 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnok, and today I'm going to be celebrating diversity and coloring a bunch of girlfriends from Art Impressions. I picked up this stamp set from Art Impressions, and then they actually sent me one after I bought it, so I have two. And if you listen to the end of this video, I will tell you how you can qualify to win one of these two sets. I wanted to color this up for Black History Month, because every Black History Month I seem to celebrate diversity, and this month I don't even know where February went. It has completely and entirely disappeared on me. I don't really know what happened. Life is a little bit crazy, but nonetheless, I am here, and the stamp set is actually called We Are Here, so that kind of makes sense. And what I have done here is tried to use some color combinations that are based on each other. So this first trio of colors, I'm going to take some of these colors and apply them to a different stamp, a different person, and just add a different color to it, and take away a different one, and just replace them, and that's one way you can experiment with different color combinations when you're coloring different ethnicities of skin, different amounts of one color or another, or just changing out the marker entirely. The other thing I'm going to do here is something that relates to a recent video that I had where I talked about my eyes getting a little funky. It's a little harder for me to see super detail now with my markers, but it's a lot easier to get that kind of detail with pencil. So guess what? You can go right in there with pencil and add details back in. Now something like this, since I've stamped it in a craft ink, and I believe this was craft by my favorite things, but you can use any kind of craft ink or that sort of light ink color to make it a no-line coloring. But since I did that, some of the lines tend to disappear, so you may have to look at the packaging in order to recreate some of those lines. So I'm just going to let you know that that's a little challenging at times because some of it you may have to draw back in because the lines will disappear. If you don't like doing that, then just leave it stamped in black and you'll be just fine and not have to do that. But this allowed me to get a little bit more realism in there by mixing the colored pencil on top of the Copic marker, and then I get the richness of the Copic and the detail that I can get with a colored pencil using a brown and a black in this one in various parts of it. And that will help me to develop the different skin tones. So I'm just going to do the skin tones here in real time. We're going to zoom through the rest of that, the coloring, the clothes and everything because you guys know how to color the clothes. And then I want to show you a little background that I'm doing for this as well. So here I've changed the base color, the lightest color to the mid-tone color from the other person. And so this one will be a little bit darker, which means I needed to push my dark a little bit darker than on the other one. And that's one of those things that there's no science to it. It's just a matter of experimenting and trying it. And on Art Impression Stamps, when they have a couple of them together like this, it's really easy to practice a whole bunch of different people all at once. Another thing that you might try is to stamp a whole bunch of these on one sheet and just go through and color them all at once and write down all the colors that you used and all different combinations beside each one and then save that as a reference sheet because here you'll get to color lots of different people all at the same time. Now this girl in the middle, the second one that I'm coloring here, she's going to have a little orange in her hair. My friend Darvi has the most beautiful hair. She's got like orange tips or like orange underneath. It is the most gorgeous thing. I wish I could have her hair and her skin and she's just beautiful and I love her. So I made this one look like her. If you're sending a card to someone, then it's kind of fun to make it look like them. So Darvi might get this one because that looks like her to me. It's also one of the shorter people in here. She's not the tall people in the back. So that could also be Darvi because she's a little height challenged. She's the sweetest thing in the world. So I'm using the black pencil to add detail onto the hair and I'm even going past where the lines are in the stamp to create the kind of hair that I want for each one of these people. That's one reason to try to stamp in a lighter ink because then you're not wedded to those black lines that you stamped with when you were doing the initial stamping. And I've had people ask me recently, I've talked about using some Catherine pooler inks for stamping when I was going to use Copics and I've gotten several comments saying, oh my goodness, I didn't know you could do that. Those are pigment inks and with pigment inks you do need to let them dry longer and you also need to use light colors. With an ink like this, this is one of the hybrid inks from MFT, that you can just stamp and start coloring right away and not worry about it even if you're using a not quite light color. But if you're going to use a pigment ink, I would recommend definitely going for the lighter colors and be sure to let it dry because I don't want you to mess up your nibs because if you get all that pigment ink all over your Copic nibs, you will ruin them and then you're going to have to buy more. And who wants to buy more nibs because you've ruined them. Now some of that if you accidentally forget, which I have done before and ended up with a big inky mess and that stuff not only on my paper but on my marker. If you scribble it off right away, you can often recover that and you'll be okay. So try that before just pitching the nib entirely. So I'm working my way back to these other people in the background and again just adjusting color combinations a little bit to make them look like different people. So they're not all the same skin tone and then adjusting the hair to be whatever I want it to be. This gal in the back has a bun and I thought, wait a minute, she doesn't look like another friend of mine that I thought would be kind of fun to make her look like someone else that I knew. So I just gave her more hair and you can do that when you're doing quote unquote, no line coloring. Which again, every single time I do a no line video, I just kind of laugh because when we do fine art, we don't say we're doing no line fine art, we're just doing fine art. So I'm not sure with the crafting we've come up with this name calling it no line and I'm not even sure where that started. If anybody knows where that started, I would love to know how that kind of came to be because I think it's just kind of funny. So the clothing here, I'm just going to throw a bunch of color in. I'm not going to actually do much shading other than on this orange sweater on the girl in the front and just, you know, adding a little bit of dimension to that because everything else is just a cacophony of people crowding through the door and nobody's really going to be looking at all the detail in that and whether or not it looks hyper realistic, not that for women crowding through a door is hyper realistic anyway, but nonetheless, just going to throw some colors in there just to kind of pull the whole image together and get lots of solid coloring. And I was debating what kind of shop they were walking into. There is a little sign hanging on the door, it's an empty sign and you could either make this them coming out of a store so you can have like a street scene on the outside or you can do what I'm doing, which is they're walking into a store. And I'm not sure why the sign would be on the inside of the door. Maybe that's not the smartest idea. Maybe I did not think this out the way I should. But nonetheless, I'm making it a sale sign and added the curtains. Now the curtains are on the outside of the door. Oh, my goodness, you guys, I've totally done this backwards because the curtains should be on the inside if this is the inside of the store. OK, well, we're going to have a little backwards of a card here, which I'm sure some of you will get quite the kick out of. I decided to put shelves here on the wall with just random items. I'm just putting squares and rectangles and doing them in very light colors because I want the focus to be on the people, not on the stuff on the shelves and then throwing in kind of a mid tone to darkish color for the carpet. And then I decided to add a little bit more to the shelves just so that they don't completely disappear. A little tiny line of shadow for each one of these little objects. They could be candles. They could be perfume bottles. Doesn't really matter what they are. These girls are shopping and they're apparently shopping the wrong direction on the cards. So there you go. And my final step after I got this all put on to a card base with my sentiment popped onto a circle. Oh, I seem like an appropriate one. I decided to add a little bit more detail with my black pencil and that this is where I'm just putting in those tiny little details that just make the whole thing pop, like a shadow under the earrings, a little bit more in the background, that kind of thing, a little shadow here under the door and giving their feet a little shading so that the light from the store is hitting them. So there is my very crazy card. The inside is the outside and the outside is the inside. And I don't think Darby's going to care. She's going to be thrilled to get a card from me. And if you would like to make a card using the stamp set, I have two of them now to give away. And I'm actually going to do the giveaway over on the blog. So you've got to go leave a comment over there because then I have your email address. All right, thanks so much for spending a few minutes with me. I will see you again in the next video because, you know, one is coming right up very soon because I do this all the time. All right, I'll see you guys later. Bye bye.