 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and today I am going to share how to color a teeny tiny, teeny tiny koala bear that fits in an envelope. This is so cute. This stamp set from Avery Elle has a number of different animals that you can put inside the envelope. The flowers come already in the same envelope stamp, so you can choose whether to mask them out, which I did once, and you'll see at the end a card that I made by removing those flowers entirely, or you could stamp the animal into it. One struggle that I had in trying to figure out what was the intent of this is how to mask this so that the koala bear looks like he's in the envelope. I get that I can mask out those angles in the front of the envelope so he'll be tucked behind it, but I didn't really want to cut out all those little flowers and have him kind of tucked into the flowers. I also didn't want him to look like he was behind all of the flowers. I wanted him partway in front, so I wanted this little paw that's hanging down to hang out in front of the envelope, and I also wanted that one ear on that same side to be in front of the flowers, and the other ear is tucked into the flowers. I did this simply by stamping it in no-line ink. You can do the same thing with any kind of really light gray ink or just a super light tone because I can change the color of anything, and I can just follow the stamp lines that apply to the koala bear and ignore the stamp lines that were any parts of those flowers and cover them up with color that goes with the koala bear instead of color that goes with the flowers, and that way I have one of those little ears is behind some flowers and the other is in front, and I give it a lot of depth by doing that. I'm using a couple different grays to create my koala bear. I looked up some pictures online. I recommend doing that when you're coloring animals. They have white around their eyes. There's a kind of a white around the nose and then underneath of the snout. The belly is white on these guys, but I debated whether or not to really go full white down there. I wanted him to appear like he was totally inside the envelope, so it felt like it needed to be a little bit darker. And by the time I was all done, I was definitely right in that decision. I wanted him to be a bit of a darker gray. The colors I'm using for the flowers, I'm going to keep pretty simple and uniform, meaning I'm not going to add a cacophony of blues and purples and oranges and everything because I want the attention to be on the koala bear. And I want the flowers to feel happy and cheerful, but not so much that the koala bear becomes secondary to that crazy bouquet of flowers. So I'm making them all pink flowers with some medium red shadows and then some deep red shadows. I'll even add some extra berries. One of the great things as well about using colored pencils with no line coloring is that you can add other things. I'm going to add other berries throughout the clusters so that I can have a little more color in there. And you can change up the shapes of the flower petals. If your pencil goes outside the lines, you can ignore that because it's going to get pretty much covered up by this new line ink. And I've chosen a couple of different greens that I'll use consistently across this. So I end up with something that feels again fairly uniform so that I can draw the attention onto the koala bear itself. Now one thing I would like for you to watch is the color of the paper as this last portion continues on because the paper is stonehenge, but it's called warm white. It's not the regular white that I normally use. That pad has a green cover. This pad has a yellow cover. And it just means it's a little creamier of a white rather than being a bright sort of, I guess, white white. But what I'm doing here is going to change the color of the white in the koala itself. And you'll, you'll see that happen as this card moves on, as the coloring goes further. Because what I'm focusing on doing is surrounding the koala bear with color. I'm surrounding it by putting really dark color right around the koala bear and I'll just keep darkening it as I go. And that's going to really create this, this bright whiteness around the, the eyes and the nose and everything on the koala bear. I'm also going to color the envelope. And you could certainly make this a white envelope, put a really light gray shadow on it. And that will be fine. But watch what happens when I do, because it's going to change the tone of the paper entirely simply by surrounding the koala bear with color. That's because people see color relative to what's next to it. And when you see the koala bear next to all of this color that's surrounding them completely, the whites in the koala bear start to look brighter. And you can start to see that happening already. They start to feel brighter than the white of the paper itself. And especially when I get that top portion in, if he's fully surrounded by color, it's going to make a huge difference. Now on cards, that's not crucial by any means. So you wouldn't necessarily have to think about that. But I loved the idea of a green envelope with all of this green and lusciousness. The sentiment on it is going to be hugs and closed. And it's just a nice warm color to, I don't know, to carry the message, I guess. And I'm using a couple of different greens and grays in order to add some shadows to the envelope as well. I will have a little bit of a struggle coming up. And I looked it in the video because, you know, lots of people like it when I have screw ups. The blending didn't go so well here. For whatever the reason was, part of it was that my little jar, I keep a jar with baby oil in it for blending. And I have a cotton ball in there and I can't find the bottle of baby oil to replenish the moisture in there. So I was dealing with not having a lot of moisture in there to dip into with my little blending stump. So I sort of had some unevenness going on. But, you know, the great thing about color pencil, especially when you're doing it over top of blending and using any kind of blending solution, whether it's the Gamsol or the baby oil, is that once you put the second layer of color down, it really enriches it. And between the enriching of the color and the texture of the Stonehenge drawing paper, I'm getting this luscious texture that feels very much like, I don't know, like a handmade paper. It's just, it's very textural. And I really like that a lot in terms of creating an envelope that's really hugging this little quality. Look how white he looks, how white the whites on his face look compared to the rest of the paper. Just amazing to me what relative color does when it's changing from one, one thing to the surrounding color. It just makes a huge difference. Here's a bunch of paper layers to create my card with pinks and greens to match the pinks and greens that I colored with, came out so dang cute. And I think he's going to be great for a little Valentine's card. I have another video that's going to be on Instagram, TV, and Facebook. So check this one out later on today. A simpler version where I stripped out the flowers and just kept the animal in there. There's several animals in the stamp set that you might want to try. Links for everything are in the doodly-do, the supplies as well as a link to the blog so you can see more information. And I'll see you again soon. Go create something beautiful today and I'll see you next time.