 Hello there, sweet friend! I'm Sandy Olnock and I'm going to do some really simple coloring with colored pencils today. The sweet friend stamp set has short strings on the swing, so I drew longer ones in with a pen and I picked out some colors from my Polychromo set to color with on my card. And I'm going to keep the coloring pretty simple. In a couple of these areas, I'm going to use two colors to shade with. You don't have to use a ton and with pencils it's even easier than with any other medium because you can just use pressure to vary the color. And I'm going to use two colors to do it, but you could do this same thing by picking a brown pencil that you can just press harder in the shadow area. And when I say shadow area, I'm talking about the area that's furthest away from the light. And that is as simple as you can keep it. You don't have to make it really complex. I did put a little shadow underneath of her hair, so it looks like her bangs hang out a little bit from her her face, but you can even eliminate that. And here on her hair, I'm going to use a gray and then a black because that's going to give me some variety in the color without having to control the black pencil to make it go to a lighter color. One of the reasons that I like to do a secondary color when I'm using my color pencils is I can use a little bit more pressure in the light areas and still have light color there. Otherwise I end up with a lot of white pencil showing through the black in order to try to create highlights. So to make my shadows, I'm going to go into the dark areas. The dark areas are going to be anything that's underneath. So when you're coloring people, you want to color underneath of the neck and under the head, anywhere in those kinds of areas. If you put a few shadows in there, really that's all anybody needs to look at your artwork and think you're amazing at shading. Truly. That will convince them. If they see that you've put some shading in one area and we're really smart, truly, you don't have to shade everything perfectly in order to convince someone's eye. And I have said for many years, keep the main thing the main thing. If you're trying to make this little girl be the hero of the card, then focus your time and energy on her and let everything else fall away. If you want to be crazy like me and make full scenes, then that's fine too. Just know that you're putting a burden on yourself when you do full scenes to make the whole scene look nice. Whereas when you're just working on a simple scene like this, I'm going to add a few elements to it, but not a lot in order to make the card special, but keep the coloring really simple. With my little bunny, I'm going to use just the gray. I'll use the same gray that was in her hair, because when you simplify the palette on your card, it's going to simplify everything and make it harmonize better. So I'm going to use the gray. I'm not worried about trying to make my lighting in the same direction on the bunny as it is on the girl. And one of the reasons for and one of the reasons for that is that bunnies' noses and underneath of their mouth tends to be a little bit on the lighter side. And that tends to make the shading look like it's off anyway. And so I just don't stress about it. You know, if you stress about your coloring, you're probably doing something wrong, because coloring is relaxing and it's supposed to be fun. We're supposed to enjoy making art as opposed to stressing out over it. So I recommend just relaxing. If it gets stressful, get up, go get like a handful of M&Ms or some chocolate chips out of the stash in the cupboard and come back. And you have my permission to have a couple of couple pieces of chocolate to relax you while you're trying to de-stress. For her dress, I put a base coat of a pink down, and I'm going to go in here with in each one of these sections with a darker pinkish purple color. And I'm doing the same thing as I did on her face. I'm putting the shadow for each section away from the light. So if I'm picturing the light from her that's on her face being in the upper left, then I'm going to put all the shadows in the lower right hand side of each one of these things. And that back section is going to be completely covered because it's going to be all in shadow. And there'll just be a couple highlights on the poofs of her dress and then on her shoulder that's facing the sun. And you could get away with doing just this much coloring and that's it. But you know me, I tend to go the extra mile. So I'm going to show you two different things that you can do to make your card special without going to a lot of work. I'm taking a light green pencil and I'm making a very, very light background underneath of her. Just some green underneath and it's super, super light touch. For those who've taken the color pencil jumpstart class, it's like a one. It's very, very, very light. I'm even holding the pencil off to the side. You can do that a little bit. And if you want to smooth it out, you can use a cotton ball or something to smooth that a bit. And what I've done is cut the front of the card short a little bit so I can add some color that's on the inside that's going to show through on the front. And I started adding a little bit in and I want to show you the difference between using the blending stump and not using the blending stump. And I'm starting with these two colors that I used on her dress, but I realized I want this to match her dress. So how do I match her dress? I need to close it and use the same kind of pressure that I did on the dress. And it's easier to see whether it's working out right by closing the card. So I'm just going to stay in this bottom section and I want the very bottom to match her dress. And so I'm going to use a little heavier pressure like I did when I was coloring her dress. The darker purple color is underneath. I'm going in with the lighter pink color right now. And just trying to make them generally match in intensity overall so that it just feels like it belongs together. And underneath of it, I have some of that darker purple color. So that's going to help the pink be a little bit darker. And then I want it to slowly fade toward the white of the paper, because of course that's where I'll write the message inside the card. And I'm trying to fill in some of those blank areas a little bit with the pencil, get my blending as good as I can before I use a blending stump. So blending stump is a tool that will help you to blend. You can use it with or without blending solution. I know lots of folks want to try some coloring, but they don't really care about having blending solutions hanging around the house or anything. So you can use something like a blending stump or even use a cotton ball, just a plain clean cotton ball will move some of the color depending on what paper you're stamping on. This is stamped on Stonehenge. Links in the doobly-doo for all the supplies. Stonehenge is a great drawing paper and a simple cotton ball can smooth out a lot of that color in the background as well. Something nice and easy we all already have in our houses. Thanks so much for stopping by. Subscribe if you have not yet already. Make sure you hit that like button if you enjoyed this and I will see you all in another video very, very soon. Go out and make something beautiful. Bye-bye.