 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnog, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube with video number three in the 24 Tags of Christmas series for 2018. Every year I create 24 tags and give them all away and this is the third in the series of the videos for this year and I'm going to teach you how to color fuzzy foxes. These are from Honey Bee, adorable little fox and I've stamped him on an angle so he's kind of peeking into the tag, he's not just kind of standing there which is how we normally color things but I thought it would be kind of fun and playful to do that. I masked out his little hand and the side of his body so that I could stamp the worm and have it look like he's peeking out in front of it and I think that actually emphasizes the fact that he's peeking out like a silly little fox just by doing that and having the words interact with him. And what I decided to do here, I wanted to color the fox for you and show you that. I also have a background idea but I decided I wanted to get the background kind of done a little bit before I do all of the layering and colors and stuff on the fox so I'm just going to do a little bit of the blending here. I wanted the fox to be kind of a warm gray so I did his face and I also wanted to show you real quickly there that you could put your shadows down before you do your color so on that little neck part of his sweater you could actually get away with doing your coloring of your shadows before you do the rest of it but then I decided I'm just going to go ahead and get the background done before I do any of the detail on him because then I'll know how intense I want to get with the color because I wanted to do something here that I did in a previous video. I didn't show you how I did it. I just showed the card on screen and I wanted to show you how to make Christmas trees in the dark that are really really easy. It's a technique that kind of stemmed out of the underwater class, the mini class over at art-classes.com and I've realized so many other uses for this particular technique and I thought okay I'll show you how to do it for Christmas and you can actually do it for summertime too I suppose. It doesn't have to be Christmas. You can just do it without putting snow on the trees at all. So I've used a really dark blue for the background just colored the whole thing in. Didn't worry about trying to make it even because I'm going to be adding these trees and I took a YG97 to add the tree shape. Basically it's a triangle with griggly kind of scribbly edges on it and you can especially focus your tree on any area that your coloring of the blue didn't work out. I'm exactly perfect. It's a great way to cover over those kind of things and make it look like oh yeah I meant to do that. I'm always looking for a way to make it seem like I meant to do what happened. And then there's this magical YG03. There may be other colors that do this but YG03 does a really good job of it. I think of these light colors, the light Copic markers, as having more colorless blender in them. I don't know if that's the science of it but you know they're light colors. So they have enough of that colorless blender in them they're going to act a little bit like a colorless blender. But in this particular case if you were to use a colorless blender you'd get a weird splotchy kind of color as it tried to erase the color here. But what we want to do is just push the color by scribbling in little groups and I'm not sure if groups is the right way but I'm trying to scribble a branch at a time rather than just scribbling all over the whole thing. So you can see I've got little tiny splotches of color that in a really soft muted background they start to look like the branches of trees. And you don't have to be real careful about worrying about where the light's coming from or anything. And if it comes out like a hot mess just add a lot of snow to it. I'm not going to add any snow to these but you can do that in order to cover up things. This snow covers a myriad of sins you know how that is. Take your white gel pen and put snow dots everywhere. So now that we have the fuzzy trees done I know how dark I can get with my fox. Because sometimes if you color the image first before you have some major dark element in your picture you'll find that the fox might wash out if you're not using dark enough colors. So I went really dark with my colors and you may not feel comfortable going this dark but go darker than you normally would when you have a dark background element like this because it's going to help to make the whole thing feel a little more united rather than having a really kind of wussy image out in the front. So notice how I did all those little lines and it looked like oh my gosh she's got a lot of fur lines in there and then I went over it with the lightest color that kind of just pulled it all back together. For his sweater I wanted it to look like he's got a ribbed sweater. Ribbed sweaters to me just say winter. They're just very very wintry you know with with all that cable knit whatever and you could of course get crazy and do patterns in your cable knit. I wouldn't recommend trying that on something this small but you could do that if you wanted I suppose and then even in the shadow areas I'm using the same kind of ribbing but I'm moving to darker colors and then I'll have a mid-tone type of color and I'll just keep adding different lines of different strength and color so that I get that roundness created by the ribbing itself. And just like I did on his little furry head I'm just going to go right over top of it with my lightest color. That'll soften a lot of it out some of it will disappear but it just starts to kind of pull it back together again instead of making it look like you've got all these really strong sharp lines with lots of contrast. So then I added lines again in the red part of the sweater just to add a lot more ribbing and texture to that one as well go over it with the lighter red and then call it done. So I have four tags ready now for four lucky winners out of the 24 winners that there are going to be by the end of this week and if you would like to qualify then go over to my blog. Link is in the doobly-doo and leave comments on all of the 24 tags of Christmas posts and you might win one. There's also a card there made with this stamp set and you might not want to miss that because it's using the same technique in a different kind of way on a card front instead of on a little tag. So I will see you there on the blog and I will meet you back here tomorrow for another video. Take care. Have a good one. Bye-bye.