 Hello there, it's Sandy Almok, and today I'm going to do a little vintage garden watercolor, partly because the name of the stamp set is Vintage Garden, but I also wanted to try to create some vintage colors using my new palette. So we'll talk about that in a minute. But the stamp set has one stamp that has two flowers, the other has one, and then a bunch of extra leaves that you can use to fill in. So I took my Arches cold press watercolor paper and filled it with the different stamps so that I had a pleasing arrangement of them for myself. And the new palette, this is my Island palette that's intended for me to try to limit my colors and not have quite so many. And I talked about that and showed you swatches of everything in a recent video, which I will link in the doobly-doo if you want to go see that. But I'm going to use some colors that are also in my crafty palette, my main palette that I've been using for a couple of years. And this is yellow ochre. It's in both palettes, has not left, and it's a yellow, but it's not a bright yellow. It's a sort of darker, dingier kind of yellow color. And I'm going to mix a little bit of transparent red oxide with it to create some shadows and some darker areas in my yellow flowers. And if you were trying to use my other palette full of colors, this would be an equivalent of burnt sienna. But it just has a little more life to it than burnt sienna. So I'm trying that one in this new palette just to see how it goes. Now notice that I'm leaving some white areas as I'm painting. I'm not just filling it all in completely. And I'm dropping the colors, the shadow colors, mainly toward the center of that particular flower. This color now is one of the new ones. It's a permanent alizarin crimson. And this one replaces quinacridone rose from my old palette. Now the quinacridone rose is probably more pleasing to most crafters who like bright colors. That's what I tend to find, tends to be what I see. And that color is in my crafty palette for that reason. But you can make this color look like a pink by just watering it down. It's a really strong, strong color. You can also get incredibly strong dark red out of this. And it's a cool red. So it may or may not end up being my permanent replacement for quinacridone rose. But I also know that I didn't use quinacridone rose when I've done any of my fine art painting. I just don't use it. I don't tend to paint things that have pink in them. So that's where I thought this might be more helpful because I'm more likely to use reds. So having a second real red red I thought would be more helpful for me. But in this flower you can see that I started off with a very pale watered down version of the color and then started dropping in deeper color. And you can do this with any color in your palette. There are some that don't actually have variants between light and dark. A lot of the yellows are that way. You don't get really a pale yellow with some of them. And there are other colors that do that too, but most you'll get some kind of a range from a darker to a lighter based on how much water you have in the mix. So in order to create the shadows in the differences in between all these petals I'm adding thicker paint, even some straight from the palette to drop in here that's going to be a much darker richer color. You can see the kind of red that that gives you. If you were using quinacridone rose you wouldn't get something quite that dark, but you can get a little bit darker out of a quin rose than just a straight light wash of pink. I'm going to paint the other flower that is the same flower as this one. You can see I turned this one stamp upside down so the yellow and red are flipped on the left side from where they are on the right side and I'll basically do the same thing. Put in the light pink with the wash of the red and then I'll add in some thicker paint by adding more pigment straight into my little puddle to create those shadows and each one of those shadow areas that I add in should create the top edge, the light edge of the next petal. It's doing some negative painting around them so that each of those petals ends up a little bit defined and you don't really want them to look like outlines necessarily, but letting some of that white show through is going to give a lot more life to your painting. This flower I decided to try to create in a white. White still has shadows in it, still has some color in it, so I'm going to do that using Payne's Blue Gray which is in both palettes. It's one of my favorite colors to use. I use it a ton, I go through tube after tube after tube. This is the color that I use to darken other colors and I do that with a Payne's Blue Gray because I also get the blueness out of it. If I don't want it to be so blue I can just add a little bit of the transparent red oxide to it and make it very neutral or if you have burnt sienna you could do the same thing with that in order to turn it into a regular gray or black color. Here I'm putting in some really dark spots of this color and they look rather stark right now but then I'll take some water on my brush and just start to move that around and soften those edges and it starts to create deep shadows and yet leaves lots of white so this is going to feel a little bit more like a whitish flower. Whiteish flower that has very deep shadows on the inside so I wanted to convey that lighting. Next up is trying to create a color that would end up being right for the leaves. I mixed into the Payne's Blue Gray some of my yellow ochre because a yellow and a blue make green and in this particular case it's going to make a very vintage looking green. It's kind of a brownish hoop looking green in some ways but that fits with the vintage theme just because it's not a bright cheerful green doesn't mean it's not going to work for this and in the bottom portion of some of these leaves or the shadow portion I'm adding a little bit of more straight Payne's Blue Gray rather than the mix that I've created so that I get some variation in the leaves I get some shadows but I'm using the same three colors that I've already used here well four colors technically since I added in a little bit of the transparent oxide but the goal that I had set for myself in this was trying to use three colors a lot of my paintings I start out thinking which yellow which red and which blue will I use in this painting there are some times when that is totally thrown out the window but a lot of what I do is trying to see how different groupings of colors play together because if you have a red a yellow and a blue you can mix anything in between now what it comes out looking like as you mix them is what happens because of which of those colors you choose since I chose a yellow that's not a screaming bright yellow and my Payne's Blue Gray is kind of a dark and grayish kind of blue the red is the only thing that's going to add crazy life to it and brightness to it the rest of it is going to be very dull which is why I get that dull green when I try to mix the leaf color now the whole thing is working well except for one thing my whites are not feeling white so I just kind of mixed up a bunch of whatever was left in the palette and added a bunch of water to thin it down and then painted the whole background with that just a light wash very pale wash of color and as I do that watch how the whites start to turn much more white than they were because everything in color is in relation to the colors that are around it so if you take away the rest of the whites on the page then those whites the white of the background no longer fights with the white of the flowers so it ends up strengthening the contrast in the flowers because there is color now in the rest of those white areas so filling all those in gives me a really nice balance for the whole thing the last little bit I decided to do was to work on the centers of the flowers and I'm gonna this time mix a little bit of the red into my yellow ochre instead and you could do that instead of bringing in a transparent red oxide or a burnt sienna just add a little bit of red in it and you'll get an orangey color and after that dried I then added very dark centers from the Pains Blue Gray into some of those to finish off my card I put some black and gold accents with it just paper layers which I just love and the sentiment I had to stamp it in black and then do some clear embossing on it because otherwise the ink smushed so there is that card all finished and gorgeous and vintage looking the second version I did several versions of this with the same colors the second version has a cream background and I swapped out the colors on some of the flowers change them up to see what would happen with that and I did a third one that only uses the yellow ochre and the transparent red oxide or burnt sienna for the flowers and added a very dark background just mixing the paint much thicker than I had on the others and it gives me three totally different looks on cards without having to do anything other than change up my paint colors so if you're going to do this much stamping I recommend stamping several of them and try out different color combinations I also want to let you know that there is an inspiration post on my blog that collects a whole bunch of watercolor flower videos so if you're into watercoloring flowers check that out link in the doobly-doo and that's about it for me I will see you again very soon with another video make sure you click the like button and share it with your friends if you know somebody else who loves watercoloring flowers and I'll see you again soon bye bye