 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I am part of the Altenew Crafty Friends blog hop. I'm also going to be using a set called Charmed in addition to Crafty Friends, but the Crafty Friends is just sentiments and then a few little tiny images that go with them, and they're excellent for sending cards to your crafty friends. There are also some in here that have dual purposes. So they say things like you inspire me or you're so talented, which you can use for all different kinds of cards, not just for fellow crafters, because I know a lot of people don't have addresses to send crafters a card, but if you need a crafter to send a card to, my address is on my contact page, so you can always send one to me. I'd love to see what you guys create. This is the Charmed set, and I'm not going to use the sentiments on this. I'm going to use sentiments from Crafty Friends, and the reason that I'm using pencil with this is because it's a very, very thin stamp line on this flower. I should say flowers, it's kind of nice to have flowers that are all together, you don't have to worry about masking, it's just one stamp, which is most excellent. You can stamp when you're going to use pencil, you can stamp in all different kinds of inks, whatever colors and stuff that you have, don't worry about getting something special because as long as it's good and dry, if you use a pigment ink and it's still wet, your pencil might drag in some of it, but if you let it dry, you're good to go with pretty much any kind of color. And I'm going to do a whole set in different colors here so that you can see some different layouts to use as well. I've taken the stamp and turned it different directions for different cards, but I've used the Crafty Friends sentiments on all of these, and I'll show you just a couple of different ways that I'm using them here. I'm coloring with two different yellows, or I will be coloring, shall we say, with two different yellows, and I'm coloring the negative space outside of the flowers. I've done this a little bit with Copics before, but I haven't tried it with pencil, and I thought that would be fun to try with these, especially since it's a really thin line and a pencil you can get really sharp and have it kind of tuck all the way down inside each one of those little, little tiny bits of the flowers and get a really nice sharp edge. And I'm getting darker toward the center of the image and then lighter as I get out to the edge, and then taking my darker color, and you can sometimes do this with just one pencil. You don't necessarily have to have two pencils, but on this particular one, the yellow just never got dark enough in those crevices, those little cracks. So I went for an orange pencil to start making that, that really deep in there. And I'm just going to go all the way around the whole image and you can sit there and watch. I'll speed it up in a little bit, but I thought I would tell you the story of how I got into crafting, because that's what we're talking about on the Crafty Friends blog hop today. I made things ever since I was a little girl. I was always drawing something, coloring something. Art supplies were just a regular part of everything I did. I had gone to college and gotten a degree in art, but I didn't really do crafting at the time. I've always made my own cards for family and friends for Christmas and stuff. But OK, here's where it goes really fast. And I wish I could color that fast. Wouldn't that be nice? Anyway, back to my story. Then I ended up after college, moving a couple of different places. And in one particular place, I got into a ministry that gave out cards on like an epic basis. We had retreats and at those retreats, if anybody has heard of Walk to Emmaus or Curcio or Kairos, I was part of that ministry. And we gave out cards to people who attended those retreats and just told them how much they were loved. And that was always really great. So I got into making tons and tons of cards during that time period and tons of other little, gifty things, too. And that eventually turned into just loving to make cards because I love to give something to somebody else to encourage them. And that's really why I make cards, not only because I just love making things, but it's making things for a purpose. I can draw things and hang them on my wall forever. But if I don't actually share it with anybody, it doesn't do any good. So I like making things that I can actually give to someone else. Eventually, I got into different mediums over time as I became a blogger and started sharing more videos on how to do things. And that's kind of how everything got started. Just kept growing from there in my craftiness. As you can see, I'm using some of the colors now on the insides, just shading where some of those lines cross over so that you have a flower that's in front of another flower. So put another shadow underneath that other flower. And it just starts to raise that flower up from underneath the up above, I guess, the flower that's behind it. And then I just scribbled some color into the middle and called it done. The secondary sentiment on there. I have popped up onto the card with another piece of stamping onto a piece of cardstock and I just use some Tombow power tabs, these extreme tabs, I think they're called now. I just cut them down into small pieces so they'd fit behind that panel. Here's another one with a blue-green kind of a color. And with this one, I just used the pencil heavier in the shadow areas and didn't use a secondary color to create the really dark areas in there. And I stamped the sentiment, but not with a popped panel on top of it. Here's another one where I turned the flower, again, a different direction and stamped it so that I could do the same kind of coloring with red. And then I put the sentiment right in between the two lines of the larger sentiment, so it kind of intertwined them a little bit more. And here's one in blues. And you can see I added my sentiment above it and just kind of nested those the secondary sentiments in there somehow. So they felt like they were part of the design and left the rest of the card just plain white, which was kind of nice to make them feel like they were clean and simple. Now, this one has a bluish kind of color for the shadows and a reddish kind of purple for the other purple, which was kind of a nice combination. So play around with your colors. Lots of different color pencil shades can work together in different ways and make a whole set like this and send them out to a bunch of people. And you can put me on your list because I love to get cards from people just like you do. I send out a lot too. So I hope some of you have gotten cards from me in the past. All right. Thanks so much for joining me. You can watch some more videos, but I highly recommend you click on the link in the doobly-doo and go on the hop and see what else there is out there. And I will see you guys next time. Bye bye.