 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnock and it's National Creativity Day. So to inspire you to get out your art supplies I'm going to show you how to turn circles into art. Today's project stems from something I shared on Instagram a while back in the spring and I wanted to share a version of it that's much simpler and hopefully will help you to get your brain tuned a little bit more in that direction but let's look at the video first. What would your response be if I said the only natural talent that an artist has is the desire to create? Everything outside of that is a skill that they have learned and some people pick those skills up quicker than others but everybody, everybody can learn those skills if they have the desire to create. I couldn't agree more with what the woman said in that voiceover and I want to share something with you today that I think is going to help you to move toward creating something as crazy as seeing birds in splatters but in a much more controlled way because I think it's potentially something that can help you get there because we're going to make birds and trees and things out of circles. Circles are a shape we're familiar with so you're not looking at blobs of weird color and trying to make something out of it in this particular case. So I'm using Yupo paper which is a plastic synthetic paper and alcohol inks. Alcohol inks are a lot of fun they're very intense in color and you can get them to make near perfect circles but a lot of us tend to just put a whole lot of dots all over our paper and then we add more dots and more dots because we get excited about that. Have a little patience and then when you start to add your dots separate from each other and let them dry when you put the next row of dots the ones that go in between these they're not going to blend and take over as much because they're not meeting with more liquid when it gets to the end of making its circle. It meets just kind of a dry surface. Some of it may track over into it and you'll see one that does and I'll show you a little bit about what you can do to keep that from happening. You can see my hair blowing in the corner of the video. I was using my breath to just put a light breeze across the surface to try to dry things a little faster. Don't use a hair dryer with this paper because it will melt and I've sometimes used an airbrush with no ink in it just an airbrush so it blows air but that will move it too fast. Here I want to move it very very slowly. If I moved that spot that I just pointed to with an airbrush it would move it way too quickly in there and my breath is just enough to get it to dry a little quicker without putting pressure on it because you don't want to press into the dots at all. But you can work around the page if you're making a whole bunch of them in a row like I am just switch from one area to another in order to work in a place that's got dry stuff on both sides. Some of them will take over that blue one definitely took over the orange and that's fine and there's also some circles in here that are less than perfect and we're going to fix that when we get to the final stage of turning these into pieces of art. You can use any colors you like with this bright happy colors you can go with all different greens you can mix greens and blues and make something that's very analogous in the color way. Lots of different things. I'm going to add just one more little one little tiny one here in the tucked into the corner just so all of these join in some way everything touches something. I love it when they just kiss each other at the edge but sometimes they get a little little wonkiness we can deal with that in the next stage. Once everything is completely dry we're going to turn the circles into trees using color pencils. I'm just going to use a black color pencil here very simple and this one is by Prismacolor but you can also use Polychromos or most others. Cheaper pencils may not work as much if they're not as pigmented and I'm going to go around the edge of all my circles and make a nice thick line which is more than just one pencil line going around it. I am very sketchy when I do my drawing so I go back and forth like this to try to get something smooth and what I ended up doing was some areas got a little thicker and some were a little thinner. I just thickened everything up to the thickest place around the entire thing to try to make it mostly even but perfection is not required this is art. Remember that it's going to be something handmade so I'm going to repeat the process going through all of the circles and a quick tip if you have a lot of sticky alcohol that gets stuck around the outside edges sometimes that will happen and as the ink collects sprinkle a little baby powder or talcum powder of some kind on the surface and make sure that it gets covered and then buff it off with a cotton ball that's going to take away the sticky and make the paper easier to work with. So next I'm going to add a horizon line mine's going to be a little curved you can also do one that's straight and then I'm going to sketch in some tree trunks very simple to do wider at the bottom skinnier at the top you can add tree trunks that have branches you could make yours straight they don't have to be curved like this lots of different ways to do it even just a popsicle stick kind of line at the base of each one would still be really great and I'm thinking about all the different kind of uses that you can have for a project like this these kind of trees would be excellent for a greeting card for wrapping around a pencil can you could make art for a child's room lots of great things to do the white paint I'm using here is called bleed proof white by ph martins and I have found it works pretty much on everything it doesn't suck the color back up into the the whites the white stays really white and that seemed like a good thing to add here these would work really well with these highlights on them for balloons or you could do lollipops lots of different ways you could use this kind of an idea to make something very very simple yet very happy and cheerful so let's talk about turning these circles into something else but I want to address an issue that I had when I was making the something else which is I've got some little blobs of color little drops of color you can see that jumped off of the bottle and what do you do with that you can sometimes use a little cloth like a Kleenex or a paper towel or something with some alcohol on it and kind of get in there and try to scrub it I decided not to go that route because that was just going to be too dangerous getting close to that pink and also red colors when you're working with anything reds are notoriously not wanting to lift they're going to stay in the paper so it might not be worth it anyway so I came up with another idea after waiting for my blobs to all dry so I could add the blue one in there and watch it do its thing and then I'm going to add one more over on the other side so I have a little imbalance and like odd numbers when I do things like this even numbers just seem too mechanical but that one of course came out shaped a little weird you know it's always the last one there's always going to be one that does something funky so what I have done to fix the blobbiness those little spatters is to add more deliberate ones touching a glass pen to the either the top of the bottle of ink if you've got excess ink there or just dipping it into the cap and both of those will work so now I'm going to use that same glass pen all the links for the supplies by the way are in the doobly do and I'm going to dip it in there and I'm going to make one eyeball and I'm going to let that eyeball sit there first and see if it's going to be the big eye or the small eye because I'm going to do two different size eyes on these birds because they're going to be a funky bird band it's going to be cool so I made my big one first and then the small one you might want to make one dot on each and then let them sit there so you can see whether that's going to be the big or the small one because it takes a second for the 99 alcohol to do its thing and to decide how far it's going to go a glass pen is literally just a glass point that that you can dip into something and draw with and it's going to pick up different amounts of alcohol so I kept a tissue handy so I could just keep wiping it off I didn't want to have big drips of anything so I'm going to do the same process that I did for the trees and just give them nice big thick outlines around each one of these birds so you can add the outline around the outside for all of the circles first or you can just work on the birds one at a time you can also turn these into fish or other characters that are around you can make monsters out of them lots of different fun things you could do but I'm going to work on one guy first he's the leader of the band you'll see why he's the leader of the band in a little bit you can make the centers of the eyes either the same size or different they're funny either way so next up I'm going to be thinking about the wings and in this particular case there's a wing basically in an imperfection in the ink where I want to wing anyway it may have changed the angle that I'm doing it at but that's totally fine you may find places throughout the entire drawing that are going to be perfect places to cover up with that black line but there also might be places where you'll just ignore the fact that there's an imperfection there and depending on what medium you use if you have watercolor on watercolor paper that you're doing this on you're going to have more imperfections than you will with alcohol inks so I'm adding all of the noses and eyes noses their beaks and the eyeballs for each one of my birds and they started developing personalities and I was talking to them while I was working which was kind of funny and I just started adding in either wings or hints of wings sometimes in places where the imperfections were in the ink sometimes not and then added the legs to them I wanted them mostly to have short stubby legs but that would mean that the ones in the back would have to have longer legs than what I was wishing for so I moved the horizon line up for all of the ones in the background so only this big tall one ended up with legs everybody else has stubby legs and now the green one looks like it's in the front and so I decided since it is a band that they need some hairdos just a few of them not all of them so we have a mohawk for the lead singer the gal in the pink is one of the backup singers then we have the drummer in the back he's going to have a few little hairs sticking up off his head I just had so much fun with this I'm probably going to be making a lot more of these because they're way fun to do and if you want to try some please do share it with me I'd love to see what you're making if you have not yet joined in on the peace love and art challenge do so using the link in the doobly do to get more information and sign up for it and all week long on socials I'll see you with more mixed media types of projects and Friday I'll be back with more alcohol ink with colored pencil because I have been having fun can't wait to share that with you see you then bye bye