 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to be coloring City Lady in Copic Markers and showing you how to make a flower shop background. It's part of the Ellen Hudson New Release, and there's three sets of Leading Ladies, and I'm going to show you the other ones first. This is Beach Lady. She's got a lot of stuff she can go to the beach with, little crabby buddy to have along with her seashells, drinks, a hat, fun things. There's Woodsy Lady, who goes out to the mountains and goes hiking and camping. She's got all her gear with her, and she's got a little squirrel for a buddy, which is nice to have a little friend, because you never want to go hiking alone. And finally is City Lady, and that's the one I'm going to be coloring today. And part of this was done in a previous video over on Ellen's channel, and I'll have a link to you, that one in the description down below. When you get to the end of this video, you can go see that. But the other video is all about this pattern play stamp set, and I show you how to use these with your Distress Oxide inks. So the Distress Oxides, if you apply them, like you've seen me do with the ink blending tool, instead of just straight up stamping them, you get a really soft color. And those pants that you can see there is one of the patterns, and as well on the little purse. And I've stamped peacock feathers and picked raspberry on top of each other to get that soft purple, and then pounced ink onto her shirt so they would have the same colors and be all matchy-matchy. So that was how I did those, and again, you can go see the video over on Ellen's channel once you're done watching this, if you would like. This particular image was stamped onto some Neenah cardstock, and it's the 80-pound classic crest, which I like to use for my Copic coloring. And it was stamped in Lawn Fawn's Jet Black Ink, which works great for Copics as well as watercolor. So it's kind of become my go-to black ink when I'm going to do coloring, and I'll be using my Copic markers. And one of the things I wanted to talk about since I'm doing a flower shop here for my background is why I'm doing a flower shop. I discovered something recently, and that is living in the mindset of abundance. For a long time, I had worked at so many nonprofits and was, you know, ran a nonprofit. I was so set in the mindset of like, I'm always broke. I'm always broke. I'm always broke that I bought the generic brand of absolutely everything. I bought the cheapest I could possibly get of everything I bought in huge things of bulk, even if I didn't need it because it was going to be cheaper. And I was always pinching pennies, and it was pretty miserable way to live. Now, I know we have to do that sometimes. You know, it's not like I'm looking to waste money, but I decided that in one area of my life, I was going to just live in the abundance. And that is always having fresh flowers in my house. And this is not going to the flower shop and buying a $40 big arrangement of flowers or anything, but it's just a little, you know, eight, nine, nine, 10, 99 batch of flowers at the grocery store even, just look for what's on sale and always have some fresh flowers in the house. And it, it reminds me that I live in abundance and in this country in America for those of you who live here, we live with abundance around us. So to reach yourself to something, it might be just getting that extra shot of something in your coffee. It might be just one little thing that you can do for yourself to remind yourself that you are very blessed. You're very lucky in the situation that you're in. Even if you're somebody who's like I have been at times in my life, you're, you know, pennies pinching all the time and really scrimping and saving all the time. Give yourself something. And for me, it's flowers where you live in the abundance, even just for that one moment, just a little tiny bit because that's going to help change your mindset all over. And I am a firm believer that if you believe something, it's going to have more chance of coming true. So if you really just concentrate all the time on how you don't have things, you're not going to have things and not that life is about having things, but it's about how you live your life. And for me, having flowers is just that little sign to myself that I'm okay, I can afford to buy little flowers once a week. I can treat myself to that. So I recommend that kind of a practice to you if you're in that place in your brain where you just need to feel like it's okay, I can actually blow just a little bit on this. Maybe it's just a candy bar once a week that you can afford or just some little thing. Anyway, for the flower shop, I'm making it a very fuzzy in the background kind of flower shop because that's going to be the easiest to color. And you can see I'm just kind of making blotches of color and I'm layering them on top of each other. But if you do them like in little clumps, then you can create little clusters of flowers. So it looks like there's different groupings of flowers, different kinds of colors. And I'm just making dots. I'm really not getting super excited about making anything really specific. But this RV 02 is probably the darkest you want to go with it. Keep it really faint and light and it's going to make it easier to get it all kind of blended out. So it looks really soft in the background. This would also work if you're trying to put a hedge row behind something like a row of bushes, you could do that with soft greens and do the same kind of a thing. I'm going back in with my lighter pink again and doing it around all of the darker pink so that I kind of have those softened out as they get out to the edges and it's not as stark. So if you end up accidentally putting a darker color in there, go in with some lighter colors around it or go in with your colorless blender and lighten that layer some colors over top of each other, let like these blue green and the pink and the yellows and all work together so that you start creating just a mass of colors behind her and she starts looking like she's got something in the distance. You can't really tell you can't really focus on it because your focus is on her, but it gives her a setting. Now for the rest of the flower shop, the easiest way to just do it is make an awning because if you make an awning it looks like a shop behind them and what I'm going to do is just draw it with my light gray marker. You can go with something lighter than this if you're nervous, but you can see I'm not being real careful about it. I'm kind of making a mess, but then I'm going to use flip marks to make the shadows underneath of that on the glass of the shop so all of that gray in there and I'm also trying to make the awning hang down below her head. If you make it just above her head, it's either going to look like a really tall building or something, but if you put it down below it just gives you a different perspective that's going to make it more pleasing rather than make it look like it's floating and looming over her head. This way it's clear that she's in front of it. And I started making a BG13. You can also make a striped awning if you want and make a horizontal across the front. I'll show you in a few minutes how I started working on something like that so that you can make one area in shadows. It looks like it tips down, but you'll see that in just a moment. I'm trying to just get the color on there first and then the sidewalk. I'm just going to use some warm grays and do the same flip marks going downward so that I'm creating shadows underneath of the flowers and that sort of thing and then slowly gradually make the colors lighter and lighter as it gets toward the front out into the sunshine. My markers are all running out so I was having a little stress mode here, but you know, that's the life of using your markers a lot. They run out, but then moving down to the W 00 down at the bottom and then it's starting to add some stronger shadows and on anything when you have an area that you've messed up on like maybe that the sidewalk isn't looking perfect. If you start adding darker details, people aren't going to look at those other details. So here I'm going to add some lines to create the sidewalk and using my drawing class perspective lessons for those of you who've taken the drawing class at art dash glasses dot com. Then you know that that is a one point perspective going on there and I can create something that looks like a sidewalk underneath of her feet. I added a little darker color right under those flowers and it looked really weird. So I went over it with my colorless blender to lighten that up because it was too dark and then I wanted to make the glass look like there were vertical panels as well holding up that glass. So I did some negative coloring just put another layer of that very light gray color in there with some spots where I didn't color it. And then it looks like there's a lighter area for the poles and things in the mirror or in the glass. And now this is where I was trying to I was going to put this front edge the leading edge here in a gray color and try to make that in shadow and then have the top of the awning above it in the light color and then that was just not looking quite right. So I thought I'm just going to dull the whole thing back because even if it's dulled back it's going to push it toward the background when you can't see it as much and that sort of thing and I really wanted the focus to be on her. I just wanted a really soft background behind her and then it's just a matter of adding her outfit onto her that I already had colored from the previous video. So there you go. All I had to do was add this onto a card base and I left it really straight up simple and did not get all fancy fancy with it because you know you spend all that time coloring who needs embellishments right. So these are the three of the leading ladies. You can see Beach Lady over on Ellen's channel. There is no video for hiking would see lady but that one was that took me a long time to color that one. So that's why there's no video of that baby because it yeah it was a lot anyway. I will see you guys later. Make sure you check the links down below especially if you want the full set of the bundle of all the stamps and get a little discount on that and that's about it. I will see you next time in another video. Have a really great day and a great summer. Bye bye.