 Hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to be coloring with inks and then doing some pen work. So it's not technically pen and ink today. And I'm inspired for these cards by Maurice Sendax, where the wild things are, one of my favorite children's books. And I love his monsters. I love their playfulness. I love the scenes and the elements that I'm going to use in creating my cards. And look at how he handles light. Look at a lot of children's books because it's really obvious where light sources are a lot of times you can see that which side of the trees the moon is shining on that kind of thing. You can learn a lot from looking at illustrator's work. If you can't see it in real life, sometimes looking at how an artist has dealt with it might translate a little bit better into your brain. So I'm going to be making those cards using solid stamps, believe it or not. I know there's not much left of the solid stamp by the time I get done, but it's a good start and it's a way that you can adapt your stamps and turn them into monsters. So I'm starting off with a couple of Catherine Pooler inks. This one is called Shea Butter and I'm applying a little extra where the white lines are around the ears. Because that's how normally it would stamp and I wanted to be able to adjust the ear shape when I get to the pen and ink part so I wanted that colored yellow. And then I applied some other colors onto the stamp itself because I wanted those little subtle changes in color that Mori Sendak gets. So I added a little bit of sage and a little bit of rouge so that gave me some of those really subtle color changes in the elephant shape. Next I'm going to take some Eclipse Tape which I use for masking and I'm going to stamp a mask that I can cut out by hand with my little fussy cutting scissors. But before I do on this one, I want to kind of pencil in, pen in I guess, my ear, the ear shape just to practice that. But I also wanted to see if I wanted to put horns on it because if I want to put horns on it I want to cut around them when I do my mask so that when I do the background that actually works. So now I'm going to stamp the rhinoceros, I almost said rhinoceros and I'm going to give the rhinoceros a sweater just by simply using some washi tape and creating some stripes on the body of the rhino. And that's going to reflect again the Mori Sendak thing that he puts little sweaters on his characters which is really fun. I didn't bother masking out above and below the sweater. There is going to be a little overspillage of color but I'm not worried about it because I'm putting a background in there anyway so I'm going to cover that up. I'm working on letterpress paper and what I found is letterpress is kind of forgiving even if you get some spludging of one color as soon as you start moving ink across with another kind of color in the same area, it almost it either blends it in or it erases it. I'm not sure which but it's much more forgiving than using Nina. My first attempt on a card today when I was making these was a real failure. I used my Nina and my inking was just so awful. It went in the circular file pretty quickly. The scene that I'm going to put in here for the elephant is going to be basically the front cover of the book just with one of the monsters instead of a bunch and I started out with some tumble glass for the river and the sky and then distress oxide peeled paint for the grass at the bottom and the tree tops up above leaving some space in the tree tops I can add some other colors and then I used some distress ink regular distress ink bundled sage in the background. I'm mixing matching inks by the way because I don't have full sets of anything. I have most of the little mini distress ink pads because I bought them all together but everything else I hit or miss around this place. I don't really have anything specific that I I can say yes I use this color so I'm mixing and matching even throwing in again some of the shea butter from Catherine pooler to try to add a little bit of that yellow elsewhere in the scene a little bit more of it on the far side of the river etc and then let's get busy on the other one and do the inking of the background now both of these you could easily stop after you get the inking of the background done and maybe do some doodling in the animal itself to create the little elements that you want to put in your monster and leave the rest of the background as it is if you do really great inking work by all means do that I do terrible inking work as you can see in that bottom section I had some bundled sage still left in my blending tool and when I put the peel paint down there with it it kind of made a little mess down there then I had some of those other same colors that were stuck in my blending brush when I was using the tumble glass so I decided to make this a darker blue I guess I should have made it a darker blue in the first place but stormy sky is the other color that I'm putting in the background here so that I can create a night sky and I didn't mask out the moon because I figured I could just go around that real easily with the blending tool and then adding again the far side of the river using the bundled sage to stress sink and then I'll add one tree in this one to make it a little simpler I was working all day long on these cards this was this was an epic adventure in card making took me forever but it was a lot of fun to do and I was kind of getting antsy to get this thing done so I decided one tree was going to be easier than multiple trees for the drawing portion of my cards I'm using a micron pen and these come in all different sizes the one I'm using is the smallest it is a point zero zero five not a zero five but a double zero five that means it's super thin and when I was looking at Sendax work and trying to scale it down like try to see how small those lines would have to be his lines are really thin when he uses them full size so if I were to try to replicate that I would kind of need to match their proportion and that's where I went down to the super super fine size I was hoping to do this in pen and ink I realized none of my pens are quite this thin and I wanted to make sure that I captured that ratio of black line to the image itself I think this actually worked so I'm glad I scaled it this far down a thicker pen might have gone faster but it also wouldn't have let me the detail what I started with was putting in the elements where I'm changing the critter so I drew in the ear and the two horns I debated whether to put a giant eyeball in there the way some of the monsters have in Maurice's work but opted for the just a little curled closed eye so that would be nice and then just started adding the features in it now I'm going to speed this way the heck up because we could be here all day long because remember I told you it took me all day to get these done but a few tips that I have if you want to try this is using cross hatching and the line direction to the best of your ability what I mean is when you've got fur on an animal so this is actually a furry elephant is what it kind of turned out to be in the long run if you wanted to look furry then make a bunch of your lines go in the direction that the fur would go but I wanted to get darker so I looked at what Sendak did in his book and he did some cross hatching in different directions but the main stuff you can get the idea of the direction that all that fur goes by the way he put his primary lines so what I did was do my secondary lines in a different angle in order to try to make it so that I could get darker hues because you need to do something other than just have everything going in one direction the grasses I was just tickled when I was looking at his work to realize that not everybody who does penning stuff is one of those kind of artists and I admire their work but I can't do it those people who are able to make every line precise and perfect his work is very loose it's very much my kind of style maybe that's why I like his work so much because he just kind of puts the lines down and he doesn't worry if something crisscrosses over something else or if he's gonna make grasses he just does a whole series of small choppy lines and if you are someone who's taken my pen and ink techniques class you'll know that I'm not a perfectionist at all and I have nothing against those who are it's just not my style because I am just not a precise person in that kind of a way go look at where the wild things are go buy yourself a copy of the book don't just look for pictures on the web you can do that but you need the book in your house and you can actually see it nice and close up and analyze his work you can do that with any illustrator and I think I might start a series where I take some illustrator's work and try to see what it would take to replicate that kind of a style in card making and using that with our stamping because I love doing children's illustration you know that I have some storybook illustration classes on my website as well as the pen and ink stuff and Copic and watercolor and everything else but I do a lot of storybook types of things and I love that kind of a look and I think it fits well for cards and it tends to be a little simpler because we're not trying to make everything hyper realistic and perfect we're just trying to make cards and have fun doing it so the pen and ink work is done I added some stars into the lovely sky that I've got going and I realized I had forgotten to put the last little marks into the horn and the horn remember was stamped yellow in the beginning I added some white pen you may have missed that portion because I was going so fast added some white pen but once it was done drying I could go over it with the micron pen and add some shading to it so there is my finished two crazy Maurice Sendak inspired cards if you have an illustrator you want me to take a look at and see about replicating styles leave that in the comments down below I'd love to hear your suggestions and there's pictures of these over on my blog etc supply links are down below and everything too I also just had a post a few days ago coloring with inks as inspiration I don't color with inks a lot but I did gather what I do have and my way of using inks is not very typical because like I said I'm not a real good inker but you might find some interesting ways to adapt your inks that you already have to use them for coloring in different ways because I've got some fun masking techniques over there as well check all that out and I will see you again very soon take care and have a wonderful day bye