 Hi there, it's Sandy and I have done a doodle today. Yes, a watermelon doodle because it's summer and it's hot, so let's cool down. Before I begin, let me say this is not a mandala. Mandalas are a spiritual exercise of some kind, I believe. I don't know much about it, but that's not what this was, it was just relaxing. And it's also not perfect because mandala artists, they're really good at this and making everything line up and everything's measured, et cetera, mine or not. That's why it's called a doodle. I am making a half circle first and I put a piece of tape across. I could have just done a pencil line, but I did piece of tape across the center and then started to add the color. I went short of the pencil line so that I could erase it. And in this particular case, that doesn't matter a whole lot, I thought I'd include that tip if you're ever doing a pencil drawing that you want to color with Copics and use those pencil lines as guidelines and not trap the color underneath because it'll stay there. And you'll also smear graphite, then just make your color come short of the line. And it didn't matter if I got it perfect here or not because I was going to be doodling over it, so I just threw the color in, erased that pencil line right around the pink and then started working on the green, which was a little tougher because the green is a stronger color. It's a little darker and that means you're going to see any areas where your hand didn't make a perfect circle. I wish there was some kind of tool to make a perfect circle out of a marker like this, like a compass for a marker. There isn't one and I decided there could be one somewhere, but I don't do this often enough to really make it matter. It's not worth buying a tool just to do one project, so I just winged it. I also didn't worry about the blending because I was going to be doodling over top of it all and it wasn't going to matter. I always think about the end product as opposed to the panicked comments that I get from a lot of people about, oh my gosh, are you going to erase those pencil lines? Are you going to blend that better? Are you going to go back and finish this one thing that you missed? And that's not the kind of art that I do. I do things for more fun purposes than being perfect about them. But I did decide to try to make some kind of pattern that was going to be replicable around the entire drawing. So I divided each of the half sections into halves, made a little tick mark so I could draw a radiating line out from the middle and have some kind of sections to divide it into and then did the same thing in between those. And just divide whatever your size is because none of us are going to make the same size of drawing to make yours anything you like. I did add some of the circles in with the pencil on top of this because when the pencil is on top, it can be erased later. I also erased over it lightly so that there wasn't very much underneath it there anyway. And then it was time to start the doodling portion, which was really fun. Part of the reason for me wanting to do a doodle here on YouTube today is that this is the beginning of August and every month I put a different category of classes on sale. Last month was all the watercolor and over the last couple months we had all of the mini classes on sale but now this month it's going to be all the drawing and doodling classes. And I figured that would be a good thing for August since we're all in the doldrums of summer. The time in which I was drawing and filming this, it was like 90 degrees here. We finally got the heat wave out here in Washington where I live. I know a lot of you have had a heat wave that's been way higher than ours. You guys are in the hundreds and we're in the mid 90s. It's been really brutal and I say brutal because I don't have air conditioning. Lots of us don't have air conditioning. Even our pastor was suggesting last Sunday that maybe we should make friends with people who do have air conditioning if we don't have any. So instead I have spent my week just washing the car and doing the wet chores and the cool things like going to a movie. Trying to stay cool. So I thought some of you might want to do some doodling types of things like this. What I'm doing here is testing out to see if a second layer of Copic would add in a bit of difference in differentiation in some areas and it really did, did a nice job. So later on at the end of the drawing I'll add more of that once I have a better sense of what the whole thing looks like. Throughout this I am just making different kinds of patterns and I'm not following anything, I'm just picking one section starting to make something and then moving on from there and trying to vary between areas that are really detailed and areas that are a little more open. So let me get some variety. And in the whimsical doodling class we talk about that quite a bit and we do round patterns but we also do some regular patterns across the paper and that kind of thing. Lots of fun and I do have an idea for a pattern making class that I've been working on and I've been doing some practice on and it's how to design your own patterns. And I'll talk more about that when the time comes but I have been having just a heck of a lot of fun doing that kind of practice stuff. So this was another exercise in that. I had made this one weird shape and I wasn't really sure what to do with it. So I disguised it and I did that throughout this. If I came up with a leaf shape or something that looked weird I would just do enough things around it that nobody would notice what was going on there and it works when you've got something like this with so much pattern and so much beauty in it all over the place. Nobody's going to notice one little section that looked a little funky. As I was working through it I started thinking about how I was going to edge this out at the very, very end and wanted to make sure that I had more of a loose line so I'm making these loops at the outside edge to finish it off out in that final section which worked nicely. And I also had to think about the same thing when I did the green because I didn't blend that green remember I just threw the color on. So I went across it with a line and then did some circles right alongside of it and then nobody will notice that that line is even there and you could go in with more marker and tidy things up if you wanted but I would recommend drawing yourself a big shape and just make a big watermelon shape and go sit in the backyard under a tree with a glass of lemonade or something and take your white pen and just doodle. I use the Signo Uniball white gel pen that's the one that works for me, whatever works for you use that you could also do pink on pink so if you have a pink pen of some kind you could do it on top of that you could do all different kinds of colors this is just a fun, fun thing to spend some time doing in the middle of summer especially so whatever you do do it in pinks and greens because that's going to make you think watermelon and think cool. Once I finished adding the extra Copic in there I decided that I wanted to pull some of them back to not having quite so much dark in them so I added a little more white and you could just go on fussing with this forever or you could just enjoy what you've created. Be sure to hit the like button if you haven't yet and subscribe if you haven't because on Friday I'm going to be back with another watermelon piece a really cute one and it's Fundraiser so we're going to do some fundraising and you're going to get some art supplies if you participate in the Fundraiser so you're going to want to come back for that make sure you turn on notifications that silly little bell that YouTube gives you and I will see you again in a couple of days as well as watermelon stuff all week long on Instagram and Facebook see you guys, have a great day