 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok. I'm an artist. I work in a lot of mediums. I do a lot of different things from large frameable pieces to small things you can put in the mail to sketchbook drawings, which is what I'll be doing today. And in this drawing, I am trying to finish off my animal sketchbook. I started this one earlier this year and I am two pages from the end. So this is the second to last drawing. I will take more suggestions in the comments down below. But this suggestion came from someone whose child, whose daughter loves possum. Now possum are a very, shall we say, not cute animal. It's kind of ugly in all honesty. And I wasn't really sure that I wanted to do this, but I thought it would be a good challenge to perhaps share a video, not because anybody wants to draw possum necessarily, but showing you ways that you can make something cuter, try some of these tips. There's five of them here and I'm going to deploy them all in this drawing. So let's get started. First, my apologies to the opossum mamas who think you have the cutest babies in the world. I'm sorry. You guys all grow up to have like a weird shape. Your walk is kind of weird. You have strange teeth, the just big giant teeth in all the pictures on Google. You guys need a manny and a petty. Have you ever heard of that? A little getting a little manicure. Your hair is kind of scraggly. There's just so many with bald spots, weird elongated noses. There's just not a lot of classic beauty going on. I'm sorry if that's insulting, but I'm going to make you really cute by exaggerating your features. Okay, little opossum. And I say opossum in the United States. It's opossum and they are, I believe related to rodents. There are possum that are marsupials and those are in Australia. So they're kind of different animals. So I'm going to try to remember to say opossum because I'm doing something in the United States for this little creature. So for exaggeration of features, it's kind of like caricatures. You exaggerate features, make people's ears bigger than they are or their eyes bigger than they are, et cetera. And I'm not going to go cartoony here. You could go cartoony large with things like the eyes and the nose and stuff, make the ears bigger. I'm making them just a little bit bigger because I want to make it look more like a baby animal because baby animals are at least cuter and making them brighter colors. So the pink is like a little brighter than what I saw in a lot of photographs. A lot of them have more of a grayish nose rather than a pink nose. So, look for a lot of references when you're trying to create something that's going to try to be cuter because you might get ideas from something. Well, that one little animal has cuter fur on that picture from that angle. So then use that. And the drawing here is a compilation of a whole bunch of photos to try to put together something in a unique position at least. So now I'm going to add an accessory. You can add hats and sweaters and scarves and all kinds of things to make them super cute. Someone else suggested that to me when I posted about having this as a suggestion for a drawing posted that on social last week. I decided to add a flower. Rather than adding something unnatural, like, you know, gear to wear. So just something to hold instead. And that was just a little buttercup. And then I also recommend hiding the ugliest bits. Now, if it's an animal that has like a super ugly face, then draw the back of the head. Like, you know, find some way to put the animal in a position where something that you find kind of creepy is hidden. And the tails of these animals, they look kind of stiff, they curve, but they look, I don't know, they look kind of gross. So I decided to make it curve around whatever this creature is hanging off of. And I have no idea if they climb. I did not research deeply enough to find out, but I'm going to pretend that they do. And then you want to make it cuddle a bowl. So instead of making all of that fur that looks like there's bald spots on it, I just kept blending so that I could end up with fur that looked softer. But I still had to keep the character of all that sticky outty bits because there's lots of fur that just sticks out all over. I tried putting a little bit of a pale pinkish color in some of the open areas so that maybe I'd still carry some of the feeling that there's skin showing because that's what I saw in so many of the photos. Yeah, I kind of feel bad for these guys. They need like a hair club for opossum or something so that they'll be a little bit, I don't know, more cuddly. Everybody should be cuddly. Everybody should be loved, including these really crazy opossum. But I was trying to figure out how to make the body curve around so that the arm and the leg on the right side, I guess on the opossum's right are the ones hanging on the other side of the thing it's hanging from. And then this, the leg facing us had to like curve over and grab onto that same thing. It was like trying to figure out how a mouse would crawl on something since I was trying to relate it to another animal that I did know, since I didn't find a critter in this position. So just kind of spinning the animal around that way. But then I just kept trying to blend that fur and make it a little more dense even though it had to be looking like it was sharp and had lots of sections in it. And that was accomplished with value and color. So trying to go back and forth between warm and cool grays and leaving some value differences between them. So it wasn't just all smooth kind of fur, more like ready kind of fur. So there's the arm and the leg there in the backside hanging around the other side of the twig that it's hanging off of. And I'm guessing it probably has to be a really large twig if it's holding the animal's weight, I don't know. Or maybe it's, maybe I'm really making it into a baby. I don't know if babies climb. Who knows? The babies climb onto their parents. I did see pictures of like three, four, five, six babies sitting on mama's back getting carried around. So I guess they do climb at least a small amount. So I kept kind of going over the fur trying to figure out what to do and like would I cuddle this thing? And just adding more fur until I felt like I was done making it like huggable. Gosh, I feel bad saying anything is unhuggable because everything should be huggable. But you know, such as life, right? Some of us are just not as cute as others. I can attest to that in my own life. All right, then you wanna pop in a little bit of color because the animal is basically brown and gray. And it helps in any kind of drawing to have a pop of some color. So I have that yellow from the flower. So that was one pop. I wanted something a little stronger because I was originally thinking about making this brown or gray kind of branches so that it was heavy enough, like thick enough to hold the weight of the animal. And then I decided, you know, it's just a made up drawing anyway. So I'm gonna make it green as though it's like shoots of something. Hopefully it's a sturdy enough plant that can stand up to the weight of this little cute creature. Cause it's getting cuter. I'm feeling better about it as I'm getting through the drawing but adding shading to it to try to darken and make that color pop because that's also going to lighten the color in the animal. If I start darkening the color in this other element that has a lot of color in it, everything is seen in relation to the other colors that are next to it. So those really dark eyes, the darkish value in the ears and in that tail. And then you get into the nice darks in the greens. And that starts at least breaking things up so that you have some pops of really strong contrast. Next up is finishing off the tail. Now that I knew what else was happening in the drawing and knocking it back so that it's a little less bright, gets a little less attention because I want it curving behind the branch so it doesn't actually take up too much attention. And add the whisker pads in to hold the whiskers with a dark pencil and I'll use a white pencil to add in some details to soften up some of the fur. And this is a technique that I use throughout the rest of this sketchbook is using colored pencil over top of alcohol marker. And that helps to kind of give you the ability to refine some of the marker strokes that you might not have been able to refine tightly before. So here's the rest of the sketchbook. I'm gonna put links to some of the YouTube videos for some of these, but all these ones that have a strip down the side are ones from the drawing on nature class. You can either take the full class with all 10 animals in it or you can just do one at a time and just take one little class learn how to draw one animal. And these are all done with alcohol markers on drawing paper. So there is my little guy. Tell me if you think he's cute. Is he huggable? Would you touch him? Even if he's a rodent? Let me know. Thanks for sticking around for this crazy, crazy video. I hope you got some good tips that you can use to make some of your animals look a little bit cuter than they might otherwise. And if you are the mom of that young lady, please do contact me. I have something I would like to send her and I'll see you guys later. Have a great weekend. Go create something every day. Check you out next week.