 Hi there, I'm Sandy Aldach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to show you some vignette Copic coloring. And sometimes you just want a little atmosphere on your piece of artwork, but you don't necessarily want a full background and that's what a vignette will give you. So I'm going to use this stamp set from Paper Smooches, it's called Curdius Cuties and has a whole variety of different types of images so I've grouped them into trios or pairs so that we have three different cards we're going to make today. A vignette is a French word and it's defined as a small illustration or photograph that fades into the background without a defined border. If you think of some of those old timey photographs or even your Instagram filters that have a little area around the outside where it just blends into a background very softly that's the idea is to create a little bit of a scene in one area and let it fade out on the card or on the piece of artwork. So on this particular one I've gathered the underwater elements that are in the stamp set so there's some bubbles that go with it but also three little critters that I've put together and what I did was stamp first the sentiment and then I added the animals to it because that way I could see how they related to each other and to the sentiment itself in each one of these you'll see that the images are offset to the side a little bit almost the one-third rule because if you divide anything into thirds and don't put things dead center put it in the left or right third or top or bottom third tend to have a little more interesting layout so here you can see it's a little less than half of the right side of the card so it's on the on the one-third side ish and just coloring all of my different images so that then I can add my background to it in these particular ones I'm going to try to add some pretty hefty color in the images themselves because I want some lightish color for the background portion since this is going to be water I'm going to use a couple different blues and it's going to be darker toward the center of the vignette and then it'll get lighter toward the outside and I'm going to fill all the color in kind of dense in the center and then as I get to the outside I use more of a flicking motion and part of the reason I want enough color in the center is because I'm going to use some colorless blender techniques if you want to go really pale and not have any texture in there you can certainly do that but since I wanted to add some colorless blender I need to have enough color which is why I picked that B21 for the inside portion there but I'm just going to flick kind of letting my brush strokes from the marker nib be vertical and that way if I get anything that doesn't actually blend out completely softly it's going to give the illusion of that underwater feel where you see the trail of light coming down into the water and that that will sort of feel like it was intentional even if it may not have been but I'm going to take my colorless blender and add bubbles I'm just going to add little dots in different places and they can be really dense they can be really far apart I was making them around the same size as the stamped bubbles and there's not a whole lot you can see here in real life it's a little more obvious but the darker the color on the inside the more obvious it will be and then I chose a few of the bubbles to add a little white pen outline around them and that allows me to make some of them pop just a little bit differently than other ones so there is the finished card I just cut it square and then added some layers to it very sweet little card now this one is going to be even simpler a much simpler colorway because I'm going to use the same colors for both my sheep and my llama and these are colors that aren't used very often I don't see people using the b6 is very often at all but the b6 is even though it's a blue it's very purplish kind of blue and it's a really nice soft color so I'm going to add that color to the sheep and then here on the llama and on the llama I'm kind of thinking maybe he's got some color on his back which is why I didn't mean just highlight color there because I want enough color in him to make it feel right on the card if he's too light it could feel like he's just kind of floating out there I used my colorless blender to go back into some of those areas and add just some squishy looking fur or to soften out some areas that may not have blended particularly well I'm just kind of scribbling around with that color since they have lumpy fuzzy fur you can can get away with doing some squishing around of your markers I wanted to add some darker color to the ears the feet and the face on the sheep and then I'll do the ears and the feet on the llama just because I wanted a little more of that intensity I'm gonna have a very soft background behind it so I want to add some power to the images since they are white critters it's a little tough sometimes to give enough contrast to them to make them look like you actually put some effort into it otherwise it can look like you just threw on a little tiny bit of color and there's not much there on the card so I'm using three different blue violets to create that nice blend to give me a real real good punch of color but keep it in the same color way as the white fur that already is now for the background I'm going to kind of make the center of the background right around those hearts that I stamped and I'm using an rv02 you can also use an rv10 it's another light like kind of pinkish color and again I'm just going to let those marker strokes kind of stretch out around the image and not not stress out too much don't worry too much about blending really smoothly into white although it's a great time to practice that and I did use kind of skip that here in the video because the camera shut off I did use a little bit of a quadruple zero in between there to add a little bit more of that really light rv out to the edges but then I went in with my zero marker and just started making more bubbles to blend that those areas breaking up some of the color that strong color that may not have turned into white very nicely again cut it square added a layer of paper and called it done on this third one I decided to use the b and we need bear together because I thought the the yellow would be a nice unifying the yellow and black would be nice unifying between the two of them so he's going to be a black bear with a brown belly I even like doing black bears with brown faces on them I think they're really cute when you do that I'll use a couple of different grays to make my bear black a lot of folks will try to use a very light gray very pale gray when you're coloring something that's black so you get some contrast but I find that starting with at least a middle tone gray tends to work a little bit better and one thing about when you get really dark colors like this if you end up getting too much then you can color into it with more of the light color and that will sort of erase a little bit of it but don't go with too light of a color or else it'll act like colorless blender so sometimes it's that playing back and forth between the two of them so you end up with enough contrast to to make it look like it's not just a big blob of gray and black but it enough to make it look like like it's black that makes sense not sure it makes sense so here's his little belly now starting to appear with a couple different browns to give him some depth on his tummy and then I'll jump into the best color in the entire universe which is why one seven I wrote a poem recently roses are red violets are blue yellow is still the best color and of poem yes I am a poet and if anyone would like to use that poem you're welcome to share that with anyone you'd like because yellow is the best color and that was my dog sneezing if you heard a funky noise in the background so again I've added the color right around where the focal point is where the B is at and the flower and I'm going to color around that using that very light violet marker and that's going to help to blend that color out a little bit toward the edges but I'm giving it just that focal point around that center I don't have to give the entire thing a background I can do just a small amount and practice my blending and do some texture in there with a colors blender or just let it be as it is kind of really depends on what look you want but I'll add a couple little bubble little bubbles in here so it's a really fun technique to add something special to an image without having to go whole hog on a background and here it's trimmed square with a little bit of yellow around it because it's got a good bit of yellow on the card so I hope you enjoyed this video this might be something especially that new copic colorists might try because it's just a way to add a little splash to your cards here's a couple more videos if you'd like to see some more of that you can check out the copic jumpstart class that's linked there because that's a great way to learn a lot more about your copic coloring and you can click on my face to subscribe to my channel and I will see you guys next time take care bye