 Well, hello there. It's Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I made a card for my Steelers fan uncle to share with you today. When I saw Honeybee come out with this really cute hedgehog, I had to get the stamp set because I have an uncle who's been on my mind lately. He's not been well, and I wanted to send him a card that is kind of celebrating his team, Pittsburgh Steelers. He and I are both big Pittsburgh Steelers fans. So I have stamped the pom-poms and the little outfit first in black ink, and I'm going to color it in Copic. So this is on Nina, and I'm using a Copic-friendly ink, the Lawn Fawn Jet Black, and I'm going to mask these parts out. I'm going to tear off some of my masking tape and put it right over top and stamp that. And this tape doesn't stick super super heavily, which means it's easy to work with. It's kind of post-it-note stickiness level, not really like some of the the artistic versions, I guess, of masking papers, which can be really sticky sticky. And I'm trimming them out, and I'm not fussy cutting every little bit of those pom-poms, by the way. I overcut, meaning I left extra paper there because I can always take a pen and redraw in any portions that I missed. It's much easier than spending all your time doing the fussy cutting. And I wanted to stamp the outside edges first of the little hedgehog in grout gray, because I wanted them to kind of disappear and then mask them off really weirdly by using a bunch of torn sticky notes and other pieces that I've just kind of glued on there, so that I could stamp the body in black ink and have that contrast between the light and the dark. Now, one thing I didn't do was test stamp first. I often will test stamp on a piece of acetate because you'll notice when all this is done that the body didn't quite line up in the right place. So, yeah, I'll have to deal with that. But since I'm going to be using Pittsburgh Steelers colors, I didn't worry about it too much because I can fix that. The Steelers allow this little hedgehog in order to cover up that little, see the little area on the right-hand side of the body? Yeah, that's an oops there. But the Steelers outfit allows me to make the outfit itself a dark color, so it's going to disappear. If you ever have an area like that that you totally goof up on the stamping, see if there's some way you can adjust the colors so that the stamping doesn't matter all that much and that you can fix it. Just cover it up with something and by the time I was done with this, you're going to see the craziness of the whole card. Well, I guess you saw the preview already. There's so much going on in the card. No one would notice it anyway because there's so much crazy activity going on. And I'm sorry if you're hearing airplanes going on overhead. We apparently have some really strange flight patterns going on over my house and I'm tired of waiting for the air to clear of whatever it is that's causing that. So we're going to get a little bit of air travel going on overhead. For the hedgehog itself, I'm going to use some dark browns around the snout and then slowly blend that out to the outer edges. I was looking at hedgehog pictures and I found this one really cute one that had a mostly kind of white going from the top of the head down to dark at the snout, which is really cute. I don't know how many hedgehogs really have that type of coloration, but that's what I was using for this and then coloring the body in that same brown color. I'm going to add a little darker brown to get some depth going on and I would love to see anybody who's got a hedgehog that actually does do like flailing around with pom-poms. Wouldn't that be cute? I kind of picture them as little cuddly guys, but having not had a hedgehog. I don't really know if they get energetic and excited over anything. The hedgehog picture that I was using also had kind of some dark in the body portion right around the face so that the face was all lit up and bright and then it went out slowly to white. And so that's what I'm trying to develop here as I'm blending the colors and getting lighter as it gets toward that outside edge. I'm going to deal with the outside edge a little bit more later on, but as I was doing this and coming up with what I wanted to do in the scene, I decided I wanted to get just enough of this color that it feels like there's a decent soft blend going on and then jump into the background portion. So I put another piece of scratch paper underneath so I don't dirty things up as I color over the edges and I put in just big shapes for faces. Notice these are blobs and if you're doing anything with a crowd in the background I'm really just going to see blobs. The size of them will indicate how far back this is. So if the hedgehog is on the near side of the stadium and you're seeing the far side of the stadium in the background, then you would do very small heads. But she's standing right by the sidelines so the heads are pretty big of the people in the crowd. And then I'm using other colors that are very muted colors, either muted in terms of just being very light colors, very pale, but also in desaturated and letting all that color just be blobs because I wanted to just give an indication she's on the field without getting into much detail. Then added some of that that color for the grass is going from the YG9-1 in the background, that kind of muted color to a brighter color in the foreground gives that sense of depth and the shadow is down below her feet far enough that you can see air underneath, which means she's jumping up in the air. If you put the shadow touching her toe, then she's not jumping as high. So the higher you want her to jump, put that further down. For the little spines here on my little hedgy, I started using dark grays at the top and then moved to middle grays in that bottom section. And then went in with a white pen to add some more detail onto little hedgy. Isn't she just getting so cute? I know I wanted to put a little bit more detail into my pom-poms. So I added a couple of black stripes, gave her a little context for being on a field by adding the markings on the field and not being super intentional about going to look up what a field looks like. I know there's different lines that go different directions. And as long as I put a couple of them directionally, those ones that recede into the background, it just looks like she's on the field itself. Next, I decided to really get crazy and make it a super celebration card by adding just confetti everywhere. Because she's just having fun. The Steelers just scored. She is a happy camper. So I started with yellows and I put a little bit into the black areas. You can see a little bit of that erase, but not much of it did. I rotated through a couple different colors of confetti that match the team colors. And if you're using whatever team colors, this is a great opportunity to get lots of that in there. But the outfit was not responding of course well to having the light yellow confetti. So I had a lot of white confetti using my, of course, white pen. You can use a gold pen too and add that sort of thing in here. Remember that confetti just like snow is going to fall in front of your main subject, not just behind it. Well, I suppose if they're throwing it behind the person, then yes, you could do that. But make sure with all those kinds of falling things that they fall in front of the subject as well. For my card, I just added a couple paper layers because that's all you need to add when I spend all this beautiful time coloring and making it such a pretty card. Thank you so much for joining me. Don't forget to send your crazy uncle's a card. Go ahead and do that this week. Crazy uncles never get a card and they really should because they deserve it. So Uncle George, this one's for you. Watch your mailbox and I'll see you guys later on. Have a great football season. I'll talk to you later. Bye.