 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allknock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to answer a question today that I've gotten in several different places over time. What is the appropriate way to hold a blending stump? First, a little bit about how I choose colors. I use both my hex chart, which is blended with blending solution and my little swatches, which are not because I don't blend everything. That's just not how I roll. I like the pencil texture, but I can pick a set of colors that are going to work for the look that I want to achieve by choosing from both, because then I'll know what it's going to look like, whether I choose to do blended or unblended in certain sections, and my neighbor dog is going wild right now. There must be a giant squirrel out there, so I will apologize right now. Maybe that dog knows that there are lots of animals in this little car that I'm coloring. I don't know. I chose to use a purple for the shadows, and I know purple seems kind of crazy. If you haven't taken any of my color theory lessons, that is one of them, and purple is one of my favorite things to shade yellow with, because it doesn't come out like a weird brown. It may blend like a brown, but it blends more like a yellow brown than it does a brown-brown. It looks just a little more alive in that way, and I'm using an orange for a middle color, and then I'll add a little bit more of the purple in the darks. And now for some blending solution, I'm going to use baby oil today, but you can also use gamsol. I put it in a little makeup jar with cotton balls in it, and that way I'm not dipping the end of the stump into actual liquid. I'm just dipping it in and compress it against that cotton ball, and control how much fluid I pick up. So with a blending stump, you can either hold it kind of like a pencil and that will give you the sharper point on the end of the blending stump. And I do that kind of in the areas where I'm getting near an edge of something, or a place where I need a small area to be covered and not really wanting to spill over. And how you hold a pencil is how you hold a pencil. So whatever way you would normally hold a pencil works just fine. Then for larger areas, I turn it on its side, and I'm using the whole side angle of that point to apply the blending solution onto it. And my goodness, I think this world got really big next door. The the side angle gives you more area to cover all at once, and you end up with less of the little lines in between. So then you are getting a wider stroke, basically, by doing it that way. And then I switch back to the pencil type of holding, and that way I can get back into smaller areas. Going back and forth between the two of those can be really helpful. One of the great things about blending solution, unlike things like watercolors, you don't have to wait for it to dry. You can go in right away with another layer of a color. And I noticed some of my color amounts of pigment in the center area was not as even as it was on the others. So I just added more in, and you can re-blend on top of that. The harder you press with the pencil, the less you're going to be able to move that color. So don't feel it like completely. Don't squish down on it quite so much that there's no room for pigment to move around. You want to leave some air in there and let the blending solution be the thing that moves the pigment around in different ways. So next I'm going to work on these wheels, and I'm trying to leave some of that gray showing. I did the first coat of gray, and I don't want the wheels to just be solid black. Although once I applied the blending solution, a lot of that did disappear. But I do end up with a little lighter on the bottom, and the heavier should be in the area, just inside the wheel well. Because there's no sunshine getting in there. Now for the inside of these little guys, I didn't re-dip into the solution in order to get more solution in there. I'm just using an almost dry stump, and you can use a dry stump or a stump with the solution on it when you do your blending. You don't have to use the solution. You may find a better effect in getting a really light color that's going to blend into a white using just the stump and no solution with it at times. So always bear that in mind. You also don't have to use multiple colors in order to use a blending stump. Use one color, and you can be just fine. And you can also, if you have solution and pigment on the tip of your blending stump, then by all means, you can actually use it as almost a brush to pick up color and move it into another area. Now I'm just adding all these different types of browns into all of the different areas of the animals, and mixing up which ones go with which ones. So sometimes I'll use a gray with a warm kind of yellow brown. And other times I'll use a dark brown with a nearly black type of brown. And I can get a lot of variety in the animals by just rotating which color I put with which color. And then they don't all look like they're the same brown, and yet they're all related to each other. So the whole piece has unity to it because they all feel like they're made from the same colors. Now one of the things that's kind of amusing about this is that none of these animals would ever, of course, be in a car together unless they are driving to see the squirrel that my neighbor has found. That's always possible, I suppose. But I'm holding the blending stump like a pencil now in order to get into these teeny tiny areas. And this is another reason that you might want to choose to use pencil sometimes on a piece that you're coloring for a card or something because pencil can get into all those tiny areas. Whereas a lot of times you can't get into those small areas if you're using a watercolor brush or if you're using a Copic marker. It's much more difficult to get into that. To do little noses like that. You could never do that with a lot of other mediums. However, you can always add in a little pencil with other mediums that you use. So I used the side of the pencil to just make a little gray cloud. And then I added a little bit of a yellow into it just so it wouldn't look like just gray dust. And then colored black all along the bottom. And again, I'm going to use the side of the blending stump to get a really wide stroke. If you were to sit there and try to do this section while holding the blending stump vertically, you would be there all day long and you would end up with a really not smooth area. It would be really, really rough. But I'm holding it by its side and pressing down on it so that you can actually see the strokes coming across that are really thick, as opposed to just the width of the tip of it. And it gets your work done faster as well as making it smoother. Now, one thing that blending stumps do that you need to be aware of is they remove color. That's why you have color that's on your actual blending stump. It also moves color into the white areas. So it's basically lessening the amount of color that you have on your picture. So this is no longer a solid black and I'll show you in a few minutes what I mean by that and how you can take advantage of that fact that there's less color on. I put the card into my misty so I could stamp the piles of thanks sentiment coming out the back like a banner and added some other colors to it. I wanted it to be yellow and I didn't want to contaminate it. So I did the yellow first and then the black outline. Had I done the reverse, then when I color the yellow, I might have dragged some of that black into the yellow area and made a mess. In the stamp set there's also a little dotted line to make a road. So I also used my misty and some Lawn Fawn white ink. It's a white pigment ink to make that little line across there. And then I trimmed it down so I had a little space above and below to let the card base color show and put all of that onto a dimensional adhesive. Now here's where I can use the fact that the black has been somewhat removed. I'm putting black on top of all of that blending as a final touch. And I can put a shadow underneath of the car that looks like a shadow. And before you would have said oh that's really a black area down there and the tires melted right into the black. But the black underneath remember is blended with a blending stump. It's not not just black pencil. So this is going to give me that difference in black on black so that I can have something that looks a little bit more dimensional and makes the car really pop up off the ground. So there's my cute little card for today. I hope that answered the question about blending stumps using them either vertically or on the side in order to achieve different effects. And I will see you guys again next time. Have an awesome day and go make something beautiful and give it away to somebody else. Make their day and make them smile. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.