 Hello there, it's Sandy Almak, artist and crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to be coloring a quote-unquote Dutch rabbit family. I like these little black and white bunnies. I see them when I go to the fair every year, and I thought it would be fun to do them on an Easter card because I don't know that I've ever seen anybody do this kind of rabbit for an Easter card. And with these Anita Jerome stamps from Colorado Craft Company, I thought it would be fun. The colors are going to be listed over on the blog, so if you want to see what those are, you can check that out. These are Prismacolor pencils, and I'm coloring on a Neenah Environment Desert Storm. And it's just like Neenah paper. It's the same texture as the Neenah Solar White if you're used to using that, except it's brown, and it's got little flecks in it, so it looks very natural, even though it's just a flat manufactured paper. It's not a craft. You could do some things on craft, but I found a lot of the craft papers have something in them that makes them a little slicker. It's just kind of a weird thing, depends on which brand, but this one is at least very consistent because it's manufactured the same way as the Neenah is. I've stamped it in no-line ink, which on this paper comes out a little bit darker than it might on, say, a white paper. And I didn't have to stamp over it as many times because my ink pad I have refilled, but it just doesn't seem to get very dark, which is part of the idea. You want it to sort of disappear. So I'm going to be coloring over top of these lines in as much of an area, much of the areas as I can. Gosh, I can't even talk right now, but I'm going to try to cover them up because the point of doing no-line coloring is so that your artwork looks like a drawing and it doesn't look like you've colored in a stamp. There's a lot of people that don't like this look, or they're not ready to try this look. That's perfectly fine, but I enjoy it. I find it a lot of fun. Now, a lot of people ask how do you color an animal when it has black in it? You know, a black bear, a black dog, that sort of thing. And here I've got a black rabbit. And I need to find a way to create dimension within that black. Even though in a photograph you kind of see a wall of black, sometimes even an eye will disappear, you can still create some difference in it. I know where the stamp lines are. You can refer to the little sheet that comes with the stamps in order to see where that is, but I can create with a black pencil on top of a gray a bunch of dimension. And when I do that, I can make the ear in the back darker so that the ear in the front pops forward. Color in the center of the ear, so it sort of looks like they're bowl-shaped ears. All kinds of stuff that you can do to create dimension even though it's a black section of the animal. These particular Dutch bunnies, I don't know anything about rabbits, I'm just going to tell you that right up front. Probably going to say things wrong in this, but I did look up black and white rabbits. There's lots of different kinds of markings on them. And these are called Dutch markings. I don't think it's a Dutch breed, I think it's just Dutch markings. And the bunnies that have this particular kind of marking are a small bunny and they don't have these big long ears. They normally have like little smaller ears or kind of little portly bunnies. But you know, this is a card, so I hope anybody who is a bunny aficionado will forgive me for not having the right kind of bunny to be coloring in this. I'm trying to add some shading using the gray pencil on top of the white to create some difference between each of the planes of the rabbit tube. There's an arm, or do you call it an arm when it's an animal? Is it an arm with a paw or is it just the four legs? I don't know. I don't know what these things are called. I'm not an animal person in that kind of a way that I've studied those sorts of words. But nonetheless, I'm trying to create some difference so that one of the parts of the rabbit moves to the back, another moves to the front. There's a shadow under the chin, all that kind of stuff. It is important in trying to create some realism. The two little bunnies are going to be done the same way as mama bunny or daddy bunny, not sure which it is. I considered adding something grillish to the mama bunny just to say that it was a mama bunny, but I opted not to. But when you're doing no-line coloring, you could do that. You could add a bow to the mother's neck if you wanted to. Whereas it's a little harder to do that when you've stamped it in black and you're trying to rely on those lines to carry the whole image for you. But again, I'm doing the gray first, and then I'll add the black on top to create some dimension. And when I do my colored pencil work, I keep my pencils really sharp, and I use the quiet sharp pencil sharpener. I'll link that in the supplies. And it's a BMF. It's a giant, giant, giant machine, and it's not quiet. I don't know why they call it the quiet sharp. But it does have an auto stop, which means if you put your pencil in, and once it's sharp, it doesn't keep sucking your pencil in. It'll keep turning, but it won't keep eating at your pencil. And sometimes after that, if I want a super sharp point, a machine can only get it so sharp. So I'll take a handheld sharpener, just a little one. Almost any of them seem to be, they seem to work about the same. You can just take one or two turns in order to get that super, super, super fine sharp point. So if there's an area that you need an extra amount of detail, sometimes I keep that on hand to just keep my pencil really, really sharp in a particular area. You can see how I'm creating dimension in this little bunny's legs because I've made some roundness to that shape. It still looks like he's got a little black leg down there on the bottom half of him, but he's got some dimension in there. It's not just a solid black. And of course, adding some gray to give him a little bit of roundness in the whites all over him as well. And then there is a little bow on this bunny. So that's why there's a gap there. You may not be able to see that real well on camera. And there's mama's toes. And I filled in the leg behind there. I had forgotten to do that as well. So that helps to pull the little bunny on the right in front of the mama as well. So I gave him a little blue bow on the neck and then started coloring in each of the little Easter eggs. I debated whether to make them colored eggs, you know, like patterns and shapes on them. And this was so realistic, I thought I don't know that these bunnies would actually decorate their eggs. And I know I'm not going for hyper realism here because these eggs are not the right size for bunnies. If they were actually holding eggs, the eggs would be like uncariable by little bunnies. So since we're not going for realism, I decided I'm at least going to make them feel like, you know, the bunnies didn't do something other than color them. So they just have one color on them, not little details and stuff, but you could put that on yours if you wish. And then I'm giving a little bit of roundness and dimension to the basket as well. The basket will be darker on the inside and that sort of thing, then dark over on the left. And I'm trying to keep from drawing in too much of the detail, just do a few lines around one side, going horizontally and then a couple going vertically just to indicate the basket leave and leave it at that, not get too crazy about it. And then some grass. Now I had colored this once before I did this and I wrecked it because I chose too bright of a color for the grass. It was like this screaming bright green. And it stole all the attention. It just sucked the attention directly to the grass. So I put with a really soft green instead, a very muted neutral kind of green. And then added just a few little strokes of a brighter green, not the bright green that I had started with on the other one, but a few strokes of a brighter green just to pull a little bit of brightness out of it, but not enough to take over. Because when one element that isn't your main element starts to just go crazy, you need to pull that back if at all possible. So it's always good to test your colors. I thought I needed a brighter color on this craft paper, or this desert storm paper, because when you're coloring on a colored paper, most of your colors need to be a little bit on the opaque side. They need to be a little stronger than you might use on a piece of white paper because you've got all that background color that you're fighting. I overdid that call when I did the grass, so everything else is much more simply done and that sort of thing. So you might wanna test on a scrap sheet of paper. So I added a few little clouds to the sky and then decided I was gonna take the sentiment and go over it with my colored pencils so it would just kind of go with everything and feel right. I would never try this if I were trying to use a font in the sentiment that was like computer driven. Now these might be computer driven, but they feel handwritten. So you can get away with doing that by hand, but if it's really sharp edges and stuff, I wouldn't bother with trying to do that. If you are a lover of all things bunny, then you're in luck because all week long, I have videos planned with bunnies in them. Yay for that, make sure you're subscribed so you get those in your inbox, click the little bell so that you will be reminded when one of my videos goes live as well as you can go to the inspiration tab on my blog and find all of the bunny videos that I've ever made. They're all in one place in all different mediums just for you. All right, thanks so much for clicking the like button and I will see you again very soon with more bunnies. Bye-bye.