 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to show you how to draw your own bird using a stamp as a guide in Prismacolor pencil. Sometimes you need a specific kind of bird for a card and you can use a really great generic bird like this one from the Life is Lovely stamp set from Flora and Fauna. And I'm stamping in walnut and manatee from Lawn Fawn. You can use any dye inks. They don't dry really quickly. They don't set up on the surface and you don't even have to do anything other than stamp them straight onto the card base. And I have the walnut for the sentiment and the lighter color. You can use any light color. You can use a yellow or a blue or especially something that's related to the bird that you're coloring and the flowers that you're coloring and stamped your images across your cardstock. I'm using some plain old Nina cardstock, but you can use any cardstock that you've got because pencil works on a lot of different things. And I'm going to make my bird blue. You can make your bird any color you want and you can change the markings because you see how well this blue goes right over top of that light ink and here I can use the basic shell of the bird to adapt and make it whatever bird I want. If I wanted to do a bird with certain kinds of stripes on it, I could adapt it. The only thing you wouldn't be able to do would be to put white tips on them unless you're gonna make your white really really bright. You could actually use a little bit of acrylic if you want to paint a little a few spots of white on top of it after you're done. But I'm gonna make my bird mostly blue and I'm gonna use a couple different blues to add some shading to it. And I'm adapting his body a little bit, making him a little bit fatter as I go. And I'm giving him some shading around the wing so I can give some just some dimension to that instead of just doing a solid color. If you want to do this with other mediums, if you want to do this with Copic markers, you can easily go right over top of this as well with your Copic markers. Here I'm adding a little fuzziness to the bird's head. If you're gonna use watercolor, you'd have to use a really good light color because watercolor if you use an ink that's not going to run, I guess, then it's going to stay there. Otherwise, you could use Distress Inks and and be able to move some of that color. And that way you can adapt and do the same kind of thing. So here I'm adding some little dark areas onto my bird and it give him some little black wing tips on the edges of his wings and kind of carry that around. Adapt the shape of his shoulder. So pull up whatever bird you want to make him into, pull it up on Google and find one that's at the same angle as your stamp. Like this is just a really generic side view that we've got going here and follow along. This particular bird that I found and it was some sort of a blue bird in the south. I don't remember exactly what bird it was. It was just a really pretty little one and I've attached his eye to his beak. So look for little details like that because those will carry the realism of what the bird is going to look like on your card. And he's got a little white underbelly. So I'm going to get lighter and lighter with my pencil as I get down to the base. And then I need to make sure that there's not a whole lot of dark color down there. That sort of thing. This bird also doesn't have any feet, which is great because you could draw them in if you need them. And what I decided to do was pull one of the leaves in front of the bird. You can pull a bunch of the leaves in front of the bird. You can kind of mask it out and cover right over the base of him. So you don't have to worry about where he's sitting. So I'm going to put another one of my leaves right up here on top. Just going to draw an extra one because now I have that shape from the other ones. I can just see exactly what shape it is and I'm coloring it flat. I'll add some dimension later, but I'm going to color in all of my leaves in the same fashion. I'm going to use a brown that's the same kind of a brown as my sentiment. So I'll make my branch that goes in between all these different parts with that brown. And then I'll go back and start really working on the rest of my leaves across the card. And I don't want to bore you with having to watch all the leaves. So we're just going to watch a few of them and then I'm going to take a different green and create a half a leaf shadow and don't stress out about whether or not it's in the right direction from the light when leaves kind of cascade around on a branch. Sometimes they actually are opposite what you would think. So most people, when they look at it, their eye is just going to fill it in and it's going to make it seem like a real leaf just because it's got a little bit of different color on half of it. So no worries there. It's a way to make it simple on yourself, but also get the fun and the joy of coloring. When you do this no line coloring with pencils, it's really fun because people think that you're more of an an artist with a blank piece of paper than you really have to be because you can follow along with these stamps. Hopefully eventually you'll get the hang of how you draw leaves and flowers and things and be able to do those yourself. But stamps are a great help in the meantime. I'm using my brown to add a little detail onto my leaves and look how realistic they look. And all I did was cover half of the leaf and then add a little bit of the the darker color and the the brown. All right, so I'm adding a little bit more detail now onto the bird since I now know where the leaves are going to be sitting up in front of him. I'll color his tail a little bit, give him some darker tail feathers underneath. And then we'll be on to just working on the flower once our bird is set in place. And with the flower, I'm going to make this really simple as well. I'm not going to worry about where the shading goes or anything. I'm just going to put a yellowish color on the inside of the flower, not worrying about where the sun is coming from and where the shadows are going to hit and that sort of thing. But I'm just going to put some color toward the center of my flower and get a little bit darker as I get to the center. Now, one of the things I do with color pencil, if you've watched many of my videos, is I use a very sharp pencil and the pencil sharpener that I use is a quiet sharp. It's a really giant pencil sharpener. Most people, when they get it, they're very surprised by how big it is. So you got to have some space for it. But it's a really good sharpener because it has auto stop, which means it's not going to chew up your pencil. And it's going to get it also nice and sharp because the detail that I get is because I had this nice sharp pencil. If you have a nub on the end, it's going to be hard to get down into the fibers of the paper and to make that texture work. So I'll do each one of my flowers kind of the same sort of way, just with some of that yellowish color on the inside. I did pick a duller yellow rather than a bright color because I wanted the bluebird to be the brightest thing on the card. Now this flower is a little different than the others. It has these overlapping lines. And so what I did was try to make it look like they were almost transparent. So I'm coloring every other one. So you have some areas that look like they're laid on top of each other. And it's almost a little bit on the transparent side, which is kind of cool. And now I'm going to take that same brown because it's going to tie the whole thing together if I have a little bit of that brown color in my flowers as well. And I'm going to add a little tiny bit of detail toward the inside of each flower and maybe around some of those outside edges. Just pick a few, don't outline the whole thing because then you've defeated the purpose of hiding your lines. But if you make some of them darker, the other ones almost visually get lighter. They almost start to disappear. And now I'm just going to add some of the little parts on the inside, those little details, and make sort of matching ones on each flower. Even if the flowers in the stamps don't have exactly that pattern to them, you can make the flowers feel like they belong together by adding some features that are the same on each one. Because you can see that the petals are different on each one. So you can make them all very different. But on a branch, they would pretty much be the same flower on one branch because we're not talking about a bouquet here. So I'm going to add a little bit of detail to the inside of this one. And this leaves me with a very simple and beautiful single layer card. I rounded the bottom edges with a corner rounder, corner chomper. And that was it. And it's one of those nice things that you can stamp ahead of time. Take some pencils with you, go sit and do some errands and watch the kids play sports. You can do this while you're sitting in the car waiting for somebody. Lots of different things you can do by preparing ahead to make a card like this. Feel free to click on my face to subscribe to my channel, watch some other videos while you're here. And I will see you guys later. I hope you have a really great day and go out and color a bird yourself.