 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnok, artist and crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to show you how to simplify a scene. Usually I'm showing you how to make it more complex, but today I'm going to show you how to make it easier using stamped watercolor. I'm going to make two cards today, the two on the left, not the one on the right, but I'm going to simplify this scene. It's in a brand new stamp set from Colorado Craft Company. You've seen me do a lot of Anita Jerome stamps. I love her as a designer. Her illustration style is just really sweet. And lends itself to lots of different techniques. So what I am doing is putting the stamp into my MISTI, my stamping tool, and I'm going to just color directly onto the stamp itself with some water-based markers. This will not work with your Copic, so please don't use your alcohol markers for this technique. Not going to happen, but since this holds the paper in place and holds the stamp in place, I can just stamp a little tiny section of whatever the scene is in whatever color that I want. So I can make all my bunnies different colors. I can make all the leaves different colors and the flowers and use this tool, this MISTI tool, to make a stamp scene little by little by little. Just keep changing which area you're focusing on, et cetera, in order to get it stamped. Now you may have seen this technique done with Art Impressions watercolor stamps. They do that a whole lot. They have a whole line of stamps that do that, but you can do this with other stamps as well. Remember that some of your acrylic stamps, the clear stamps, may get discolored when you use water-based markers on them. That's natural to happen. It's not going to ruin the stamp, but if you're one of those people that doesn't like that, then you might find a different medium to do that with, because this will discolor them. Certain colors will. And then once you have the ink on the paper, then you can start watercoloring. You could do the entire thing first if you wanted, and do all of the stamping, and then just sit and watercolor all of it. I decided to do just the bunnies first, because I hadn't used this stamp set before. And I wanted to kind of get an idea of where all the grasses were on the bottom and all that sort of thing. And it usually takes me a time or two to start stamping something to realize, you know, where are the arms? There's an arm on one of the bunnies that gets left off for a little while, I'll fix it later, because I didn't realize you had another arm. You know, when you're looking at a clear stamp, it's a little hard to tell which parts are what. But you can see that I used different colors on each one of these bunny rabbits. The Tombow markers that I use are my set. Ellen Hudson put a set together that's my favorite color. So if you want to use my favorites, these will be really obvious choices, because there is a gray, there is a dark brown, there's a medium brown. So you'll be able to figure out really easily from that pack what these colors are, because I didn't write them down. But I went and did a second pass and started adding in all of the other little flowers and the bird, and I stamped a bunch of the tree trunk. And before I did that though, I did dry it, because if you start stamping over top of something while it's wet, you'll get different effects. Sometimes you want those, sometimes you don't, but I dried it so that I wouldn't mess with the bunnies because I liked where they were and that sort of thing. So I'm going to take a number eight silver black velvet brush, one of the ones that I recommend for crafters. And I'm going to just watercolor right over the whole tree trunk. If you use a lot of water, then you're going to lose detail. If you use a little water, then you could get a dry brush look or you'll retain more of those outer lines. You could also use different brands of markers. The zig markers tend to run a whole lot. So as soon as you touch them with water, they like scream and get all excited and start running like crazy. The distress markers don't like to move as much. So that's a place where you can get more control. If you use distress markers, you can also use them in combination. So if you have a color in one that you don't have in another, feel free to mix and match. Not a problem. So now that I've got the flowers and everything else in there, all I have is the greens left. And the cool thing about having stained the stamp with all of that red is I can tell exactly where the flowers are. I just color green across the entire rest of it. And I stamped some of the green right on top of the brown. I didn't even worry about where all those branches were because this green on top of that brown is not going to make any difference. I just kept any of the green ink off of the bunny rabbits and off of the bird and the flowers. And it was good. To paint this, just touch the color with the brush. That's it. The amount of water you use will determine the effect. As I said before, if you use a lot of water, it'll wash away any of the detailed stamp lines. And if you use a little water, then you'll retain more of that. Really depends on what you want for the look of yours. That sort of thing. So I'm just going to run around and paint all these leaves. And the whole scene will be just about finished. Except for one little thing. And I wanted to finish off by just completing all this grass down here at the bottom and then stamp one more time over top of all of this green. So I haven't put any extra ink on the stamp itself. But if I just close it at this point while all these leaves are wet, it's going to transfer any leftover color back onto the paper and give me a little more dimension in the leaves. So bada boom, bada bing. Pretty easy to do this kind of a technique if you've got some time on your hands because it does take a little time to do each one of those pieces from stamping them and that sort of thing. But there is no masking involved because you're just controlling it by where you put the color. This one though is the same technique. Except notice all the stuff that I left out. I did the bunnies. Went through and did those, just like I did in the other one. I did part of the tree trunk. But I stopped it right past the bird. So the bird would have something to sit on. But the tree trunk would just have part of it in there. I also did the tree trunk in the gray and the brown so I could get a little mixed color to it. So that's one of the things you can also do with the stamped watercolor is create new colors by putting a little bit of this, a little bit of that, especially if you're doing things like a barn or something that's wood. Put a couple colors in there and let them mix because that's going to make them look more realistic and even rustic. With each one of these leaves, I'm painting the ones that are there. I only stamped some of them. And then I left that end of the tree branch kind of hanging out there. It needs a little bit of something added to it based on what I stamped. I need a little bit more. But the leaves were coming from the other direction. So what I did was instead I'd go around and paint all the leaves that are on here. Some of them are, again, turn the wrong way like this one is pointing down. So instead I turned it into leaves that are pointing up just by connecting them at the bottom and leaving the top open. And then I can take my brush since I have all this green paint on it or pick up green paint from another spot and I can add another leaf or two to make it feel like one area or another finishes off a little bit differently. So I can kind of tidy that up some. This time my bird is going to be blue and I'm going to color just the top part of the bird so that the tummy is white. And as I ran into a lot of excess ink on the wing I just tapped the watercolor around so it would carry the color across the entire bird and make it a little more uniform in color. Then it was time to start working on the bunnies. And between each color, by the way, I've been rinsing my brush just real quickly wiping it off on a paper towel so it's not super super wet and then moving over to the paper to start working on more color. Now with each one of these you could simplify even further. You could take this one and simplify it by taking off the bunny on the left just having two bunnies. You could remove that whole tree entirely and these little bunnies could be looking up at the moon or something up in the sky, a happy birthday sign or something. Lots of different ways that you can use this kind of an idea to edit out things you don't need in a complex scene and edit something else back in as you need it. So each one of my little bunnies is all happily painted and then I can just work on the grass at the bottom and give it just a little bit of a touch across there with the light green ink. This time I used a lighter green because I wasn't really happy with the darker green and the other one. Again, learning from things as I go and then I'm going to dry it really well because I wanted to add eyes and this time instead of using the marker even to add the eyes I'm going to go to a fountain pen that has a very tiny fine point. I'm going to use any kind of pen on it if you're going to use something and then watercolor over it just make sure it's not water soluble, water safe, I guess is the word I'm looking for. And then I added the whiskers using my little fountain pen in order to create teeny tiny lines. You could also do that with a really sharp pencil and get the same kind of an effect. So this card I was able since it was simpler to add other things to it. I added some more paper layers. I added ribbon to it because the scene was so simple it could handle having more design elements in it. There's air around it, there's space, there's white space on there which gives the thing room to breathe. Compare that to the first card where there was just a cacophony of leaves and flowers and all kinds of craziness might have been better if I used a lighter green for that but I think it's still really busy and I like the simplified version much more. This one is simplified even more. The stamp set has a single bunny, a pair of bunnies, and a little bird so you can make your own scenes like this one as well. This is going to be on Facebook and Instagram later on today so you can go watch that in one of my little speed videos. I also want to let you know that my birthday is coming up, March 27th and I'm going to have a live stream that day. Information's in the doobly-do on how you can participate because I want you to send in a card that I can share in the live stream and I'm also going to do some artwork so leave me some comments let me know what you think I should do that day and if you have not subscribed I suggest you do that click the little bell so that you can be notified when I have a new video up so you don't miss anything. All right, I'm going to be back tomorrow with more bunnies. You know me, it's Bunny Week so we're going to continue this craziness. I will see you then with another video. Take care and have a great day. Bye-bye.