 Well hello and welcome to my stop on the Christmas in July blog hop with Ellen Hudson. Ellen's Over the River stamp set has mountains and trees and clouds and houses and cars and like everything you would want in a mountain holiday type stamp set. It's got a road or a river. I'm going to be using mine as a river and the little car has been picking up its tree and then driving around this road coming around from the mountain and then behind there I'm going to have an aurora borealis and then make it snow all over top of everything. So even though it seems like it's got a lot of parts to it if you get all the stamping done you could kind of mass produce these in steps and since it's Christmas in July those of you who are starting Christmas cards now are probably going to be doing some massive numbers of cards. I'm not very good at starting Christmas cards early so this is kind of a big deal for me to even start one in July much less very many others. I did one other card recently this this past month that has been a Christmas card. However I'm going to be using some indenthrone paint some imperial purple and a little bit of quinacridone rose and then mix some other things into the aurora borealis. The water that I painted in there is going to stop the paint from going all the way down the page into the snow because it's going to hold the paint right up there in the top section and I'm going to drop some of that quinacridone rose in there making sure that I hit the edges of the mountains and move the color down there. When I painted the water I couldn't tell if I'd made it perfectly but the water is just to get it get the paint on there able to move and and just kind of keep that motion going with the the paint itself. You can paint this on an angle or you can do what I'm going to be doing in just a minute. I'm starting by trying to train it a little bit and having some up-down kind of motion the way that a lot of aurora borealis is I don't know what the plural is or aurora boreali. I tell you some days I should look things up before I talk here on YouTube but I'm putting some thicker paint in some places and thinner in others so that I'm going to get some interesting blends when this happens. Next step is a little tiny bit of nickel azo look at that is that not delicious oh my gosh so beautiful and then tilting the board all that color starts to run at the same time it is going to collect there in a pool up at the top so I'm keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn't do any super weird things while I add more of the blue at the bottom but I wanted the blue to sort of melt into a little bit the green of my trees now I probably shouldn't have done this because the green will take over a little bit you can see it kind of blew up into the sky a little bit but I don't really mind that all that much because it still looks really cool and then I'm tilting my board again so that all that extra paint will run down there and I'll just collect it and remove it my paper is six by four and half which means when I cut it down for a card any of these little edge weird things are going to get cut off so I don't stress out about that I just keep my my paper glued down to my board with some adhesive instead of using tape so next up is the rest of the scene I'm going to start with the river and just paint it a very simple river now river could be all iced over in which case it would be a very light blue this one is going to be a ribbon of darker color just because I need a little bit more strength of color down there at the bottom so I'm going to use the indent throne but not at super full strength and then I'm going to use some of that indent throne that's still on the brush and mix it in a little bit with the trees because I want the trees to just start to feel like a mass of more trees in behind them because they're little stick stamps so they don't look super realistic but if I add a lot more color in there behind them it's going to help to sort of make them feel a little more like a forest and then I'm going to paint up into the mountains and let the mountains be more of that quinacridone rose color and since I'm not doing a lot of heavy blending with it it's going to stand out against the lights in the background so I'm doing all of that portion while those sections are wet so that the mountains and the trees kind of blend together and then I wanted the trees that that whole forest section to have a soft edge on the bottom so I made sure I had some blue there and I'm going to clean my brush really well and then go with just some water around the bottom edge and give it a soft edge and that's what water can do for you it takes some practice so that you don't end up with blooms going back the other direction but it's worth practicing because it's one of the best tricks in watercolor it's really going to help you to improve your paintings now I'm using just barely barely barely any color to make the road path here first just trying to figure out where I want it to go and I want it to kind of curl and spin around so he's been kind of on a journey around the other side of the trees and you know get that in there really soft and then take a little bit of color and drop it in so that it comes and goes and it there's some areas where it's darker some areas where it's lighter and then it's going to just have some soft edges to it which will be really nice to make it feel like soft snow I'm taking a dryer brush I've wiped my brush off on a paper towel and I'm trying to clean up some of those edges and sometimes that dry brush will work other times just grabbing a little bit of a baby wipe and dabbing off some of those edges will give you a softer edge and the reason I use a baby wipe instead of a paper towel is it puts a little bit of moisture there but not too much and it's not too dry either because a paper towel could be so dry that it'll give you a hard edge and it'll create that which is kind of a problem too I'm painting my car in a stronger version of that quinacridone pink might even have a little bit of the purple there on my brush as well so it has a good standout kind of color and then I'll add a little bit of nickel azo for the headlights so that it looks like he's driving and lighting up the road ahead of him and then I'm going to use watercolor grounds for my snow and you can also use acrylic paint if you have some white acrylic paint but it's a matter of trying to get it to the right thickness and you have to experiment with that yourself so I put a little bit on a plate this is a little 89 cent tile that I got from like Home Depot or something and mix it with enough water that it moves but not so much that it ends up being gray because if you make it too thin and watery it'll splatter easy but it also is going to be too transparent so then it's not going to look like bright white snow and the amount of snow you put on it is entirely up to you this technique does sometimes as you're seeing here it makes some lines but if you're putting enough snow down it's going to look a little bit more like motion by the time you're all said and done but you can also take a baby wipe when you get one of those spots and kind of wipe across it to knock out some of those portions that look like lines but I'm going to put a ton of snow on here because I love snow on my cards a lot of times I use a white pen to do that white gel pen and that gives you a very controlled look but this gives you just like crazy wild spray of just craziness watercolor ground is also nice to have on hand for repairs because if you mess up on an area you've got the whole thing painted and you screw up on one little section you could actually paint the watercolor grounds on there let it dry again and then repaint over top of that if it's in a particular kind of section that you can do that without having edges stitched around it that sort of thing but for repairs this stuff is excellent and you can also paint it onto a surface that you can then add watercolor too so for my finished card I popped the trimmed down panel onto a card base and added a little bit of a popped sentiment to it as well to finish off my card make sure you go see the blog hop today because it's a Christmas in July blog hop and especially if you're looking for Christmas ideas with stuff that's already out there this this blog hop is for you you may already have the stamps there all right I'll see you guys next time links to everything we're in the doobly-doo hit that like button subscribe share and I will see you next time bye bye