 Well hello there, it's Sandy and I've got a little video introducing inks and paints to each other. I think I've done things with both of these mediums before, but I needed something catchy for this. So I'm using Distress Oxide inks as well as some watercolors from Daniel Smith. And these are some stamps that came out a few months ago from Ellen Hudson and I wanted to recreate a card that I did on Instagram but in watercolor this time. So what I have done is cut my watercolor paper to four and a half by six so it's bigger than a card front and then I trimmed down a piece of scrap paper so that it was going to fit the sentiment plus a little bit so I had some comfortable room around it and then drew a line with pencil so I kind of knew where I was headed on the piece of paper. In my MISTI I put the sentiment down first and then figured out where to put the flowers so that they would be able to spill a little bit over on top of the sentiment but not a whole lot. I didn't want it to become unreadable. And then I stamped the flowers, the Mondo pansies with some Distress inks, Distress Oxide inks shall I say. These are water soluble so you can use them as the paint but I decided to match them up with my Daniel Smith watercolor paints. I cleaned off the stamp, moved everything over so I could set up putting the flower in a different way. I didn't want it to just look like the same branch so I lowered it and kind of torqued the angle a little bit and blocked off a little piece with a sticky note so that I wouldn't stamp over top of something and put one of those flowers in the corner and then I had to turn it the other way so I could get just the corner of something so I'd have not necessarily even left and right side to the card but I wanted a little bit more on one side going up higher so just have a little bit of flowers peeking in from the edge. Knowing of course that I'm going to be trimming all this down so that it makes a regular card size but having extra room is helpful. And then it came down to putting some sticky notes down to mask the flowers so that now I can stamp the sentiment in the middle. You can of course do this with any of your flowers and sentiment stamps but I recommend these because they're fun and who doesn't want to be thanked for being a friend. So there you go. That's the simple stamping part of this. I dried it all really well because I didn't want to mess up any of the ink and then used a kneaded eraser to get rid of the pencil lines that are inside the flowers and then I ran the eraser lightly over everything else so that I wouldn't have a heavy pencil line it would just be lighter and then just started painting. I started by trying to see after heat drying it was like to get enough color like it didn't move enough color like I normally am used to because usually I don't heat set before doing this step before doing the watercolor and so I just used my watercolors instead. And the two colors that I used here were New Gamboge and Aussie Red Gold and using them at different thicknesses of paint versus water. The darker it is the more paint it is and the lighter it is the more water it has in the brush. And this is one of my fancy brushes by the way. I usually try to use my silver black velvet brushes in my videos and I totally spaced it because this one was the one that had been out on my desk for something else that I was painting. So this is one of the fancy schmancy sables that I love so much. So throughout the painting of these flowers I kept going back a little bit here and there and adding tiny touches of darker color. So even while it was wet I would go back in and drop a little bit of thicker Aussie Red Gold into those centers that sort of thing. I do go back at the end and add a little bit more because I'm a fusser and I kept fussing. But when you're painting something like this what I started off with was using water to just move the color around. You can see there is some color that does lift off of those outlines from the Distress Oxide Inks and if you wanted a really soft pastelly card you could certainly just do that. But I wanted more color in it so I dropped it into the wet paint which means that I didn't end up getting brush stroke types of lines. I got this kind of really soft blended mushy look from the watercolors. I also was sure to leave some white spaces. There were just areas I deliberately did not paint on. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to it but I was trying not to be perfect. Because as soon as you start trying to make one thing perfect then the next thing has to be perfect and the next thing has to be perfect and the next thing has to be perfect. And if you're anything like me you might achieve perfection on one flower and then everything else goes to heck in a handbag. So this is just a really easy way to make it look like everything's supposed to be loose and splashy and it's totally fine and no one will care, right? And of course it's yellow so it makes me happy whether it's perfect or not. So I just kept running around the whole card adding color to the flowers. After doing the first couple I felt bolder so I could do several petals at once, flower petals, etc. And then I went back in to add a little tiny bit of green, just a tinge. I didn't want very much, I wanted this to feel like a yellow card. And notice that I didn't stamp those stems in green. You could do that. You could mask things off and wipe ink off of your stamp on the misty and go crazy with that. I thought that was way too much work so I just left it in the yellow and added just the tiniest, tiniest drop of greens into each one of those leaves. So I dried everything really well, heat set that so that at least color wasn't going to move on its own before I was trying to get it to go. And then painted the border section of it. And the card that I did that was the inspiration for this had Copic Marker doing this outside part. I just did a bunch of stamping and then used a Copic Marker to color this outside bit. I will post a link to that card over on my blog so you can see what that card looked like. It was a green one. I did that earlier this summer and a couple of people had asked for tutorials and I thought I want to try the same thing in watercolor so that is where this comes from. But the same technique for doing the stamping was used on that card. There just wasn't watercolor in it. It was just plain outlines of the stamps themselves and some very simple color added to the border section. And once all of this part was done, I did my fussing. And that's where you can decide how much more detail you want to add to each of the parts of it. So I mixed up a little bit of Aussie Red Gold and I dropped in a little tiny bit of burnt Sienna just so I'd have a little bit darker color and then made a few brushstrokes into the centers of a few of the flowers so that I'd have a little more zing, a little more impact on each of these flowers. And when you're doing this last step, if you want it to be punchy color, then make sure you don't use a ton of water. Use mostly pigment or I shouldn't say mostly pigment. Not sure what the percentage is, but you want it to be kind of thicker than your normal wash so that you end up with a punch of your color. So I just dropped a little bit into each one of my flowers, which remember all this is dry now so I can make kind of crisp brushstrokes to add, you know, just a little bit of detail into these. And the last step is then to trim it down and put it on a card front. It is a one layer watercolor card that looks like multiple layers. It looks like you've got layers of paper and things, but it's all one layer on the card. Just kind of nice. See how flat that is? Pretty awesome and very beautiful for fall. It's got the yellows and the golds and orange colors, etc. And you can go over to my blog and see the other card. I'll go pull that up and add it to the blog post so you can check it out. And I will see you again very soon. Take care guys. Bye.