 Hi, my name is Sandy Allnach and I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I want to share today a superhero card that I made for kids. It's a lot of fun to make a comic strip type of card and this one is sort of a miniature version of something I've done on my blog before. I've got some free comic strip templates that you can download and this one just requires having to die. So I've die cut it out of some Neenah Desert Storm card stock and I'm tracing it onto the background piece that I'm going to actually do the coloring on and then use a window effect to layer this on top after I get finished with all the stamping and coloring. So I could turn it every which way and decide where I want the scenes so depending on what kind of stamps you have teeny tiny stamps are going to work great for this. And clearly you saw this when we released just came out and this superhero set with the Kate Cuties is the name of it. They are so adorable look at these little critters. So I'm just kind of trying to figure out which ones are going to fit where how I'm going to lay this out and I decided to sketch it out first. What I've done is take the plastic from the stamp set and taped it down over top of my little sketched out lines and I'm going to do a real quick stamping and this is wipe off a bowl it's not a word you can wipe it off afterward and reuse it but I'm going to just stamp the images in there to see how they fit in the boxes and you know is there any masking I'm going to need to do. I'm one of those people that loves to stamp all the stamps in a stamp set. I like to color all the images so it's trying to see how many of them I could fit in here. So in this large box we have even the little helicopter Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dude and then this mouse he's my favorite and I think he's just so cute because he reminds me of Danger Mouse. Danger Mouse is a British cartoon and it's just my favorite cartoon I've ever watched and he's so cool so I will link you to a Danger Mouse video how about in the description down below so you can see what I'm talking about. So now I'm just going to follow my plan and use a couple of post-it notes and then I only need one mask I'm going to cut this out of some 2 inch post-it tape by stamping my little guy on there and trimming him out so I can put the city behind him. Anything else is going to have really simple backgrounds but I wanted to use the little buildings that are included in this city in the little stamp set so I'm just going to stamp each one of them in different places sort of figure out how I want them to be laid out. I can continue some of those lines down below with a pen if I wanted to stamp them all the way down to the bottom etc lots of different ways to fix that I'll block off this building so I can put one above it and then I have this cute little scene in this box I did decide to cut out the moon that I had stamped for the sun and I'm going to draw that in myself in a different way but I had it for an idea on the pre-stamped piece so I thought I would carry that through when I do my coloring so I'm just stamping them each in here and they're a little bit bigger than their boxes so I'm using my post-it notes to just mask them out and when I get out my colored pencils I love my colored pencils and even though I know a lot of people don't like them all that much because they are challenging to blend my technique is to just go really really lightly with a really sharp pencil it takes some time to do you have to have a little patience to do that but I have nothing but patience when it comes to my colored pencils because I just love the look of them and I also like the look without the super perfect blending that you can get you can try it with your car pencils get some baby oil or some gamsol baby oil is more accessible and it smells better in my opinion and put it on a blending stump and just go over the pencil after you get it all done and it does smooth it out so if you have trouble with your colored pencil looking a little on the funky side that could help you but I like the look of pencil and I I do have time the patience to put into really coloring it and getting my pencil into all those little crevices and I keep sharpening so every time my hand leaves I try to cut those out of the video for the most part because it leaves a lot to go to my pencil sharpener and keep my pencil super sharp because when it is super sharp I can sort of angle it into the little texture of the paper and even though this Neenah paper seems very smooth as soon as you start working with colored pencils on it you suddenly see there is an enormous amount of texture on it and it's not as as big as Bristol it's not definitely as big as a watercolor card stock but it definitely has some now here with this little guy was trying to figure out what color to color him I knew I was gonna make the mouse down in the bottom right a brown mouse so I decided to make this little guy a black critter but I did struggle a little bit with I didn't know if his hand was supposed to be part of his costume and then did he have pants on or not you can decide when you color if you color him so he's just got his little butt hanging out or whether he's got pants but I noticed the other guys didn't really seem to have pants that little bunny right below and has no pants so I think it's okay and Captain Underpants can come to rescue if he has to to rescue my little my little critter here from being Kansas sometimes you just gotta make those decisions as a crafter as an artist and decide what your color in which way so I am gonna move on to my next image and this little little bunny this is another one of those decisions I made I could have made the mask on the bunny a different color and then made the head and the ears the bunny color what I decided is that his little outfit instead was going to be covering his head and his ears I've never seen a bunny superhero that had an outfit like that I thought it would be really cute so it would be a little more like a kid's costume potentially than a superhero cuz you know I don't know would it be just a mask on top you can make that decision if you color this little stamp set there are a number of stamp sets by the way in the clearly decided collection and in this new release as well and I'm gonna link you to all of them in the description down below so you can check them all out and see if there's other stamp sets you want to do this with and the dye will also be down there as well as there's a tag dye set and I actually did a card with it but that stamp set got pushed out to April so in April I'll share on Instagram the other card it's gonna be pebbles and bam-bam so you're gonna be excited to see that one in April so be sure to follow me over on Instagram so you get to see that one but that card I use the tag dye and take a look at the tag dye and see if you can picture what I did because I didn't cut out or it didn't cut apart the dyes I do that a lot with my dye sets I leave them intact and I just run the whole thing through when I'm going to cut the pieces out just to see if there's anything interesting I can do before I cut them apart because what that did was give me this wonderful random group of boxes this one is very structured because the dye is structured that way but that one was just a kind of random collection of little tag shapes and came out really cute as well so stay tuned for that one when the release comes out in April and get to see it I apologize for the doggie footage disappearing little puppy dog went AWOL I'm not really sure what happened to the little piece of footage that I imported but it wasn't usable so sad because he's just adorable little puppy he's actually the one that made me get all squee about this set until I saw Danger Mouse here and I'm just gonna I'm gonna mentally think this is Danger Mouse the company clearly besotted is a company over in the UK so I'm guessing she may have known Danger Mouse I don't know he's still a thing or if it was just a thing when I was younger but yeah Danger Mouse is my little buddy and initially almost going to make his little body the brown color and then caught myself just in time so I put a little outfit on him using a second color to make some shadows on the ears and on my little mouse we give him the most shading since he's kind of a featured one in this and give him some real strong color differences but you can see how I can layer the colors when I do this very softly if you start you know really pressing hard with your pencil you'll do two things one is you'll build up some wax and that waxy surface is hard to color over top of it's very difficult to do any color over over top of something that's that slick when you're talking about pencil that wax just just puts a really thick coating down and then you also risk breaking your pencils so a lot of people tell me that they their personal pencils break all the time that could be a lot of it too so you're putting a lot of pressure on it that could cause you some troubles another thing that I have discovered recently I've been doing a little research and found out um Prismacolor pencils if you drop them the lead could shatter on the inside so if you have one pencil that you've dropped and you find that after that every time you sharpen it it just goes to put that could be why because the the lead inside may have shattered at the floor so be careful with your pencils nicely I also use an electric pencil sharpener I've shared this one before I will share a link to the video at the end of this one where you can see the pencil sharpener that I use it's a bow stitch and it is a giant beast it's huge but it works really well and gives you a super sharp point it's a classroom style one so it has a lot of different pencil widths which is also nice to have if you have a lot of different kinds of pencils and I'll link you up to that one so you can see more about the pencil sharpener that I love. All right so here's where I decided to do a night scene in the moon I was trying to figure out what to do here you'll notice that there's just simple shapes in the other ones and when you see the Pebbles and Bam Bam card as well that was one of the features of that card that we don't get to show you today but that one I just used really simple shapes to create like a mountain scene behind or a little stream scene by just doing some really graphical shapes behind the little cartoon animals because that can actually create a real atmosphere without you having to have a lot of huge drawing skill and know what you're doing just make that little bunny has just a little curve like he's flying up a little curve here I did a circle and I just used a template from something I think it was a die that I used to draw a circle in pencil and then fill it in with my white pencil to make a white moon and I wanted it to be a little bigger than the stamp that was in the set so I decided to to draw it in myself so I can make it larger and kind of go off the scene so that it's not a focal point but I have a nice fun light source in there and here's where I'm showing you the amount of little little tiny labor that I put into these backgrounds to make them really smooth I'll go one direction after the other direction back and forth I've used two blues here one lighter blues sort of at the bottom and then a darker blue that'll be the night night blue color that I'm using right now and it does take a little effort but boy is it worth it which comes out so cute when it's done it's very soft way of using the colored pencils rather than a real heavy hand and kind of look you could also combine this with your Copics you could do the backgrounds in your Copics and maybe the first layer of all these animals in your Copics and then go in with your colored pencil to add detail on top and add some texture to the animals and that would save you some of the extra effort or if you're into airbrush and masking you could airbrush backgrounds and then do the images themselves in colored pencil that would be even more effort though I think but I guess it depends on whether you're into airbrush whether you're real quick at that or not I'm a little slower with that so I opted to go with my pencils so then I just wanted to fill in a couple colors for the buildings down here to finish off this little image and I went with neutralish colors behind my little mouse so he would stand out and be quite the important thing in front of the buildings that he's protecting the city and I will of course think of him as protecting the city of London since Danger Mouse takes place in London from what I recall I'm gonna have to go sit and look up some Danger Mouse videos now and go enjoy them again because I haven't seen it in a long time I ordered a whole set of dvds I think when I was in college I think that was the my little secret thing that I got to do when I was in college and studying I would put on actually probably wasn't even dvds I bet it was eight tracks back then oh my gosh I'm totally dating myself here all right let's get back to the card I put a lot of dimensional adhesive on the back and I cut little slivers to put on just a few of the crossbars because that's going to help to keep them from sinking down and flattening out on the card so that it will remain popped up but I didn't have to put more than just those two little pieces and then the ones around the edges to make this one work and I am just so excited at how this one came out and I want to get out all my little stamps Billy decided like I said has a ton Lawn Fawn has a ton a lot of companies make little itty bitties and they would all be really cute with something like this so if you want to pick up that die the link's in the description as well because this one's really cute cute cute cute cute cute cute all right guys here are the promised videos at the end the color pencil sharpener is right there for you to go take a look at there's another storybook coloring in the middle and another idea to make a maze card with your tiny images as well on the right hand side you can hit the subscribe button if you're not yet a subscriber and check out more from me I put out videos about three times a week and hit that like button if you like this video and I will talk to you guys later have a wonderful day and they do something creative