 Well, hi everybody, it's Sandy and welcome to my channel today. We're going to talk about art impressions watercolor I've been sharing a lot of these on Instagram lately and lots of you are asking for a tutorial so today we're going to do an intermediate project and I want beginners to pay attention because I'm going to show you some beginner tips along the way and some beginner shopping tips at the end because I've learned a lot from teaching some beginner classes So I have an arbor stamp this can be an intermediate project not one I would recommend you beginning with but I have the stamp a palette some brushes I've got my my sticky notes for masking a couple stamps and I'm going to use more stamps than that and watercolor paper and Some Tombow markers you don't have to have very many actually didn't even use all these colors in this project so you don't have to have a whole lot to get started but you do need water-based markers and Art impressions recommends the marvies, but you can also use distress markers You can use mementos tombows lots of different water-based just not anything alcohol-based and this is my collection of The art impressions stamps you can see you can get very overwhelmed very quickly and that is what a lot of people tell Me they take my beginner class because they've bought a gajillion like me and then they're like I don't know what to do So I would recommend starting with the starter sets and not with these advanced ones even though I have a bunch of them I've done a lot of practicing with them, and I know I'll use them But here are all the flowers that I've pulled out of all the different sets and I keep them all in one container So that I can use them all together With all the other stamps that I get and these are all stamping up containers that I I bought some sets in a long time ago And that's what I store them in Here is an advanced project and a lot of people see this and like oh, yeah, I'll buy the stamps and I can do that one So there's a house. There's containers. There's flowers and grasses. There's a gate. There's bushes There's trees. There's clouds and you can spend a gajillion dollars And then sit there and stare at it all and freak out because you can't do it because you don't you know you have to understand the principles of how to build an image like this and The beginner sets are much more conducive to doing that and I would recommend those I'll talk about those and show them to you later on in this video It is going to be a long one. I'll apologize now for that because there's so much to share I'm going to be using the six by six block from fluid 100 It's a higher end paper, but you can also use some lower-end paper And I would recommend practicing on the lower-end stuff anyway And I have my stamp already on my block I'm going to take my Tombow marker and I'm just going to color on the surface of the rubber stamp and Don't worry if you get interrupted by the dog barking or the doorbell ringing or something Because you can put the color on here and it'll stay there until you clean it off and cleaning off off Is either stamping it or washing it so if you get interrupted in the middle and Like I did on this one and I just huffed on it and just breathe on it real quickly And that will re moisten it enough to be able to stamp with it So figure out where I want to put it and stamp it onto my paper It's going to look really light and I'll tell you right now It'll be surprising to you how much color you get out of that by the time you're done What I always do is I stamp my main focal image and sometimes two focal images if there's going to be two main pictures Two main items and then I do whatever sky or background that I'm going to do The reason is because I don't want to have to paint a background around a bunch of little teeny tiny flowers So if I'm going to do a lot of flowers or trees I don't want to have to paint blue around the edges of each and every one of them Here if I do my blue sky and then it's all dry by the time I stamp flowers over top of it It's going to look very natural and it's just going to cover that blue So you don't want a too intensive a color or something It's going to clash with whatever you're painting over it But you can just paint your sky first and I'm going to paint a little bit inside of the arbor Like some of those little tiny sections Just in case I don't have flowers across all of it because I haven't decided how many flowers or how much it's going to spill out over I Would recommend if you can think ahead to come up with a plan But I usually just let the stamps kind of tell me what they're going to do Because I I don't plan out a lot of this I just wait and see kind of what happens you do have to have enough of a plan So you know what's in the background and foreground and that's really about all you you need to plan out I'm adding water along the top just to soften out that blue edge And now I'm going to start stamping some of my other images So I'm going to put it on my block. That's a Lawn Fawn block by the way That has that funky cool shape. So it's really easy to hold in your hands I'll have links to that in the doobly-doo in the description So I'll stamp that and then the little mousy. I'm going to stamp him in multiple colors And I have him stamped mostly in the gray and then I added some brown on his back and I give him a little pink tail And you'll see how that plays out when we add the water to him So I'll stamp him sort of in the foreground So I'll have a background behind the arbor and then the arbor and the the container in the middle and then in the very front is going to be this little mouse and you can see I got a whole lot of brown all of a sudden and Sometimes some of the colors depending on your marker or how it was applied to the block or how it was stamped or anything We'll have more color and sometimes we'll have less and it's really a matter of what happens when you hit it with water And here I'm going to hit a little bit more clean water on the top of his His nose and his tail and stuff because I want those to remain light And I as I was painting the brown I was picking up more brown color So I wanted to wash my brush and make sure I got a really light color there on his top of his head On something like this you want to make sure that if you're going to add any detail on top of it You do it after it's dried because in a few minutes. I will make a mistake It's not a huge one, but it's one that I wished I had done something differently with But here I'm doing some pink in his ears So I just dropped a little bit of pink that I had scribbled onto the palette dropped a little bit inside the ear and painted over it with water gave him a little pink on his cheeks and Then I went in with the Bullet nib of the pen on the other side and drew the eyes back in because they didn't stamp very well in the gray ink And then I decided this is my mistake to add the whiskers and I did that while that that was still wet So my my whiskers on this forward side on the right hand side of him got a little bit softer and mushier But I did want to add some gray to the brown So I have gray that I've scribbled on the palette and painted it over the brown and it blended perfectly and now I'll color the Container and here you can see a lot better to how that color just pulls in From each of the lines now different marker lines will pull in different amounts of color and Certain ones are going to hold more of that line the integrity of that line Will stay or go depending on the amount of water and then which kind of marker What I found is that the Tombows are kind of mid-range they hold the line but they also do watercolor look and the distress and the Momentos tend to hold the line a little bit more So if you want more of a sharp line you may want to use a certain kind of marker But you'll have to test out how yours work and how your technique works But the clean color pens which are all the rage right now They don't hold a line at all because as soon as you hit them with water they want to play That's just the way that they're built So I would not recommend the clean colors unless you're just going to do like washi flowers because Those they do very well very very well But if you wanted to stamp this arbor in the clean colors that that whole line would just disappear And it would just be a rounded blob so I Am going to do a test with a lot of different kinds of markers at some point but Not today because this is already a long enough video So here I did some stamping that didn't go so well And I had this little bush stamped on the top in green and on the bottom in a darker green and the top Didn't work very well, so I just added it with my pen So if you ever have stamping that doesn't work really great Just scribble in a little bit and especially with these Tombows since they do turn into water really easily And they do this watercolor look really easily. They they do this very very well Have some really nice little bushes I'll stamp the same thing again so you can see how I do it I have green on the top the light green and then the darker green on the bottom Didn't worry about blending anything on the stamp itself. Just scribbled it on there And here I got a much better looking bush so you can see what that stamp looks like but I can add the water to it and But a boom but a being I get a really nice washy looking bush Now I could have used the trees in the background because I wanted to add trees to this But I wanted to show you that you can take something like this hollyhock stamp from one of the sets and Make trees out of it. So even though it may look like hollyhock hollyhocks for the moment It's going to transform magically when we hit it with the water So you can look at any of the stamps in any of the sets that you get and try turning them on their side Try painting them a different way painting them in a different color can sometimes Help your mind to see them in a different way So that like with this one I thought of it as hollyhocks for a while until I accidentally stamped it as a Like a little piece of a bush and then I suddenly went wait a minute. That looks like it could be a good tree So as soon as I start doing the little Bob Ross painting on it little happy trees The hollyhocks turned into a line of trees. Isn't that sweet? So think of your stamps in unique ways and let them do more work than just what you think they were originally intended to do Anything you paint in the background that you want to look like it's at a distance Should be a little lighter in color or a little softer in color so you want to use a little bit more water for them that kind of thing and Anything in the foreground you want to be a little bit on the Sharper edges and a little bit more intense color And here I wanted to create a tree line So I just added a little bit of green marker at the bottom that Container is going to cover that area with more flowers. So I just didn't stamp anything in that area above it Now I'm going to start creating what I sort of think of as a trail for my my flowers to go down I take a light green of whatever sort and I just start painting Just just clusters. I want to have Whatever's going to be in the background I do in a light color and I just let it be really washy so I can get those general shapes down and figure out where all that stuff is going to hang out at I Wanted to see how they were going to cascade over that arbor and Then once I get to the portion where I'm going to add my flowers and here I it's mostly added here after it was dried So I want to let you know that you want to you want to mostly let some of this dry You'll see in a moment What's going to happen when I don't let it all dry completely because there is one spot that I'm going to hit right there Where there was water so if you do if you want that look then you can definitely stamp while it's wet but I've got some pink flowers and some Purple flowers both stamped in there the purple ones are teeny tiny dots and I'm just going over all the pink ones first and I try to make clusters Clusters seem to look more natural to me clusters in different directions and of different sizes and stuff if you make anything look too regular like you know Equally spaced and that sort of thing it won't look very natural because nature doesn't make things look that way So I'm adding some greens some little darker greens for my container And then I decided I wanted to add my darker greens around my arbor and I'm only having the arbor Spill a little bit over on the right and then some of it is going to twist around Down on that left-hand side because I did like how that sky still shows through in between Where I had painted it in between the arbor and now I wanted to add some definition to the arbor so I'm taking some green from my palette and I'm adding it right around the edges of that arbor because that's going to add a little definition So any of those places where you might lose a little bit of those edges It's really easy to just paint them back in and I'm just painting scribbles I'm not painting like super fantastic things and almost little grassy shapes little flick marks and You know you can do all different kinds of things with with something like this to add a little bit more color and detail now as I'm doing this, I'm realizing that my I Just wasn't feeling there was enough fluff at the top Like it was looking too groomed Because as I said nature doesn't doesn't do things in a kind of really groomed sort of a way So I just added some random green ones at the top just to add a little bit of extra greens and It was a little too intense. So I just dabbed off a little bit with paper towel. So it would lighten it just slightly Next I want to start working on that container because that one's in the front So I want a little more detail in that or just a whole big bunch of Cascading flowers So I'm going to do a bunch of different ones. There's my hollyhock again I'm going to let it look like a hollyhock while it's in there because now it's in in the container as flowers And I'll add water over top of some of that and blend out some of the purples and the blues and the the pinks together and As I add consecutive layers on top of each other I do less water on the front ones than I did in the back and then I'll do these tiny flowers in the very front and not Add anything there is a time lapse on this. So there these did dry somewhat before stamping those flowers on there so Now I wanted to add a little bit of ground to this But here is another one of those tips, which is you don't want to touch the water to the images you already have there So I don't want to touch You know the the bottom of the arbor or the mouse or anything like that So I've got to figure out how to paint around it carefully so that I don't end up Bleeding the mouse color out into the grasses So this is one of those places where having a really tiny fine brush really helps a lot and The silver brushes that I'm using here and links in the description work really great because you can get into all this teeny tiny areas and Not really, you know, you can get really close to the mouse without actually touching him Which is really helpful So I'm adding greens and brown so I can make a little bit of a path and Here my mouse is completely dry So I'm painting on a little bit of gray detail to add a little bit of fur to him with my brush Little color off the palette and if I add water to it now, I won't get as much movement Because a lot of that is already dried. So it really came out nicely there are a couple different size grasses in some of the different sets and I'm using the smaller ones in the distance and the bigger ones up front and You can see I painted the grasses right over top of the container So you don't even have to mask out some of that if you just paint over top of it Mush that color around a little bit So I'm adding a little bit at the bottom of the arbor and now I want to work on the area around the mouse Those pieces of grass are not in real good scale to that mouse because he he's really actually very much in front Or else he's a giant mouse So I decided since I wasn't having any success painting them larger I just took the marker and I made little grass lines So that the grass was a little more in proportion to him And I painted it right over where it was already wet with the tombows You can get away with that with some of the other markers like the distress markers I haven't had any success painting those right over top of wet So sometimes you have to wait for it to dry and sometimes you can paint it right over top Really depends on the marker type that you're using and my last step here is to add a little bit of Dry brush and dry brushes where the brush has color on it, but not a lot of water And I'm laying it kind of on its side across it. So it's picking up the texture of the paper My final little step is my signopen which bales me out of a lot of different things The little container full of flowers had gotten really mushy and I wasn't very happy with it So I went in and added some clean ends lace dots as well as dots in the center of those little pink flowers And I think that little extra detail made that much more of a focal point For the painting and I think it really helped quite a bit So if you get any areas that are like really dark and mushy just add some clean ends lace over it and it'll really help Now to assemble my card I took a 12 by 12 and cut it in half because this is a six by six image and shaved a little bit off that And I thought well, what if I put some pink under it? Maybe that will help But that didn't seem to do it either. I really wanted a stitched edge around this for some reason so Since I don't have a square six by six I do have this This border die from pretty pink posh and it one end cuts and then there's a stitched edge But there's two of them. So how do you cut just one of them? I just want to cut the outside one Not the inside one So I'm going to tape it down with some washi tape onto my image And run it through my die cut machine and hang on my hand will move out of the way in a second But I'm only putting that bottom edge in between the plates So that plate place where you see the edge of the plate That's the only place there's going to be pressure The other part is hanging off And that part that's hanging off will not cut So it does take a little bit of a deep breath to uh do that and And trust that it's going to work But here you can see that I have a lovely stitched edge around it So with this die and partial die cutting you can get any size rectangle that's stitched without having to Conform to the size that nested dies come in There's the finished card and I you can tell that the color is a little brighter because I can get better color on still photography than video And I added a couple layers to the inside pink and green since The card base was really lightweight since it's 12 by 12 paper This is a piece that I did when I was doing some demos and you can see I used like every image I could probably shove on to one piece flowers and trees and carts and chairs and everything You don't need to do that much And here's one with the rocking chair and the containers and the flowers It's more of an intermediate project than you may want to start with And I'm telling you this for a reason because I just know too many people Who have bought too many stamps and gotten themselves overwhelmed and confused But these stamps make it very easy. They have a focal image and a couple flowers And I'm going to link you to some of these in the description down below so you can check them out You can get the entire image that's shown on the package with just the little stamps that are in there You don't need to have every stamp no demand in order to do something even though you may look at the painting I didn't go wow Here's a few other sets if you want to get a little variety in your flowers There's a foliage and a flower set and I do like these a lot. I use them in a lot of my pieces So I just want to help you not feel like you have to do something like that These are the cards that I'm teaching in the classes And they're using these the simple sets that have just a focal image and a couple flowers You can stamp them multiple times and in multiple colors in order to get More of a massive flower look Like especially on this one. That's really it's really using the birdhouse set and just the flowers that come with it this one has a house And a kite and just a few little beachy grasses And this one's got just a chest and a few flowers You don't need to have everything known to man in order to do beautiful cards And I would recommend starting with just one of the smaller sets until you know that you like doing this technique And I hope that this was enjoyable and educational for you Here are a couple other videos if you want to see those there's links to everything in the doobly do To both these videos to other projects to my getting started with watercolor That has lots of information about brushes and paper and everything Lots more supplies and everything down there and I will see you guys later. Have a great day