 Well, hello there. It's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to take this darling little Viking gnome for a walk in a redwood forest. So let's get started on that. This project is being done for Trinity Stamps Anniversary. So happy anniversary to everybody over there. Congratulations. I love celebrating business anniversaries. And this is the stamp I get to use today. It's a gnome and a Viking all-in-one and I'll stamp it in some VersaFine Onyx Black waterproof ink in my Misti. And if you're looking for Misti tips, I've got a whole playlist. I will link below with my Misti stuff in it for stamping. And I'm going to be using the Sketch Marker Aqua pens. These are water-based markers. I just reviewed these yesterday in a very long video. I compared them to some fine art brand markers and just wanted to let you know these are my new favorite for crafty water color markers because they're really awesome. So I am going to start by coloring the gnome. I'm doing this on Canson XL watercolor paper, which I found to be the best for water-based markers. The cellulose paper instead of a cotton paper works great. I don't know why everybody always says water-based markers are so great for coloring in coloring books because that's cotton paper. That's stuff that they print on generally. And you get all kinds of pilling and strange stuff. Maybe I just over color when I'm doing things and I need something more beefy. I don't know. This Canson XL is super cheap and it works great. So I'm going to call it my favorite and be done with that. Links to all the supplies, by the way, are in the doobly-doo down below. That would be the description. And I'm adding some dark color in all the shadow areas, which would be anywhere that the hair is joining with a ponytail or under the beard, anywhere there's a dark wrinkle, that sort of thing. And then taking the same reddish marker and pulling that color through. So I get a third color without even actually putting a third color on here. When you're working with watercolor markers, there's a good Gillian techniques that you can play around with. Lots on the internet you can find. I do have a whole playlist for that as well. So I will put those down below. And I'm just going to blend these until I'm somewhat happy with them. The great thing about water-based markers is that you can always take a water brush or aqua brush or just any kind of watercolor brush and lift color off and lighten it. You can't do that with alcohol markers. So this is one of the benefits of water-based markers. So you get too much water on there, then you get a pool going, just dry your brush out and soak up that water with your brush. And then I'll just zoom around and color the rest of this guy. All week long here on YouTube as well as over on my socials, I am going to be using water-based markers because I just released a new class. And it's got tons of water based marker techniques in it. It's a travel sketching class, which is why I am taking this little guy on a travel trip. He's going to go to the Redwood Forest for the scene that I'm going to put him in. So here I'm adding some darker color. I decided I wanted a very, very dark black instead of just these grays. And the grays are on the bluish side. It's a cool gray. And when they say cool gray, they mean like really cool. It's like very bluish. And what I do find with lots of different brands of water-based markers is the colors do shift when you touch them with water. So you need to be prepared for that. In yesterday's video, I talked all about how you can swatch them and know what they're going to do. And then you can actually use them, which I will do in the scene that I do behind this gnome. You can use those properties when you're doing your coloring if you know what they're going to do when you touch them with water. So we will experiment with some of that with some of the colors. A couple of my favorite colors are the ones that we're going to use in the background. And thank you, by the way, to Sketch Marker for sending me this set of pens. This is the animal set. It has 36 colors in it. And they have two sets, I believe, of that. They also have some smaller sets, but they are, I think they have 72 colors at this time, at the time of the filming, all together. And this is basically half the set that I have. So I'm going to use some of the bluish gray. I'm just kind of keeping with the same tone for all of his outfit and all of the accoutrements, all of his weaponry that he's taking into the force. Hopefully he's not going to use that axe to cut down any trees. I'm crossing my fingers, but he came out really cute and like a little shine on his nose. And now I'm going to do the Redwoods Forest. This is the Redwoods National Park. And as I said, I've got this new class out and I'm going to show you real quickly how easy the techniques are that I'll be showing you in the class because I didn't get a chance to do that in yesterday's video because I was too busy swatching things. So scribble, scribble, scribble, throw water on with a brush. Like that is lots of what is going to happen in the class because why make it hard, right? Why get into lots of detail? Why don't we just figure out how to do things loosely? I'm going to do the same thing for the ground, make a path for him and scribble, scribble, scribble, except this time I'll put two colors in. And then when I take the brush and smooch across it, then it's going to blend and I'm going to get a difference in colors. I want the grasses around the bottom of the forest to be a little thicker. So I put more color down and I'm going to watercolor first with that nice big fat brush with lots and lots of water in it. Watercolor all that stuff at the bottom. And I'm not real keen on watercoloring around a stamp like this. The class just has the scene itself, so we don't have to worry about painting around things. And this reminded me how much I don't want to paint around things. But I didn't want to mess him up. So I had to keep the water away from him. Added a little bit of this color that turns green. It's a brown color that I put in for the shadow in the greens. And it turns green. It's like, it's a cool thing if you're not surprised by it. So you need to pay attention to it. This color that I'm using here is called Dolphin Blue. It's a very, very grayish, very pale kind of blue. And I wanted some trees in the distance. I wanted a misty picture. So I looked up the Redwoods National Forest and found some misty looking bluish kinds of atmospheric photos that I started adapting to try to make a scene out of it. And I went over each of the tree trunks with water first and then just spludged around and broke up some of the edges because I wanted it to look really soft and misty. And that also created the look of some branches. And I mean, look, it's just scribbling. Like you could do this. Honestly, you could do this. So then I started adding in a little more detail or I guess just a second layer of color adding some extra trees. Wasn't really sure what I was heading for at this point, but you know, just playing around with the markers and making sketchy trees. Because if you make just big long columns, it's going to look like something man made as opposed to trees. So then I sketched in the big trees. There's going to be one big tree on the right that he's standing right next to. And then another tree over here that's not as big. So it looks like it's further away on the left side and sketching them in the lighter color always helps. You can go over it with a darker color and sort of see where you want to put it before you commit to that nice dark color. This again is that dark chocolate color that turns green. That's what color I put in those grasses. That's why the grasses came out kind of greenish brown. So that color is it just fascinates me. Absolutely does. And I use it for a lot of trees that I'm coloring with these markers now. So for the greens in the grasses, I just threw in a little bit more scribbly green and threw in some scribbly water with a scribbly brush and then went over the tree trunks a little bit with more water. The reason for that is that I want lots of blooms and blossoms and crazy shapes and things because the next step is now to clean everything up with pen and ink. You could do this with a Sharpie. It doesn't have to be a fancy fountain pen like mine. I like a good eco twizby. They're like 30 ish dollars, 30, 35 dollars for a pen like this. And it's a very nice pen. I use either the fine or the extra fine most of the time nib wise. And I'm just going to go over my trees, draw in some vertical lines to make them bark and going around the shapes that I see in the the actual watercolor. And here I'll give you a closer view of what that's like when I'm doing the shrubberies at the bottom and the grasses and things. I'm just looking for shapes where the colors change where those blossoms and blooms are. That's why I did just piles and piles of water because water is what creates those. It pushes color around and forces some hard edges. And when you do all these scribbles, it looks like you did something intentional, but really you're just tracing, tracing around those lines. And for a little extra bonus, I decided I'd add some vertical lines just to make it look like I tried to shade. And none of this has anything to do with the light source or anything. It just putting some lines in there to add some darkness to it. And then when it comes to him, I put some shadows under him and under his axe. And then I was thinking about going around all these edges of the dirt area. But then I realized that was going to look exactly like all of the shrubberies. So I started going around some of them, but just picking out some spots to put rocks instead. And when you draw rocks, just make clusters in certain areas. Don't make them like consistently everywhere. Let them be kind of smaller and bigger and different shapes and stuff. And in different configurations, if they're all too even, it looks like a cobblestone path that somebody laid down rock by rock. And nobody's going to do that in a redwood forest. The final step is one of my very favorites when I make any piece of art is the peeling off of the tape. Just seeing that nice white crisp line makes me a happy camper. I don't know if it does that for anybody else, but I love that really soft, misty background behind him. And the color is a little bit better here. The lighting got a little weird on my big camera, but he looks adorable. And you can make a card out of him quite easily if you're a card maker. The class that I was talking about is called travel sketches. And it's taught in the sketch marker aqua pens that I was using today. You could use any of your markers, though, whatever water based markers you have. There's also some stamping that you might be able to do. And if you're a stamped watercolor person with those art impression stamps, then you might have some trees and other things. I'll show you how to use some of those in the class as well, along with creating a scene like this. But you can also just draw or paint those things. But you might recognize some shapes, some pine trees and other kinds of trees and grasses that you can use those for. So links in the doobly-doo, of course, to that and to all the supplies used for today's Nome in the Redwoods project. Please do make sure you're subscribed to my channel. Hit the bell and tell it to send you all notifications because Friday I'm coming back with another travel sketch this time with fine art grade markers rather than crafty. I think it's going to be Yellowstone this time. And be sure to join the blog hop. Go see all the other creations by everyone else who is celebrating Trinity's anniversary today. Thank you so much for hitting the like button. I will see you again on social later on today, tomorrow, all week and back here on Friday. Bye guys.