 Hi there, it's Sandy Almak, artist and crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to be doing a water-filled glass vase as an advanced colored pencil technique today. I don't do many advanced colored pencil things, so this is a treat for some of you who are ready for something like this. I'm going to be using the Altenew stamp set that's called Versatile Vases 2 and making a slimline card. I'm not showing the coloring of the flowers, but I will have the colors that I used over on the blog, so if you want to know what those colors were, you can grab those. I'm starting off by indicating where the water is, just where the water line is up to, and then I'm going to draw in my own stems, and the stems should all point to the center of the flower, wherever that middle of the flower is, and then having the stem go down into the vase itself. It's going to vary in how dark or how light it is as it goes through the vase, because it's going through glass, it's going through water. Sometimes you'll even see some wiggliness in the little lines themselves. I'm not going to indicate that here. I'm just going to keep it a little simpler, a little cleaner by not doing that. I'm just going to bring those stems down through the vase, and leaving a little white area in some spots is also really helpful so that it looks like that water is in front of the stems, because the stems are not the very front part of what you see when you're looking in the water. They're in the center of the vase, and there's water in front of it. In some areas, I'm going to create a really soft blend of a blue. Sometimes you can do this with a gray, because if you look at any glass that has water in it, and you put it in a different setting, it's going to take on the colors of what's around it. We think of water as blue, just because when you look at the ocean, you're seeing blue because it's reflecting the sky, and lots of other scientific reasons. But if you move a glass to all different kinds of situations, you will see that the water takes on whatever the colors are around it. For the sake of argument, though, a light blue is going to work. It's still going to indicate some kind of water in it, and I'm going to put a few areas in that outside edge of blue, and some of it's going to go gray. The reason for that is because glass reflects the color that's around it as well. So any colors that are in your picture can be brought in very slightly, at least, into whatever glass that you're using. So if there's going to be these red flowers, you might have, you might actually see some red reflected in the vase. The best way to learn how to do this is to look at every glass thing around you. And I'm probably going to create some weird obsessiveness in you if you start doing this, but it's a good obsession. So go for it. Every time you sit down at the dinner table or you go to a restaurant or you see a vase of flowers, look really carefully at the shapes of the highlights and the shapes of the shadows and look at the edges of the glass too, because that is going to start to teach you some ways to cheat when you make artwork. Because when you are creating something as a piece of artwork, you're trying to be visually convincing. And what's going to help is knowing what makes a piece of glass look visually convincing yourself by seeing it in real life. So I took a little bit of darker green and darkened the stems that are outside the glass and a little bit in that center section and then left some lighter at the bottom. And I'm going to add a little bit of reflection of the green color in the water itself because there are some green stems in there and the green will just give it a little bit more life. But now for the glass portion, I'm going to use two different gray pencils and there's no magic to this. I just happen to grab a warm gray that's a little darker and a cool gray that's a little lighter. Doesn't really matter a whole lot. I think both would work, whether it's cool or warm. And then started filling in not solid areas around that outside edge, but making them come and go. Because when you look at glass from the side, as it goes around the left and right side, it looks thicker because you're seeing the width of the glass. When you're looking at glass straight on, you don't see that width, but you do see it on those side edges. And if you're able to create some of those outside edges that are going to be a little thicker, that's going to help to make it convincing. Next, I am joining some of the outer areas with some of the inner ones and making them relate to each other. Because that's one of the things that I found from studying glass is a lot of the shapes are there because of other shapes. They're reflections of other areas and the way that water interacts with the glass itself. I don't know the science behind it, but I know the visuals because I train myself to look at what I see, not what I think I see. And even in areas like down here at the bottom, I'm going to be adding in some really strong contrast. But I'm leaving that white at the very, very bottom because that's what I see when I look at glass. Just because it's at the bottom doesn't mean it's always going to be dark. But there is a dark area at the bottom. There's a dark area around the edges of glass. There's all kinds of things that you can figure out by looking at glassware. So you have my permission to drive your family completely bunkers by asking them to move their glass over or will you move your plate to the left a little because it's interfering with this picture I'm trying to get of your glass. That's totally fine. I went on a cruise once where I was teaching and we were doing a lesson on highlights and shadows, especially on round shapes and rectangle shapes. And the rest of the cruise, everybody went around the ship looking for round and rectangle objects where they could assess where the lighting was coming from. And I completely endorse any kind of craziness for the furtherance of your art. You can make your family not, you can blame me for it. You can tell them it's homework and that your crazy art teacher told you to do this. So there's that. There's also a full class on coloring art with Copic markers over on my teaching site and it's called Clearly Copic. I have debated whether to do this class in colored pencil or not. And I haven't found very many of my colored pencil artists have been ready for an advanced colored pencil class and that sort of thing. So I may not end up doing that for a while but it is on the horizon because I love coloring glass regardless because it's just fun. I did create a little window reflection, you'll notice in that one open highlight area on the glass and made the lines of the window kind of bend around the curve where the glass is going so it's not a straight up and down kind of line. And I'm trying to make some sort of reflection a really soft one because it's very difficult to figure out where a reflection is going to be with glass. You can look up a lot of pictures of it and there's people who take these beautiful photos on a shiny white surface that show it the best. It's a lot harder when you can't look at that in real life. Like I don't have a shiny white surface that I can do that kind of study on and most restaurants I go to or my kitchen table, none of that is pure white. So I don't have a lot of study for that but I did want something on it just as an indication because it had an anchor for my card I needed to create. So the sentiment I just popped on a little banner on my card and then called it done after that. There is also a whole bunch of coloring glass videos that are collected over on my website on the inspiration tab so you can check that out if you wanna know more about coloring glass. And that's it for me. I will see you again very soon. I hope you have a wonderful day and that you too become obsessed with glass and taking pictures of and studying glass and making your family absolutely crazy. All right, I'll see you guys later. Take care, bye.