 Hi there, it's Sandy Almak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm calling this The Jungle City Selfie, and you'll see why as it develops. I've got my card base cut, I die cut a square out of the front of it, and my images are stamped they're going to be on the inside of my card. And what I've done is drawn a pencil line to give myself the window so I know where the window is going to open, and then I'm going to start my scene. Now often I will start my scene by coloring the animals first, that sort of thing, coloring the stamps, but this one I wanted to make sure the background was going to work before I spent all the time on the animals. And so I started with my light gray pencil, or light gray pencil, light gray marker, because that gives me the ability to sketch in a little bit of the outlines and give myself some placement for the items that are going to be on the card. And since I messed up with my little gray there, I'm just covering it up with some of the dirt. I'll just color this dirt at the beginning with a couple of different browns because they're going to be standing on some dirt, and it's going to give me a nice big empty area to write on top of with either a white or a black pen, because the color is enough in the middle with these two shades of brown that I could actually write on it with either one, since this is the inside of the card. Get those colors kind of blended in, and then I'm going to work on the outside. Now what I'm creating is a screen behind my animals. If you have ever done selfies in places where you weren't, like sometimes in airports they do this, they have a big picture of something and you can stand in front of it and take a selfie and have some strange scene behind you, but you don't actually have to be at the place. You can just put the scene behind you, well the animals are going to be doing that. So I'm creating two poles up and down the side and a little strip of green in between them because the pole then will hang out further than where the edge of the green is at. And just going to create my poles around that gray line, because that's where the gray line kind of helps to establish where those poles are going to be. And so then I'll just finish out coloring on the background and then cut off my poles at the top, so they're roughly even, which I do mess up later in this video. So one of the good things about coping markers is you just keep coloring over top of something and you can kind of make it work in some way. My marker was running out, so I switched now to my darker colors, which I'm going to use enough of anyway that nobody's going to know that my marker ran out at the top. And I'm going to start creating some sections. I'm doing negative coloring, negative coloring is coloring the space around the object and I'm picturing where some leaves might be and where those shapes might be. I'm continuing to draw them, you notice, in between the poles, because if you stop at the edge of the poles, then it's going to look weird. So I'm just going to throw a bunch of this sort of dark to middle green. There is a darker one that we're going to use, but use a little bit of this color to start creating shapes and just start to define some of those edges and figure out exactly where you want your trees to go. And you can work on more of the detail in the next layer, but I'm just trying to figure out how I want my branches to be laid out a little bit or how this background layer should be laid out. If you're hearing little pops and noises in the background, my neighborhood has been exploding for weeks with fireworks. They are illegal here, but it just keeps happening. So if you hear noises or if the dogs go insane, that is what's causing it. Hopefully at some point, everyone will run out of money and things that go boom. So I'm going to work my way around this other side and continue with my little shapes. You can see some of them are defined leaves. Some of them look more like palm fronds. You can do a variety of different types of lines. And if you've taken the Copic Hex Art Class over on my artclasses.com, art-classes.com website, there's a lot about how to color leaves and different shapes of leaves and different shapes your nib can make and that sort of thing. So I'm using some of that information here as I'm creating these, these trees in the background. Because some of them I'm just going to do darker lines on top of other lines. It's almost like making grasses, but up in the sky or up in the sky in the trees in the forest. And nobody's going to critique whether or not that's an actual shape of a tree. You could Google what is in the jungle and look at pictures and get ideas for shapes of leaves or you could just kind of doodle them. I'm kind of going different directions. I'm going to make different kinds of leaves, maybe some branches with actual rounded-ish kinds of leaves on them. You can go all kinds of crazy and nobody's going to care. They're going to be focused on the rest of this card because it's going to get cuter and cuter as we go. This is just setting the background, the whole mental scene for why these animals are standing in front of a screen. So I'm going to just continue to work my way round and round and round. Sorry, that's getting cut off the screen a little bit, but just doing the same kinds of strokes around the whole thing. Make sure you do carry them through if you have that little slip inside of the pole so that it looks like it kind of continues. You could actually make the backdrop there go right up to the pole and be just fine. It wouldn't really hurt anything, but it's more obvious when you can see that there's a pole there. So there I'm just about done with the YG97 and now I can go in with a white pen and I'm actually adding a little bit more detail onto it by popping a little bit of a highlight on the side of each one of my poles and then using my white pen to make a little place on the top where they're tied to the poles. And now it's time to color the animals and for the most part on these animals I'm going to use two color really simple blending. If I use any blending at all there's going to be some areas where I only do one color and I don't stress out about any blending on an animal like the elephant that's only one color you know he's just one gray. It's kind of helpful to have a little bit of shading on him but it's not crucial either because we're going to put even more into this card and the fact that there's all these animals there is going to be overwhelmed by everything else. So don't stress out too much if you're not someone who does a lot of shading although I guess if you're going to do a card like this and you're going to do that whole background you probably do like the color you probably get into your shading just a little bit. But I'm going to keep it simple I'm going to zoom in here hello firecrackers you can probably hear my dog circling me he's running in circles around the table because he wants to go outside and see the fireworks. He's decided he likes them I guess I don't really know when they're far away he just thinks they're fascinating. He's actually sat in the screen door at the back of the house and watched as fireworks go up in the neighborhood back behind me. So here I'm going to add some brown onto two of my animals and you can see that I've used the same colors for those two the giraffe and the lion didn't even worry about switching up colors. I wanted to be sure that I picked some different kinds of greens for my alligator or is he a crocodile he's alligator but I wanted him to definitely look different than the background so I didn't pick some of those desaturated colors I picked some that are a little bit on the brighter side but not super bright and just do some real quick two color blending on him as well. And now for what's going to be hanging on the the sign in the back that you could make it anything if it's a birthday card you could like draw a birthday party back there. If you went on vacation to a certain place you could draw a picture of that city skyline I'm just going to draw some random city it's just going to have some buildings in it because I think it's hilarious that these little animals would want their picture taken in front of a city as it reminds you of any movie you've seen because that's one of my favorite movies but they're just pretending that they've gone to the big city and they're going to get their picture taken in front of all these big buildings and all I'm doing is taking a couple different grays and I'm making boxes so you don't have to get real detailed about it unless you're specifically drawing a city in which case once again you can pull up a picture on Google and get some of the shapes right get a few of the buildings right you know if I were to do the say the Seattle skyline I'd make sure that I got this space needle right so there's you know a way that you can you can make them perfect so you can do the maybe the Eiffel Tower and then some city buildings that are generic around it but the Eiffel Tower will communicate where it's at you can also do a crazy sky in here if you want I'm just going to do a plain blue sky because there's so much going on in this card so I'm just going to do a plain blue sky behind here and then I'm going to start adding a little detail onto my buildings I can add more buildings in darker colors just kind of layer them over top of each other I can start putting some windows don't fret about making absolutely every window in every single building and don't worry about them being even or anything just give some suggestion of them if you start getting to detail that it could be a little crazy for me I liked having some detail in there since the animals were not colored with great detail if you have some images in the front that are super detailed then you're going to want those shapes in the background to be simpler and as far as color in between them if your images in the front are light make sure you start adding some darks behind them so that they separate a little bit and they don't all tend to look that about the same cue that same mid-tone you want some of that to be darker if you get this done and your your background looks great but you just need more pop in the animals then add more shadows to them you can always go back in and add some more contrast and make them pop out to the front a little bit more so forget you can do some of your windows sideways you can do all different kinds of patterns add some towers and things there's all kinds of radar things that come off off of buildings and little round tips for buildings little extra bits on the top of them it just adds a little bit of detail makes them feel a little bit more fun little bit more realistic well realistic as much as this can have any realism in it because it's animals getting a selfie in the middle of the jungle yeah you know sometimes I make myself question my own sanity when I say realism and I'm talking about an image like this but anyway it's a lot of fun to play around with something like this here's the finished card with the panel glued on the inside so you can see from the outside you think the animals are in the city but then you open it up and you've got all those critters really out in their natural environment but they just have a sign behind them which is kind of ridiculous right I hope you enjoyed this video if you did click that like button you can click on my face to subscribe to my channel you can click on another video to watch here there's a class you might be interested in over at artclasses.com there's also links in doobly-doo for all the products and I'll see you guys later