 Hi there! My name is Sandy Alakam, an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to show you how to color transparent water, or at least one way to do it. And before I get started on that, I want to show you a new ink pad that I got recently. I tried it out when I was at CHA. It's by Avery Allen. It's a dye ink pad. Most of theirs are pigment. I think this is the only dye ink pad they have. And this works with Copics. Not all dye inks will work with Copics. So I don't know the science of why, but this one does. And on the right hand side is my Memento pad, and I use this Memento pad all the time. Totally great. But look at the give that you have with the Avery L pad. When you press your little stamp pad down on it, it gives, it has just a lot more give to it. So if you struggle with stamping, sometimes it can be just a little easier if you have a pad with more give. You have to be careful not to get more ink outside of the image when you have a pad like that. That's all. So I put that out there for you to know that it does work. Now I'm going to be coloring this shark as though he's partially underwater. So the bottom part is him swimming and the top part is him peeking out over the water to say hello on the card. So I'm going to color the top of him darker. You could do the reverse. You could do darker underwater and lighter above water, and it would work the same kind of a way. It doesn't really matter a whole lot. It's just a matter of what you want to make happen. And I thought that the punch of the color on the top, the really stronger grays would work really well for this because I'm going to have some medium to dark water down below. I'm going to use a couple of grays. And usually I do my light grays first and then work toward my dark grays. This time I just started with the dark grays and then went to the medium and then I'll go to a light. So there are times when I switch it up. Totally fine. There's no rules about coloring. There's some things that will generally work better than others. But here one of the things you can see is that I've got some modeling MOTT LING that is appearing like up there in the in that area that I'm coloring right now. I'm just going over it with the medium tone with just some really quick flicks. And sometimes that will be enough to smooth things out if you get some of that because what's happening is the light color is pushing away the medium color. And that's why I was getting some of that that little blooming going on. So now I'm going to color the other part that's above water, which is going to be the white part underneath of the shark. I'm going to use two grays to do some shading on that. And I'm going to put a good bit of color in here. If it's white, a lot of people tend to just leave the whole thing white, but I'm going to leave very little highlight white. It's still going to look white by comparison as long as you have good contrast. And contrast is one of the things that I think is a hallmark of the stuff that I do because I try to make sure I really focus on how much contrast am I getting? Do I have enough contrast between my darks and my lights? Because when your eye looks at something, it doesn't see the lines around an object. It sees the light and the dark and that's what separates one object from another. So now I'm going to color the part that's going to go under the water. And this is basically an undercoat that's going to be underneath of this. Whatever object you have that's going to be underwater, just put down whatever base coat you're going to have. I'm not going to worry a little bit about fussing with my shading and my blending, but by the time it's all said and done, a lot of that's not going to matter. So I'm just kind of putting this undercoat down just so I have some color there and I have some definition to the shape of him. So I'm going to put a little bit of shadows in around where the stamp lines are, because that's usually a good sign from the artist that the stamp lines are where the shadows should be. And now I'm going to start putting in the water. Now it does not matter what colors you use in the water. You can use blues and purples, you can use blues and green, you can use blue greens and purples and whatever you want for your water. And what you need to remind yourself of is where is that water line. So the pencil line, it actually doesn't continue all the way across there right now at the pencil line that I drew in the first place, would continue across to that top section. So there's two waves in this stamp that actually the little wavy part in the background is a second stamp in the set. There's two sharks, a couple waves, there's some fish, there's bubbles, all kinds of things in the stamp set. But in this I'm picturing that one wave to be in front of him and the other wave to be behind him. So right now I'm not worrying about the wave in front of him other than stopping at the top of it because I want to create that wave shape. I'm going to layer this over him so he looks like he's underwater in a little bit. Most people will just color around him like this and he'll still look like he's underwater but we're going to try to make it look like it's actually transparent. This transparency is one of those things that look, it'll just be really interesting on a card and on any kind of piece of artwork. So it's a fun thing to play with. So I'm just going around with a couple of light blues. I'm not, I mean there's no science to why I'm picking them and you can use as I said any blues that you want. If you want your water to be darker you can pick darker colors. It'll just have a little different effect when you get to the layering portion that we're going to get to. So I'm just layering stripes of color. You want to keep these generally all vertical or if you're going to go at an angle then all go at the same angle so that it looks like the light is coming through the same way. And now is where I'm going to start layering right over top. So I'm letting some of that color not in every area but in some of the areas I'm letting it go right over top of his body. So you can see that transparent layer over him. That's going to start building up color to look like there's water in front of him as well as water behind him. So I'm going to switch to some blue violets now. Oh my gosh, Sandy's getting crazy. She's getting purple in here. And I'm just going to start layering some of that color over. I was debating whether I wanted it to be really purplish water so I started really going crazy with the blue violet. It's a very light blue violet. It's not as light as it could be but it's a bv11 so it's fairly light and I've just started messing around putting it in here. And I got a little bit messy and I did that on purpose because I wanted to show you that when you do water like this it's okay if it gets messy. Keep working on it because now I'm taking a bv00 so take a lighter color and just go over practically the whole thing. And once you have a lot of moisture building up on your paper it's going to pretty naturally do some blending. You just can't stop. Lots of people will stop before they get there but when you're doing this kind of real soft blending you'll need to lay your marker nib down on its side. Don't do it just with the tip because if you do it just with the tip you're going to end up with little tiny stripes. You need enough color on there to get just lots of marker and just lay it down pretty thick. Well not thick. You don't lay marker down thick but you want nice big fat juicy lines and overlay them over top of each other. So that got to be too purple so I went back in with my b23 again and started adding more blue to it. And you can keep working at this. Unless you get into the navy blues once you get to the really dark colors then layering a lot of it will end up causing you trouble because it'll get kind of a waxy sticky build up on the top. But as long as you're staying with your lighter colors just keep working at them. If it starts getting weird just let it sit for a minute. Let the colors dry. Let the paper dry out and then add more layers on top. And for something like water adding all of these layers is just going to make it look more like there's light filtering down from the top. So I switched to another blue and I colored in that back wave, the wave behind in a little bit. And then I'm just going to start adding the dots. This is going to be the bubbles that will be the distraction factor for anybody looking at your card. Because this colorless blender pushes color away from it so it's going to get a little heavier outline around each bubble and then the bubbles themselves will get lighter. Some of them in the very light areas can go all the way to white. Some of them will go to just a lighter color because they're not going to push away all that color. And you can go right over top of the shark, right over top of the lines on him. And what I would suggest is not have the bubbles be even everywhere. The bubbles are kind of looking like they're just around him and then a few stray ones here and there but most of them are just around him as if he's disturbed the water. Because that's going to keep all the interest right there. If you spread them out over the whole thing you're going to diffuse the interest for this person looking at it. I went in with some BG10. You can go in with other colors and add other colors of bubbles. You can make a rainbow looking bubbles and you can do some darker ones too. So I'm going to do just a few of the B23 in another layer because the B23 is not going to be really dark. It's just going to add a little difference to it but I also have a lot of that color already down so it's going to help it to blend in so as it blends in it will lighten. And then my final step is going to be to add gel pendants. So I'm going to add a little bit right along that top surface line right in front of my shark so it looks like he's just he's kind of creating bubbles all around him almost as if he passed some gas under the water and he's got some little bubbles all around your little shark so think about that that might help you to keep your bubbles right in the right area around him and not spread them out everywhere and then I'll add just a few of different sizes down below. The more different sizes you have the more interesting it is so try not to make them all just the same but it's also cute if you make really big bubbles they can be adorable. You could add glossy accents over some of them. There's just a lot of different ways you can go with creating bubbles and you can color a whole sky behind this. I opted not to in mine but I added a couple of layers of black paper. This is a black shimmery paper which I love and I continued the dots onto one of the layers of the black paper just because I thought that would be a fun way to carry the design and I stamped a few of the fish from the stamp set in there too and added my little sentiment. Super easy card great for guys because you know guys like really fun silly cards and things with with more snarky attitudes to them. So here's a couple more videos if you'd like to see something else you can hit the subscribe button to get more from me there's more information on my blog. Supply links are all in the description down below and I am all over social media as Sandy Almuk so I will see you out there on the web. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me today. Bye bye now.