same time around their cauldron and then add the final witch in the background rubbing her little hands you can almost hear her laugh and then all that's left after I pull off those masks is to color them now they would be color cute color just on the center of a card that would be a great Halloween part anyway but I decided to add a crazy background behind them some trees in the distance and dirt underneath of them with the glowing light coming from their cauldron goodness gracious what a bunch of silly fun right so I hope this is helpful in getting some understanding of masking and when I say masking from the front to the back that is what I'm talking about and on the right hand side there is a video so you can see the rocks that I talked about in watercolor and someday maybe I'll do some corporate rocks all right I will talk to you guys later make sure you hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet and I will see you next time have an awesome awesome day bye