 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnock and today I want to show you how to color some reflections on some waiting flamingos and then at the end I'll show you some enamel pins just for card makers. The Sunny Studios stamp set with these cute little flamingos in it I thought would be perfect for an encouragement card. I love the sentiment, you're flamazing. Very funny and punny. I always love a good pun and I have chosen the pair of them. You can mix and match them but I chose the pair where one is kind of looking away in a shy fashion from the other. Kind of embarrassed when someone says you're flamazing that would kind of be me. I'm not really good at accepting compliments and I know a lot of people aren't especially women for some reason. When we get told we have a nice outfit on we tend to just tell them where we got it on sale instead of just saying thank you. So I thought this would be kind of cute because it reflects that in my mind, that expression. And what I did was stamp onto some Neenakard stock and I wiped off the feet before I did because I want to make them look like they're standing in water that they're waiting in the shallows. And I'll show you how to make the water and the reflections and everything when we get to that. But first with these little guys, I wanted to have the transition from dark to light go pretty quickly because I wanted a lot of light on the tops of their heads. So I reverse the order that I normally color in. Usually I do the base coat, then go to the dark, the medium and the light. But that puts more than one coat of the light color down because I cycle back through them. This way if you start with the dark color first, if you're confident enough to do that, then you can start blending in with your midtone like I'm doing. And the midtone is even eating away a little bit at the dark. So I can get rid of some of the extra dark parts if I don't like what I've already done by going over it. Just make sure if you start doing this that you don't keep going so far that you make it bleed because if you just keep going and going and going, you saturate the paper. If it starts feeling like you're saturating it, just let it sit and dry for a minute and then you can go back to it. So I'm using the midtone, the second color, to lighten the colors that are already there, but also to blend towards the light. And I'm leaving light on the top of the heads, on the top of the wings. But I also wanted to leave a little bit of light color on the very tips of the wings and the tail feathers. So I'm being a little careful as I'm doing my coloring to make sure that I leave a little bit of that little highlight there. And I can go over that with my light color, but I don't have to. I can leave it just white as well. But it goes really smoothly to have just one coat of the lightest color when I do it in this order. You can see I've got that really nice bright pink, not very, very light, bright pink on the very top. And I wanted these to be in relatively light colors rather than going for a normal heavy saturation because I wanted this whole thing to feel like really out in the sunshine. And this, it's really super bright out. And if I were to make these guys look too dark, then I'd have to darken the rest of the background to match with it. So this seemed like it was going to work a little bit better. So I'm going to start in on the looking at the sand through the water. If you've taken the underwater scenes class, there's an underwater version of this. This is kind of the above water version looking at the surface of the water. So you get the little reflections across the top of the surface, but you see the sand right underneath, especially when it's right in the shallows. And it slowly fades so that you're starting to see the deeper water back behind. But right in the foreground portion, it's going to be the sand that you see through the water. I'm going to add some water over top of it, but I wanted to have the sand underneath so that I get that kind of really interesting wavy texture. And I'm using an E42. There's a lot of different colors you can use for something like this. But I wanted that, that feeling of the sand. So next I went for my BG triple zero. And I'm just going to put some of that color in the background as I talked about the color moving from the shallows out into the deep. And you see less of the sand because you're getting just the water and not the sand portion. And I'm trying to figure out how high I want the horizon line to be. Did I want it to go past their wings or stop before their wings? If I go in with a light color to do this, I can play around with it. I can decide which way I want to go with it. And as I was putting my color down, my BG triple zero was running out of ink a little bit. So I switch, I can switch over to another color as well. I threw in a little bit of E30 to make that transition a little smoother before I went in with a darker color or I should say a better inked color, which is the B triple zero. And that worked a whole lot better to have ink in my marker. I don't know if you're like me, but I sometimes would rather just switch to another pen than go get out the ink refill bottles. I put all my markers in a drawer when they're needing re-inked if I can remember to get them in the drawer. And then I do one big day of refilling a whole bunch. All right, next up is the reflection. So RV13, the mid-tone color, I'm just drawing in a little bit of the feet. I don't even have to draw all the way down to the feet. I can just draw partway. And then I'm using the light color to just make some swooshes of color. I'm not making it solid. Notice that I'm letting some of those reflections come through. And I'm not drawing the reverse of the flamingos, which is what a lot of people try to do. They do the mirror stamping to try to make it exact. And you really don't have to. If you look at a reflection, you just sometimes see swooshes of color. And I wanted a little stronger color than the RV10. So I went for an RV11 to just add a little bit more to it. Little strength of color. And it really has that feel of light reflections without being really hard. Just a few strokes is enough to give it that reflective feel. So next it's time to make an island in the distance because they need to have a little island to look out on in the little bay that they're wandering around in. So I'm going to draw just a little mountain-ish kind of thing. I'm not really mountainous. It's more like rocks because I decided I'm going to put little trees out here. I'm going to do a couple of palm trees. When I go to the trip of my heart every year, I go to Puerto Rico and do some plein air painting. And I always end up sitting on the beach somewhere and drawing palm trees and painting palm trees. It is just so relaxing. And I've started to really look at how the wind blows them. And on a windier day, the whole palm tree kind of leans off one direction. A lot of those fronds come off the top and they all blow in one direction. So doing it at a little bit of an angle helps them to feel like they're blowing in the wind. But don't put them all out that way. Sometimes you need to have a little palm frond going the other direction just so it doesn't look like it's going to fall over entirely or that there's a hurricane going on. But I'm going to add another little layer of color with slightly darker brown to add some texture to the tree trunks and then a little bit of almost rocks or a feeling of rocks on the little island. Create a little bit of atmosphere for that. And next, I thought I'd also add a little bit of island grasses because, you know, any of the little critters need a place to hide that are out on the spit. And then it's time to make the sand look like sand. And even though you don't see a ton of detail, you can tell that it's sand. Well, hello to whoever is texting me in the middle of a voiceover. But you can tell that it's sand looking through it just by the color. But you can also add this little bit of texture, both with a marker and then also with a white pen to just add that little extra bit of detail. The last thing I wanted to do is add a little reflection to the island as well and those trees. And it's a little harder to do and make it look natural. So remember how soft the pink ones were. We want to make these along that soft side too. So use a lighter brown marker. And I'm going to even add just a few strokes to make a reflection of the land as well going across there. And when you choose your green, choose something really light because you don't want to have a whole lot of color down there. And again, make the stems or the stems, the tree trunks reflect the right direction. But the rest of it can just be blobs and then go over it with the blue color of the water because that's going to soften out what's there. And it'll just kind of pull it into being a reflection and it'll keep it really soft without having to basically redraw the trees upside down. So there's my sweet little card. I just put it on a card base didn't even add any embellishments or layers or anything. Just put it on the card base itself. And now I want to show you the pins. We rise by lifting others was my favorite show you the picture of it here with a nickel so you can see the size of it. And since this was such an encouraging card, I thought this would be a great day to show you these pins. There's a whole bunch of them for crafters by the gray muses. And I am just thrilled that they made these. So I'm just going to let you kind of look through them. There are a whole bunch of them over at Ellen Hudson. And she just got them in the store and then she added some more. And I was kind of excited. So I'm going to give you the link to the whole category of them as well as each individual one so you can see them. But a lot of them would make a great gift, especially when it comes to Secret Santa time. Now this one I love swatches. I wish it just said I love color because I don't love swatching. I just love color. Eat, sleep, craft, repeat. Is that not all of us? Oh my goodness. There's just so many fun ones in here. Down to like boy a bin of stamps, which is kind of nice. I mean there's just so many fun things that would be great for any of your crafty friends. If you need a birthday gift or something, or even just as a random act of kindness to send to somebody. I just think these are really sweet. I made an ink pen organizer. I am not an organizer, but I just think the idea is really cool. So check all those out. All the links are in the doobly-doo for the supplies and the stamps and the pins and everything. And go encourage somebody today. Give them a compliment just because and rise by lifting others today. I'll see you guys later. Bye-bye.