 Hello there! It's Sandy Alnok and today I have a really simple forest scene to show you with a fun technique for this background. I've had my watercolor pencils out in what feels like ages so I thought I would color up this cute little gnome from Trinity called Hello There. They do have another gnome in the series that's just been released so you can check that out. I will link both of them in the doobly-do supply list because you might be a gnome person and collect all of the gnome stamps. I love that these all have giant beards, like beards that are so long they take over everything really cute. The background that I'm going to be doing with this is taking my Albrecht Dora watercolor pencils and running the tip of the pencil through a t-strainer. You may have seen me do this technique with colored pencils but it also works with watercolor pencils. It's gonna stick wherever the water is as long as I don't go messing around with the areas that are not so don't spray after you do this. But I'm going to take a brush and move the color around in a deliberately uneven fashion. That's the beauty of this idea is that you don't have to be able to paint well in order to make this work. So I'm just throwing in color lighter, brighter green up at the top where the sunshine is coming from and darker green down at the bottom just going carefully around the image and then dry it completely including blowing off any excess pigment, little flecks of anything that may have gotten onto the image itself. So then it comes time for coloring everything else. The color list by the way is over on the blog if you want to know what colors they are. These are the Albrecht Dora watercolor pencils that I'm using and I'm using three colors for the beard and I use three colors sometimes. Part of it is that I'm just used to doing that with my Copics. You can get away with putting a dark color down in the shadow area and then using water to move the rest of the color or you can get really intense color by filling the image with a lot of color. So I'm using three colors to really saturate it and even one of them is a bright yellowish color which means it's going to have lots of sunshine hitting it as well. The background even though it looks a little washed out because of the camera is relatively intense and I wanted to make sure the colors on the image were way way way more intense so that the background falls back into the distance a little bit more. So I am using my silver brush. The first one that I had used for the background was the number 12 round and this one is the number eight round. So if you're looking for the size brushes those those two show kind of the sorts of things you can do with them. Larger brushes tend to use for larger things when I want to get loose and washy. The leaves down at the bottom I actually ended up painting over when I did the background so then I can just add a little bit of a shadow with the dark green color and then I wanted a blue green hat for it. I want to leave some white highlight on the top and when I went into this at first I wasn't sure how much color that I wanted to put in and I did want more than this. I could have done the strainer thing and added more color to it but I decided to just wait until it was dry and add another layer to it in a little bit. But in the meantime at least have the first layer of color down here so got some color building up. While I'm sitting here working on this I'll let you know that this month August of 2020 the sale classes over on my teaching site are all the watercolor pencil and color pencil classes. So if you're interested in learning more about using them that's a great place to start and there'll be a link in the doobly-doo. You can always check that anytime of year though I'll always have different classes on the sale page just to keep things exciting and give you a little discount if you need that in order to get some art training into you. So with the flowers I have a bright yellow that's on the top of each petal and then I put an orange toward the bottom and a very tiny bit of a very dark orange to increase that contrast. So I really wanted the feeling of the sunshine flowing in from the top of the picture and so having some bright sunshine colors is helpful. The set of pencils has a little bit of a flesh tone color in it so I've colored the skin with that and here I am adding the next layer of the watercolor pencil onto the hat and just kind of smoothing those things out little by little. Pretty satisfied with how this flower and gnome is coming along so far. He is very tiny but he's sitting on a very tall in my mind, a very tall flower and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with the background and I love what I ended up doing with it but I also thought I'd let you know I had some other ideas. I was thinking about doing some doodling down the left and right side to add a whole bunch of flowers and vines. You could stamp other flowers and stuff and give it more of a wild jungle kind of look but what I ended up doing is so simple. Just taking a sharpie which is waterproof so I can watercolor right over top of it and I'm just going to make lines up and down. They're not straight lines, they should be a little kitty wampus to indicate that it's wood. You could even make some knots which would be swirling around in a long tall oval and make some sort of a knot in the tree and I have my image stamped a little bit off to the left. I tend to not put things right in the center either so the tree on the left hand side is going to actually go a little bit behind this gnome so that the flower sticks out into it and that's going to make it look like the tree is behind him rather than being out in front of him or beside him. It just adds a little bit more interest design wise into the scene and if you start at the outer edges you can kind of just keep making lines until you're satisfied with how wide your trees are. You could make really really wide trees or you can make tall skinny tree trunks whatever kind of ports with your design might depend somewhat on the image that you're using and whether or not you need big trees or small trees but as you can see he ended up being like he's in this really super tall forest so he's on a flower that's really really tall because there are no tree trunks on this so you have to have an image that would suit something like that where it would feel like he's uh he's flying high up in the air. If you have any flying fairies they might be especially good images for something like this but this sweet little gnome certainly works and the coloring of the trees is so very simple it's just one color and you could go with several colors in it and merge several colors together but on something like this I wanted the gnome to be the big thing so I wanted the background to fade into the distance and these trees to mostly be a frame I love contrast and I love how after this was all dried and the colors all settled in that it just felt like a nice rich image with really strong contrast and I decided I was just gonna put the sentiment on it from the other gnome set that I thought was really cute and leave it at that and not do anything else to it just put it on a card all by itself no embellishments no nothing just stamp it and go and put that it's a really fun little card that you might enjoy so I hope you enjoyed this if you did click the like button share it with your friends and if you're interested in taking any watercolor pencil or colored pencil classes the link is in the doobly-doo as well as all the supplies see you guys later bye bye