 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Olnach, and today I'm going to do a little color pencil coloring to make some toucan friends. I just picked up the Catherine Pooler toucan stamps, and they're so cute. So I stamped each one of them by just masking off the ends of their branches, and sometimes masked off a full leaf. Because that way I could add a little stamp in between, because in the stamp set there are some little flowers and leaves that you can fill in the gaps with, and I can make it look like they're all on one branch. Because of course, if they are toucan friends of any sort, then they should all be on one branch. And it doesn't even matter if the branches and the leaves match up perfectly, because the idea is going to come across in the whole card anyway once you get the coloring done. I'm going to be using my Prismacolor pencils today and doing some uber-simple coloring. I'm not going to put the numbers on the screen, because you can do this in any kind of colors that you want. And I decided on this when I was going to alternate between doing some solid coloring, because there are these little almost stained glass type of pieces on the beak of this one little toucan, and some of the shapes on the other toucans on the tails and stuff are a little more on the graphic side, so they don't even necessarily need to have any shading. So I'm doing a lot of solid coloring with them, and using a pretty heavy pressure. If you've taken the Color Pencil Jumpstart class that I offer, it's probably about a four or a five-ish on most of these in the pressure that I'm using. So I have a little scale in terms of very light pressure, which leaves a lot of texture showing versus pressing really hard. Your hand does get a little tired after using heavy pressure quite a bit, and those who have taken the class I think have decided, from what I've seen on the Facebook group where everybody shares, that it's a lot easier to just add layers of pencil and other blending techniques rather than always trying to press really hard. But on something like this where I'm trying to get some areas that look fairly solid, it's most helpful to do that with the pressure. I'm using some Stonehenge drawing paper, and I find that I get a little richer color on the Stonehenge than I do on other papers. For a long time I used my Neenah cardstock because that's what I used all the time for my Copic coloring, and it just seemed easier to have one paper on hand that worked for both of them. However once I discovered this Stonehenge, I fell so much in love with it that it feels like I'm doing something wrong if I decide on my color pencil work that I'm going to go back to using my Neenah. So now I'm going to add a soft element. I've got a lot of my hard elements in there with solid areas, and I wanted this little bird to feel like he was a white bird, and that's where I started getting into putting the soft coloring in. I'm doing some very soft blending and just allowing the pencil to use really light pressure, just getting a little bit heavier in the shadow areas. And I thought that would be a really nice contrast with all of the sharper, more contrasty types of areas of the stamps. So it just gives a different feel to it. And I love the fact that they're all on one card, they're all on one branch, they're all in one streamlined look, because it's going to give them a sense of unity regardless, but I can enhance that with the colors that I choose. So I'm going to try to be bouncing back and forth to put the same colors across the stamp. Notice that there's some red little plant life over on the right hand side. It didn't necessarily need to be red, I could have left it green, but I wanted to balance out the red on the rest of the card by adding some green on that side. And here with this little guy I've got some pinkish color for the shadows on his body, but I'm blending it with some yellows to pull in a little bit more of the yellow that's used elsewhere in the card. I did decide to go for a more grayish blue for the shading on this one too can, because he's really supposed to be more white than I think the other birds on his body. So left it that way. And then I used some of the same soft colors blended together on the flower that I used on the bird on the right. And that just starts to balance things out so that I get the same colors across the card in a really nice alteration or alternation of patterns and colors and that sort of thing throughout the whole card. I love really simple ones like this. The coloring is fun to do, it's relaxing, not worried about light sources and shadows and all that kind of stuff. Just having some fun putting in some really solid, bright, happy colors and coming out with a card that I can send to somebody to encourage them to can do it. You know, like who doesn't love a good pun, right? Give them each a little extra dot on their eyeballs to make them a little bit happier. And then added it to a green card base with a little of the card base showing on the left and the right. And they came out really fun. Sometimes cards don't have to be really difficult. So I hope this has encouraged you to try a little something and whatever it is know that to can do it. I know to can. Okay, I'm stretching the pond a little too far. I'll see you guys later. Hit that like button. I'll see you next time. Bye.