 Well, hello there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I've got some Copic coloring for you with my new migrating birds printable set. And if you buy the printable set, you get this sheet with it that has all the colors in it and samples of the coloring so you know where to put the darks and the lights, that sort of thing. I've also, in this very long video, got a preview of a new class that's coming and I want to be able to tell you that and give you some examples of the kinds of things that are going to be in it because it's a clean and simple design class, not card making class, but a design class for card makers. All right, let's get started. The migrating birds were created for the class because I needed something to use as a stamp set, as a demonstration. They're not necessary for the class, but they are separate purchases. So you won't get the migrating birds if you buy the class and you don't have to buy the class to get the migrating birds. You can get the birds right now. They're over on the website, link in the doobly-doo. So I made migrating birds. The blue heron is one that lives near me and I thought that would be a beautiful bird to do. I love the way their wings flap, the way they move when they're flying. This one comes from a view where the back wing is darker than the front wing. They both use the same colors, the C9, the C7 and the C5, but the back wing uses more of them. And just uses the C5 to kind of blend them, except when you get to the forward part of the wing and then you see more of the C5, but it's going to help to separate that, the two wings from each other. Because when you start to color the front wing, then you can leave a little bit of the tips of the wings like I'm doing here and color the rest of the wing in, add as much as you want to to start doing the blending. And right when you get to the end, you can take the C5 or a C2 and just run over it really quickly. So then you end up with what looks like lighter gray tips. So next up is the mallard, a couple of color things on him. The beak is not a pure yellow, so I put a little gray over top of it. They use some brown to shade the orange feet. And the head is a shimmery green slash a blue green, which doesn't equate to shadows. So don't worry about whether you're putting it in the right shadow places. It's just the whole head shimmers and shines with the two colors. And there is one spot on the back of each wing with a bit of blue with a stripe of white above and below it, but you only see it on one wing here. That big gray shape is actually the shadow of the wing. And it's going to create a really dramatic look on the bird because it's going to leave some white there. We're going to get rid of the rest of the white on the birds so that that body portion is the only part that looks white. He's got some brown underneath of that stripe below his head. And then I'm going to color most of the rest of the wing in the medium brown color. There's a whole bunch of colors when you look at flying mallard. It's grays, it's browns, it's dark browns, it's light browns. It almost looks like there's a little bit of white in there, too. There might be some white feathers in there. The underside of the wing is white. So the front wing, we're seeing more of the underside on the back wing. We're just seeing the top side. So the front wing though is going to go gray because it's shaded. It's kind of hanging down. It's shaded by the tip of the wings. So then I'm going to color over all the white in the far wing with gray, just a very light gray and then start to pull in dark colors from around the outside edges of some of those wings. So I start to get the definition of those feathers separated by the two dark, dark brown colors into that that medium brown and then into the gray. When you get to the back of the bird, it has to join up with the front. So he has that the whole back side of him is is that darkish brown. And then I'm going to blend some of those colors to sort of bring them together and I decided at that very end, I wanted to just pull in a few strokes, very light strokes across the whole wing and that tied it together quite nicely. The sandhill crane is the easiest basically out of all these birds, I think, to color because it's a mostly white slash light gray bird with a red head. And so I'm using my very light C2 first. He's got dark feet, so I'm going to use the C7 for the dark feet. And then to put some shading along the bottom, the C7 and the C5. And then the tips of the wings on the far side will have a little bit of dark on them. But this wing in the foreground, same thing as with the mallard duck. The wing is flying kind of out toward you. And it's hard to tell that from this particular angle unless you put the shadow on the body. So I've put another shadow coming straight down from the wings, which creates that that difference between the body and the wing. The little forward part of that wing stays a light gray. I'll add red onto the head. And then I wanted this wing to just stand out a little bit more and to make it really look like it's in shadow. So that's when I jump back into the C7 and I'm adding some at the very tips of the edges of the top part of the wing. And then all along down the bottom side and then a little bit of definition inside the wing itself to give give it more feathers. And then I'm going to go over it with the C5 again. So I get a little darker color, but I'm not going to go over the body as well. That's going to make some definition between the wing itself and the body and kind of separate the two of them from each other. Next, we have the Canada goose, again, we have flying over here all the time and there's Canada geese that run around in the park near me. The dogs love to chase them and get them busy honking and flying away. But I'm going to color the two wings differently again, because this wing, we're seeing the top side of it. The other wing, we're seeing the bottom side. So the top side wing is going to be a little bit more on the brown side. The bottom one, since it's a white underwing, it's going to have mostly a warm gray. And so that's going to be the main difference between the two. But we're going to have more dark color on the top side of the wing. So I'm using a very, very dark brown in order to create just those feathers at the tips. And then I'll switch to a less dark brown, so an E49 and then an E47. I use those regularly in all of these birds to try to blend them together and start working toward lighter colors and then get into an even warmer type of brown. So just kind of using the same colors as I can for most of these birds. So you don't have to get out a good jillion colors if you want to color them all at the same time. A lot of the colors are shared between them, but they're just used in different amounts. So here I'm adding a little bit more detail into some feathers. And then I'll go back in with that color that I used at the very beginning to blend all that back in and deepen the color on the wing. This PDF with all the colors on it, by the way, comes with the set. So you'll have that handy and you'll have the coloring of these birds so you can kind of see how I applied the darks and the lights and where I put them, et cetera. So the back wing is going to have a little bit of these same colors, but very much less of them and focusing more on having that overall gray color and just adding a little bit in the tips of some of the feathers so that we don't get the two wings looking identical and then they both look like the top side of the wing. So next up is a European barn swallow. And this is the first part of the giggle for those of you who are Monty Python fans. We did a European swallow and an African swallow. And if you don't know the difference between why that matters, I will put a link in the doobly-doo to the video that you need to go see about European and African swallows. Yes, I was in a silly mood when I was coming up with these. Those birds both do migrate. European barn swallow has an orange underside to the head and blue and then even a little bit of brown on the top. You can put some brown on the top as well. The tail is very striking with those points and the very dark, dark browns on either side of that white stripe. And then I was trying to work out how to create some of the wing colors. The most of the wings on these birds are kind of a brownish color, but right close to the body, it's more orangey. And in order to create that orangey color without getting another Copic marker out, as I said, I was trying to limit the colors a little bit. I did some tip to tip and I did that early on in coloring that that intersection of the wing. But I'll also do it again here at the end to reaffirm that color. Once I get all these browns in there and starting to blend them together using the kind of warm mid-tone brown and pulling that that brown edge in toward the center. But here I go with the tip to tip again. The orange color used by touching the E42 to the YR15. And then I only get a little bit of that orange. It's not as orange as under his chin. Now, the South African swallow has much less fancy color in him. More of an overall brown bird. The wings, the head and the the tail, even though the back of the tail is very dark, there's a kind of less dark brown section underneath of his feet toward the back end. So he's got just a white stripe around the body. And then when I was doing the drawing for the these printables, I did try to put some of the lines in the places where you would want to have some of the dark colors. You can make these very plain. You can do very simple, straightforward blending and not draw in all the feathers. Certainly don't have to do that much because the lines that are there are going to carry some of that shading with them. So you could make just a very simple swash of one brown into another brown and they would still look quite beautiful. But here I'm adding the warm brown. You can see the difference between adding a warm brown to something when I start putting in this brown. There's like more of a reddish feel to it rather than that kind of sallow yellowish feel to the other browns that were there in the first place. I'm just going over it with a light color to sort of tie all of those little bits of brown feathers together. So that is the coloring of these six birds. You get the birds not only facing to the right, but you also get in the set facing left. So you get 12 birds, each one of them facing right and left. Same drawing just flipped. So you don't have to worry about flipping it. And you get this sheet along with it so that you can refer to these colors. And now for the class that I wanted to talk about, clean and simple design for card makers. What I've done is taken an old card for each lesson. And sometimes I have two of them that I do in each lesson. Assess the old card, create a sketch from it and then simplify it using principles of design kind of in a two step phase. And I'm going to show you a demonstration of how I do that. But I look at these cards and I say, well, I didn't like this so much. I do like that. I would do this differently. And I kind of just give you an assessment of that old card. Some of them are really terrible. Some of them are kind of nice like this one. But here I've redone it. I've kept the rectangle with the two rounded corners. I've kept the strip, but I've closed it up a little bit, made it smaller. I've changed the background paper to make it lighter in hopes that the image would stand out more. But when I colored the image, I didn't get much separation between the reeds and the duck. So I wanted to do something a little different there. But everything on here, all the shading that you see, that's all drawn on one flat piece of paper. I didn't bother to just, you know, put together cards for each one of these. I've drawn all the elements. That's not what the class is about. I just wanted you to know that you're not going to see like patterned paper in there. You're going to see my rendition of patterned papers. But I'll kind of give you an idea of of what that's going to look like in this next section of this video. But you're going to see some things that I like and some things that I don't in each of these phases. And I'm going to talk about why and why the principles of design are brought into those decisions. All right. So when I was starting to work on this, I decided I wanted to limit the colors. Again, I didn't want to have every color out. So I went for Pantone's set of colors. They came out again, they do this every year. They came out with their new color for 2023, which happens to be R37. They call it Viva Magenta. And what you're seeing here, that pink block I swiped from their website. It's really hard to see the difference in the colors. And these are actually closer than you would think they are, because when something is on film versus with all that light from the RGB monitor behind it, everything looks different. But these are the colors that I matched as best as I could. And that's what I'm going to be using in the class. So they're very muted, very soft, pale colors. And when I realized the kinds of colors I was using for the birds, I thought these are going to go perfectly with it. I may or may not use very much of that red spot color. We'll see how that goes, because I'm just in the phase of getting all those designs ready for the class, which I'm hoping will launch on Christmas, but we'll see. All right. So what I've done for the second version of this card is simplify the sketch. And I airbrushed in the background, which you could certainly do with inking or other techniques you could do with colored pencils and powder colored pencil. And I kept the vertical stripe. I really wanted that vertical stripe in there. And I wanted to play down that rectangle. So I used just a very simple light gray to make that rectangle recede to the back, but also lift up that, that really light panel that I'm going to put the scene in. And the scene, I'm not going to just color it all in with massive colors like I did on the left. We use very soft colors. That's a W2 I'm using for the top part of the reeds. And then a YG91, very, very light, very desaturated yellow green color for the stems on the reeds and the grasses that are in there. That's going to help the duck to really pop forward, because now I've got all these really soft colors behind it. And the duck is going to take center stage because I wanted the happy bird day, which, of course, I got the sentiment from the card. I wanted that to stand out and I wanted the duck to be looking at it. Now, in mine that I've created and you're going to get all these sketches in class. In mine, I've got gray lines because that's what I ended up printing so that I could make all of these. And I'm going to go over those with white to eliminate some of that, because if you were just airbrushing that or inking it, you wouldn't have a gray line around everything. While I had the pen out, I decided to make a pattern on that gray paper, which lightens it. So if you choose a pattern paper that has a light pattern in it, it will lighten the effect of the whole paper. We'll talk about pattern paper in the class as well and all different kinds of design decisions that we make as card makers. A bunch of the cards that I chose to to work on are ones that I over embellished and the original card here had 12 little embellishments in that corner. I change it to six in the left hand card and now I've changed it to three. And I'm hoping that in this class, you're going to be able to see some progression and changes like that that will help you to see ways that you can simplify things and make your cards more modern and fresher than they might otherwise be. Because there's just tons and tons of tips that are coming at you in this class. The clean and simple design for card makers class is going to be available on Christmas Day. And I'm launching it that day because I want you to take advantage of the sale that I'm having that day. It'll still be discounted until New Year's, but it won't be as big a discount is on Christmas Day. So make sure you go shopping that morning and yeah, go get a couple other classes while there's a good discount going, if you wish. And I will see you again very soon. I've got a special treat for you on Christmas Eve. If you're around, if not, you can watch that after Christmas. And I will see you later. Take care and have a merry one if I don't see you before then.