 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, and today I'm going to show you how to color variegated yarn using Copic markers. I started by stamping the Paper Rose stamp set called You Warm My Heart with Twilight Ink from Catherine Puller, which is generally not a Copic-friendly ink, but I did some second generation stamping, and that's described more on the blog if you don't know how to do that. And these are the colors. They will also be posted on my blog if you need to know what those are, but they're also on the screen. The second generation stamping made this gray a lighter ink, so it worked really well for this. And I started by doing the darkest shading first. Since I wanted to do variegated colors, I didn't want to shade every strand of yarn. That seemed like an excessive waste of time. So instead, I put all the gray shading down first. I started by selecting my light source, which is in the upper left, and I put the shading all along the bottom of the heart. And then went for each section, and I pretended they were each a separate item that needed to be shaded, and I put the darkest color at the bottom and then blended it toward the top with a lighter shade so that I didn't end up with a big, old, solid, heavy line around each one of those groupings of strands of yarn. And then I took some lighter color and just mushed it around a little bit so that I didn't have just a big, old, solid block of dark next to a solid block of light color underneath of all the color that I was going to place down here. And as I started doing that, I realized I needed a little more transition in here, so I went back to that N2, and I just started adding in a little bit in the darkest areas of the heart, because I really wanted this heart to feel dimensional on its own in black and white before I added the color. You can add this afterward, however, if you add it beforehand, you're going to be able to keep the freshness of the color on top. The gray will dull it down if you color it over it, and then you're going to be tempted to go back in with more color, but there is a still image of this finished black and white one on my blog, so once you get the stamp, if you need to refer to that to follow along, then it's right there for you. And then I just took a bunch of random colors. The colors, as I said, are posted on the blog. It doesn't matter what they are in order to make a heart like this with variegated strands. And I'm just just kind of picking different strands out and trying to make a nice selection of them, kind of squinting at it to make sure that I spread the colors out among each of the strands so that you don't end up with all the pink in one spot and no pink in another, et cetera. And I did find that the brighter colors felt a little more jarring. So once I got past that green, I opted for a little bit dimmer, darker colors for the rest of it, because that just seemed a little bit on the garish side. But you can choose whatever you like for your variegated yarns. To create a background for this, I wanted something that would make this feel a little bit softer, because the coloring on this is so soft. So I wanted to make some light wood coloring. And I'm just making some lines. I didn't measure a thing, as you can tell. They're not even, and it's not going to matter. I just drew some boards, and that was really it. I did add a few knots in it with this darker color before I switched to a lighter one. And I also added a little bit of shading right underneath of the heart itself so that it looks like it's sitting up on top of the wood surface. And then started making the wood. Now, with wood, it's so easy to do. Just vary the pressure of the marker. You can see sometimes I'm pressing hard, and I get a wider line. And then I lift up, and I get a thinner line. And that is the secret to making wood that looks very natural like this, as well as using kind of the right colors. I'm using an E30, which is light. If you want it to be lighter, then go even lighter. If you want to do a wood tone with a little more grayish in it, then use a gray. Whatever color you want to use. And practice it on a scrap sheet, just a little section of it, to see what's going to work out for a card design that has heavier colors in the image, really strong colors. You're going to want a stronger wood. And for something like this that's really soft, I wanted to have very soft wood. As I finished up the wood, I realized I needed a little something extra added to it. So I took a gray, and I added a little bit more to the cracks in between each of the boards. And that dulled them down as well as darkened them. And then I could add some shadows around where these little curly strands are hanging. It's the same curly little section, but it's just offset a little bit, so that it looks like it's lifted off the surface. And then I wanted to add some strength to the shadow underneath of the heart, because I want to make sure it pops up more off the surface. Watch what happens when I add even a little bit of the gray underneath. That's going to add even more contrast and lift it up that much further. So contrast is key for making things look like they're dimensional. To finish off my card, I trimmed the panel down so that I have a little white border around it and popped it on some dimensional adhesive. And I also used some dimensional adhesive on the sentiment panel, which I trimmed into a banner shape. And that small bit of embellishing with dimension was enough to make this a more elegant card than just a simple, straightforward colored one. And I really like how it came out. I'm not usually one who loves pastels like this, but I really enjoyed making this card. I hope you enjoyed watching it. Go see my blog for more on this. And stay tuned to Instagram, because I'm going to color this one again, because I love this stamp. I'll see you guys again very, very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.