 Well, hey there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to be coloring Antarctica and my new favorite penguin stamps. I've had several favorite penguins over the years and this one might actually make it into my list of new favorite stamps. When I get a favorite stamp sometimes, I color it on everything in all different kinds of scenes. And I'm doing Antarctica here, but I can totally see doing these little penguins maybe shopping in a store or doing all kinds of other things. So I am likely to use them again a time or two in my card making ventures. But you could do a number of different things for a simple Christmas card. You could make it more exotic, which is what I'm going to do in the second half of this video, or you could go really basic and just color the penguins themselves. What I did was look up penguins on Google because the Googles have good reference materials. And I found out that adult penguins, they kind of look more bluish purple-ish in their body, but the babies have this like really scrunchy fur. Like their bodies are poofy. They've got more of that undercoat or whatever they have, I guess. Anyway, they're fuzzy. And I wanted to make my two penguins look a little different because the little guy has to be fuzzy-ish. So I've made him with a warm gray tummy and a cooler gray kind of wing. And then I added a really simple shadow, really simple. You could add a Christmas sentiment to that and call it a Christmas card and be done and happy and no big deal. But I'm going to show you how to make one of the scenes that I saw in lots of the Googles when I looked up the penguins. Because Antarctica in lots of areas is really boring. It has this like long plane looking out into the distance that slowly goes from white into blue and then it fades up into the blue sky. And you can hardly even tell where the land ends and the sky begins. And you could just do this with a blend of color. It's great blending practice. And you can see the colors that I listed here. I just went from the bottom to the top with lighter and then darker and darker and darker and darker. So whatever your marker range is that you have. See if you can blend them going upward. Now you could do that with a pink sky. You could do that with all kinds of fun things to give them some different kind of a look for the card itself. Sometimes I went backwards with a lighter color to blend things out better. But generally I was trying to just move up from lighter into darker colors. And you can obviously if you are better at blending going from dark to light then start with the dark at the top. Why not? And giving it this just creates a pop of beautiful color. You can add your sentiment and be done with the card in and out really quickly. Note that it does not snow very much in Antarctica. Even though there's snow on the ground, it snows very rarely. It's kind of like the desert apparently. And anything that does fall just freezes and it just stays there. It just doesn't go anywhere. Well, at least until we melt the planet and I guess it's gonna go somewhere. But nonetheless, I'm gonna color this in a much more exotic way. This time I'll speed it up in just a little bit. But I wanted to show you a little slower here, the penguins themselves. Because what I'm using for their colors is something a little more exciting than just grays. So I'm putting in some blue violets, some blues, kind of purplish sorts of colors. Just a range of different colors. One of the photos that I saw of the baby penguins showed kind of a bluish tone to the wing itself. So I used an actual blue, modified that by using a little bit of warm gray over top of it and that sort of thing. And I'm using some warm grays in the belly. I'm going to be adding a little bit more to this one at the end of the video. So I'm going to get the scene done and then we'll go back in and add more color onto the penguin to give him a little bit more of that fluffy, warm, kind of fuzzy, tummy looking thing. But you can color them with all kinds of exotic colors. Look at the difference between using a purplish color in the adult penguin and then using the warm grays and the blues in the front penguin. So you can get a different look to them by just adding a bunch of different colors to both of the penguins. They're not just black and white. I'm leaving just a little highlight on the right hand side so that there's just that little bit of white there. I did look up finally and add at the very end. They're the beaks on the babies are black. So I'm not sure why they're not drawn in black in the stamp, but I didn't do that earlier, but I will add that at the end on my card. And now for the background, I'm going to speed this up a bit. I looked at all different kinds of photos, and there's not very many photos in the Antarctic that have much in terms of, I don't know, interest to the scene, but there were a few. And so I found one that had a whole bunch of different chunks of ice and icebergs and things that penguins meandering up and down these hills, just lots and lots of penguins in the background. So I kind of in my mind took the penguins out and just made the sort of seesaw type of hillsides. I'm using very light blues and blue violet colors just to give it an interest color. I, you know, rather than just doing gray or just doing blue, I thought a blue violet tint to the whole thing would be much more interesting. Well, while I color this scene, I thought I would tell you a funny story back when the Internet first began, or at least when I first started getting onto the Internet. I had gotten a computer. I was living in Montana. It was a long, cold, cold winter. And I had heard all these horrible things about the Internet where people could pretend to be someone they weren't and you had to be careful and it was scary. And I decided to see if this was true, if you could really pretend to be somebody that you weren't. And I went onto chat boards and pretended that I was living for the time being in the Antarctic. I was at McMurdo station and I pretended that I was a photographer and wildlife illustrator who was there doing research for some project and made up all kinds of crazy details about it. But that meant that I was doing a lot of research. I was looking up stuff on the Internet because now I have the Internet and I was excited to learn stuff. And I found pictures that I could post and say, look, you know, there's these penguins that live right off of McMurdo. And I mean, I had all the details down. I even made sure that I was only on the chat board during the hours that someone who lived at McMurdo would be there. Like, what was the end of the day? What time would that be? And how did that translate to where I was living? I mean, I was really into it and it made me realize that, yes, you can pretend very much that you're somebody totally else. But it's a lot of work to pull it off and pull it off well. I eventually did face my deception and told everybody that, no, I had been pulling their leg the whole time and people were shocked because they thought that I really was living there. So that's my crazy Antarctic story. It might be my connection to penguins as well. I've always loved a good penguin stamp, sometimes cartoony penguins. And in this particular case, because they're kind of real penguins, they're realistic looking penguins. And I love being able to do realistic scenes with a realistic looking animal. The other thing I love about this stamp is that it's a small one. It's not like a giant one that fills the entire card. So it leaves me room for the scene around it. Lately, I've found that that's one of the things that I really like. I haven't been as attracted to the stamps that have a giant image on them because there's not really room to do any drawing around it. And since I love making scenes, a stamp like this really works a whole lot better. But one of the other things I was playing with as I was translating this scene that I had found on the Internet and was trying to sketch it out was looking at the values in the snow. There was a huge range in values. There were some areas that were like blackish dark kind of, you know, dirt that was mixed in with the snow or deep shadows because of the way the light was cast in this particular hillside, etc. And there were textures and really interesting lines and fissures in the snow. And it was just fun to play around with the different markers that I have and try to see if I could replicate that and make them look realistic. And I know for a lot of people, it's hard to see that just seeing those value differences. But choosing a really simple colorway like this, those those markers that are listed there are the only colors that I'm using in the background. It looks like a lot more. But if you just grab a couple of markers in a range of a color, whatever the hue is that you're using, challenge yourself to see if you could make a scene that's in a really simple collection of markers without using a gajillion of them. It forces you to look for values. And values means the light areas, the white areas, the dark areas, the mid tones and is it a darker mid tone or a lighter mid tone, that kind of thing. So now I'm going to add a little bit more onto the little penguin himself. You could see the difference between the simpler one on the left that was not done with adding a ton of texture to his little belly. But using a white pen and then I'll use some darker markers to add a little bit of difference into his his little tummy. The fur on the pictures that I saw had little I guess you'd call them rolls of fat. So they were like little creases in his fur so that he looked like he had little rows of of different amounts of dark and light on him and stuff. And I just was playing around with my warm gray marker and my cool gray to try to create some difference in in the body color so that now the penguins have a lot more warm color, at least the little guy has a ton more warm color in it than the whole rest of the scene. And then we have that pop of yellow in the adult penguin that also draws attention to them and the rest of the scene kind of fades into the distance. But it really does add a whole lot to create that furry, squishy, yummy little texture in the baby penguin because it makes you want to hug him because he's so cute. So I think I'm going to be using this stamp set in the future quite a bit over the winter, probably to make some more cards. So if you have ideas for the kinds of scenes that I should use along with these guys, even fun, crazy things like being in shopping mall. Let me know in the comments section because I will be posting some of those over the next month or two on social media because I like to use my favorite stamps a bunch of times. And these are really fun penguins to color. So I'm adding just a little bit of white details here and there to a little bit of the snow so that I have a little more detail in the foreground section. And then I just added the sentiment up in the sky for my little penguins. You warm my heart, a card that can be used any time of year. You can send penguins other times of year. It doesn't have to be for Christmas or winter only. But I thought you might enjoy seeing a couple different ways to make a scene for this penguin stamp set. Links to all the supplies are in the doobly-doo as always. And I'm going to get going. I will see you later. Go make something beautiful and put it in the mail to make somebody else's day. Take care. Bye bye.