Hi there, I'm Sandy Almak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today we're going to make a rose garden. The idea for this quick little video came from the Gina K stamp set I'm using and I grabbed a bunch of my floral markers, floral colored markers that I wanted to use for this card and stamped the image twice. It's a cluster of roses so I put them both together and masked one so I could stamp the other behind it and make a whole little rose garden down at the bottom intending to put a big background in there. I've had a lot of people ask in recent weeks and months will I show you how to make that kind of mottled background. So this video is a little more about that but I'm going to show you this rose first in a little closer to real time and then we'll speed through the rest just cause. So when you're doing a multicolored rose or any kind of multicolored flower I like to put the base color down, the main color of the image and then whatever the edges are in this particular rose that I saw had like peachy pinky colored edges and then it started building toward deep reds in the middle. And when you're doing any kind of flower like this just look at the markers you have. I'm not putting them on the screen you can of course pick up that JPEG that I showed you a minute ago over on my blog if you want to follow along with those colors but really use your markers and choose colors that you think match a picture that you find on Google or something. I always pull out my phone and try to get inspired by coloring some roses that I've never colored that way before and I might color this one in a couple of different ways to just practice coloring roses. Most flowers the main thing is going to be to give them that dimension is putting the shadows on the interior of each one of those petals where they reach down toward the center of the flower toward the stem but depending on the rose it may end up with darker color around the outside edges because that's the color not because that's a shadow but because that's a color and that's what I'm doing here because that first pink I put down wasn't pink enough it didn't match the picture and a lot of times I just keep adding layer after layer of color until it kind of works for what I'm looking for. I knew that this card was going to end up being about that background rather than about the rose so even though I was trying to do one really nice rose I'm not overly worried about it because it's the overall effect of the card that I am looking to create but just kind of slowly trying to blend some of the colors some of the edges so I don't end up with too much hard edges in any of these spots but you can always go back in later it's always wise to go back over your coloring or look at it at least when you get the whole thing done because by the time it dries you might find that things dry differently some edges might dry harder than you expected because when you put this ink into the paper you're wetting the paper and you know anything that's wet is going to get darker it's going to get a little discolored so I'm relatively happy with where this is I just want to throw a little bit more red in the center and then go on to the rest of the card. These leaves I really actually didn't need to go in and do this much detail on them after I'm getting done I realized I spent a long time on that that didn't necessarily need to be spent but I threw some color in there a couple different greens and then started throwing color into the other flowers and the thing I want you to notice is that I'm just kind of throwing color in there I'm not being really careful about it if you want to Google a particular type of flower like a particular breed of it breed is that what they're called I don't even know particular kind of rose if you Google that name you'll get side views and top views and all that sort of thing so you can get into all the detail on these roses but I knew the background was going to be the big thing that would make this card sing so I'm trying to keep the same colors that I already had in the first rose I want to have that flavor of having yellow roses with some pink and red in them and for now I'm just throwing color in here because I want to get to that background and make sure that I'm not spending all my time on these perfect roses and then I screw up the background so it's always fun to put the better details in the tidying up of the roses in later and I started grabbing blues and greens and blue greens and just randomly placing them down in blobs see I've said before on Instagram it's blobs of color that's how we do it and the secret to this is a lot of color just lots and lots of layers of color and keep going over it and over it and I wanted to build up to have that one layer of that yellow green right around the sentiment so it was nice and readable and then just kept kind of going over the rest of it here and there the whole time just until that starts to soften so you can see it begin to soften and here's where I realized I really didn't need to spend any of that time on those leaves because I was just going around with that blue green anyway and then I took my mini mister that I keep on hand it's got some colorless blender and it don't do this with ranger solution or alcohol you buy at the store anything you want this to be colorless blender I did a couple spritzes so that will help to I guess kind of hide a little bit of any of the places that didn't blend well by making a sort of mini dot pattern and then I took the inside of the mister and just making large dots you could do this with a colorless blender marker but doing it this way you can get out a little bit more color and you know drop an actual drop of it rather than pushing the marker into it and sometimes it'll make a different effect and that sort of thing and once all of this is done then you can go in and tidy up the roses a little bit more and one of the other things that I started doing before I went into the roses was brightening up the leaves see this is why I didn't really have to do anything with the leaves I could have just put the green in afterward this YG03 is a really good color to push into other colors to make it more green and here's more of what it looked like a little darker in color than it appeared in the video and you can see I've kind of mushed up my flowers a little bit but that background is the thing that makes it sing that background and the front flower are the ones that have a real impact so that's where I wanted to put my focus and my time and so there you go there's the background that everybody's been wanting to see I will have more of those over time as I do them here on YouTube because I enjoy doing them they're a lot of fun I will see you guys again in another video thanks for stopping by and hitting that like button bye bye


Hello, I'm Matthew Horkey, wine author and owner of the site ExoticWineTravel.com, and I'm going to show you four unique and exotic wines available in the U.S. that offer superb value. I spend my entire time traveling around the world finding unique and exotic wines, and I spend a lot of time in Central and Eastern Europe, and that's what I'm going to show you here today. The first wine we have is the Tillia Estate Pinot Gris from Slovenia, the Vipava Valley, beautiful valley in Slovenia, Pinot Gris, widely planted here. This is a perfect alternative for people that love Pinot Grigio, but maybe want to show something different than Italian style. This is an outstanding producer in Vipava Valley, a small family-run estate that focuses on Pinot Graves, especially Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir, which is also available in the U.S. You know, I think that Pinot Gris is all such a delicious zipper, and almost everybody likes it. I think tropical, like a lot of tropical pineapple flavors, star fruit, white peach, mineral notes, maybe some of that flittiness crushed rock that all this wine eats like, wow. Greatest of the beautiful, crisp, clean, and for a wine that can be found under $19 in the U.S., I think, offers a lot of value for money. Now, it's winter season, so people want to find good value red wine. We have three here today. Let's start out with a wine that you can find sometimes at around $11 U.S. Definitely under $18, but sometimes under $11. This is the Tikvesh Vranis Special Selection from North Macedonia, small country right above Greece. Vranis is a grape that delivers a lot of color, a lot of flavor, a lot of tannins, a lot of acidity. I think people that like Zinfandel's will really like it. It's actually related to the grape, and Tikvesh is a fantastic producer. By the way, for all the wines I'm using, I used my new Corvind Pivot and my Corvind Model 6 here. I think these make great gifts for wine lovers because it allows you to preserve the wines for weeks, months, or even years. And in the case of the Model 6, you never even have to pull the cork. We actually have a discount code for 10% off all systems and accessories at Corvind Shop. I'll put that up on the screen right now, back to the wine. So this Vranis is only aged in concrete, so you're going to think of more pure fruit flavors. A lot of dark cherry kind of pruny notes, plum, even chocolate type notes, and kind of this unique, if you have like a Mediterranean herb mix that you like to sprinkle on meat, you kind of get that sensation as well.  And for a wine that you can find in the low teens, also really, really nice value for money. We're moving on to another unique grape from Croatia, Plovac Mali, which is the offspring of the original Zinfandel actually. Plovac Mali is the most widely planted red grape in Croatia. Big, burly, high alcohol, really can be quite tannic at times, perfect for meats during these holiday months. This is the Kamarna 7, Plovac Mali 2016. This is barrel aged. You can find this at CroatianPremiumWine.com, it can be delivered mostly all over the US. It's a little more serious. This is a wine that retails for around 19 US dollars. Now for people that like Mediterranean reds, I'm talking about the south of France, so we're really going to kind of get off on the style. You're going to get a lot of meatiness, some roast, almost like crushed rose petal, some nice cherry flavors, full bodied, lots of complexity, lots of layers. A wine that I think will go great with Christmas dinner. If you're having stuff like baked hams, roast meats type deal, I think this is going to please a lot of people at the table. Really complex wine, especially for a bottle that's around 1999. The last wine is from a unique grape that I love called Xenomavro from Greece. This is the Elfa Estate single vineyard hedgehog Xenomavro 2017. Over 10 years ago, when I first started tasting Greek wines, this bottle, an older vintage was the first Greek wine I've ever had. I personally love this grape Xenomavro. It's for fans that like Nebbiolo, kind of Barolo, Barbaresco, have high acid high tan, some nice pretty flavors. Sometimes you get tar, rose petal, perfume type notes along with some nice sour cherry notes. Let's see if this delivers as well. This also has some of those tari notes, a little bit of floral notes. That's not as perfuming as some examples of Xenomavro, but still really good. Were these two reds moved towards maybe the middle to the darker red fruit spectrum, this is definitely more on the red, red, red fruit spectrum, offers tremendous value. This wine can age to as found in the US for around 20, 21 bucks. All of these wines, I highly recommend the wines that I would love to drink. I hope you get a chance to find them, try them, taste them, stay safe and enjoy your holiday season. Hello. Thanks for watching. Hey, you made it to the end. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, click the bell so you know when new videos are out. For more content like this, check out our Patreon page where you get some behind the scenes exclusive content. Thanks for watching. Cheers. Cheers.