 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums and I love to teach. So I hope that you're going to learn something today. Yesterday I showed you how to make some tulip drawings, very beautiful ones, using underpainting on mid-tone papers. So if you missed that one, the link's in the doobly-do. But today we're going to go a different route with tulips and I'm going to get out my water based markers. There's a lot of different kinds out there and you might have something similar that you can use to make some last-minute Easter cards. There's not really time to mail cards out at this point, but maybe you can make some that you can hand deliver to a pastor or to a neighbor or someone that you see on Easter morning. And if not, you can always make these for Mother's Day cards or spring cards. So let's get started. Let me introduce you to the water soluble markers that I will be using in this particular video, liquid brush markers and water based markers. And I'm kind of trying to separate them a little bit because they both have different things they do. These Altenew markers and there's other brands, you can even make your own. I'll talk about that while we work. They have ink that you can actually see move around in the barrel and they have a brush nib on one end. And they're beautiful, but I make messes with them. And I think it's more of an ink in these possibly, or it could just be that I was messy when I was using those because I did get them all over my hands and they're hard to wash off. Secondly is the Faber Castell markers. These are my favorite in the artist quality markers because these guys are actually light fast. They're not going to fade in light, which is nice. If you're doing permanent artwork that you want to stick around for a long time, these are great to use. They have two nibs on them, a brush nib that's a little chunkier than what you might be used to. And then a bullet nib on each one. There's 30 colors in that set. And thirdly is my favorite of the crafty markers. These are cheaper markers, less expensive, less pigmented, but they work nicely. They water out well. And with these guys, they have a really nice nib on them. They're by Sketch marker. Sketch marker makes alcohol markers and these are the same nibs on the brush side that they use in their alcohol markers. So if you like those nibs, you might like these pens and they have a bullet nib on the other side. I started off a sunny day in the studio with getting these markers out, and you can see the sun streaming in. It made me so happy. Oh my goodness. So nice to have early morning sunshine, but these brush markers, you can squeeze the barrel of them and it will just put out a drop of the pigment onto the paper. You don't have to do that. You can just draw with them, but it also puts a good quantity of the color out, which you don't get with traditional water-based markers that you might be used to your normal felt tip pens. And then I'm using a brush and some water to just move that color around and shape it. So you don't have to actually draw the tulip itself with the pen. You can do that with the water. And then I'm using two different greens because I wanted a lighter green. I wanted these to trail off at the bottom and have a darker color at the top. So I was playing around with which colors would work for that. And then pushing a little bit of the color back into the tulip, if you've ever looked at the tulip closely, there's a little bit of that green color coming into the base of the tulip. And then as a tulip just starts to open, you start to see small openings around the top edges. You can draw tulips so they're fully open and fully tight, really small shapes so that they're not blooming at all yet. But there's lots of different shapes that you can use. A really simple oval with a point on the top is generally enough, if you put some stems on it, to communicate IMA tulip. That is just what people will make out of it. So they're very easy to draw. And even after I put the water on them, I could still use the pen to draw into that shape, add more color to it. You can add secondary colors, all sorts of things. And for each one of these, I was just playing around with what kinds of combinations of colors and leaves and shapes and how do these blend and just playing around with it on a scratch piece. And that's a great way to test out your markers and see what it is that you like about them or don't like. You'll also learn some things as you go, one of which is I was trying to make this very light green leaf and I hadn't rinsed my brush very well from that orange pigment and I ended up with an orange leaf that way. That told me that there's really strong pigment in these and I was going to need to make sure I rinsed my brush well. So a little bit of practice will go a long ways in making you successful in whatever you eventually want to make. So just spend some time having fun practicing tulip shapes, just fill a whole page with them. You can do this on the back of a failed painting, something else that you were going to throw away. Don't ever throw it away, just practice something on the back of it and that sort of thing. So I am using by the way here some arches cold press paper and I'm using good paper on these because it's going to give me the chance to have some really nice rough edges. Most of the time with water based markers I tell people just use the cheaper papers you know with really smooth surface on them and for these I just wanted a little bit of that texture. I wanted some of the leaves to have some dry brush in them which you can't really get very well on those cheaper papers. So this is one of those instances you might want to try out some of the good stuff. One of the things that I was thinking about with these markers if you don't have these or if you have inks and you would like to mess around with your inks and make your own brush pens you can buy brush pens blank. Somewhere around this studio I have some empty brush pens that I had thought would be really fun to add some of my fountain pen inks to. Haven't done that yet. If anybody's tried that process please do let me know in comments if you have any warnings are they easy to clean out and change colors if you want because I want to try that. That was on my to-do list at one point but these pens from Altenew are beautiful and they have a bunch of different sets in different colors. I just have this one particular spring garden set and it is really nice for that. I'm going to link you to another video in the doobly-doo that I did some flowers and I actually did vases that you might be interested in if you have these markers because that one was particularly beautiful as well. So once I kind of had some practice doing those tulips I wanted to compare what the Faber-Castell markers would do. The Faber-Castell are the artist quality markers and they are nearly as pigmented as the Altenews but this is the reason that I think Altenews pens have ink in them as opposed to whatever people put into water-based markers because they're not quite as intense but it's also easier to deal with a regular water-based marker sometimes because when you put the line down it just stays there. With a liquid it's already moving and you want to take advantage of it while it's already moving. So I played around with what it was going to be like to do small strokes with these could I get that really nice small line for some of the stems even playing around with what color it was going to be perfect for the leaves that I would make on the cards and when you do this little bit of practice it's just going to make the card process go easier and faster later and you'll throw away less paper in the long run by just practicing first. So next I got out the sketch markers these are the crafty ones the least expensive of all of these and they you know water out decently here on this paper crafty markers tend to work better on the cheaper like Canson XL papers they don't always work really well on fine art papers like and arches but in this particular case they worked fine because I wanted to have some of that roughness in some of the tulips I thought that would be pretty and I was playing around with using a couple of different greens from the collection so that I could have a darker tip and then move into a lighter green color and then use water to lighten it out and all of these are going to just fade at the bottom and that's what I was really looking for. My next step was to tear some watercolor paper and there is nothing better than a beautiful torn edge I love the deckled edge that's made when they make the paper and you end up with a sheet that has that beautiful edge around it you can't get the same edge when you tear it by hand but you can get close and get something that feels nice and torn hand created by just folding the paper back and forth a few times and then you can take a something wet baby wipe a sponge just a little bit damp it doesn't have to be soaked and run it along that tear and then it tears really easily just you know fold it back and forth enough until you get that good tear if it doesn't rip nicely then fold it another time or two and I folded these down and tore them down into three by four rectangles so I could make a whole bunch of cards and the great thing about these is that if I didn't end up getting the tulips quite right because I'm still practicing these I could just turn it over and start again because they're not going to use a ton of water so it's not like the paper will buckle and arches is a good paper that has two sides to it so you can actually just turn it over and start all over again if the first tulips don't work if you'd like to try these tulips using alcohol markers colored pencil or straight up watercolor I do have some other video suggestions that I'll put in the doobly-doo down below so that you can see how to make simple tulips in those mediums as well while I finished painting my tulips I thought I'd tell you a little story time because you guys seem to like story time and this is about Toastmasters I've been a member of Toastmasters since 2013 so by October this year it would be 10 years of being a member that's a long time for a lot of people there are a number of folks who just do Toastmasters for a year or two to gain particular skills and to work on one thing or another I found it was really valuable to continue to grow and to continue have somebody out there at the meetings counting how many times I said um and ah and to discover that I say the word so a lot which probably now that I've mentioned it out loud you will probably hear me say a lot because that's my crutch word but Toastmasters is something that's meant a lot to me it's changed how I do things like make videos and teach classes and how I communicate in all the voiceovers that I do there's a lot that goes into what you see here in videos and a lot of it is due to what I've learned from that program and I used to have two clubs that I went to and clubs can meet monthly they can meet bi-weekly they can meet every week lots of different things there are clubs that are corporate clubs so they're in an office the meetings can be held at lunchtime so that employees can just meet there and they don't have to go anywhere else or take time off work there's clubs that meet in other places like my clubs have met in churches and in libraries and all different kinds of things over the years my club that used to be a corporate club ended last october because the company that was hosting it had a huge series of layoffs and a whole bunch of people in the club just disappeared they just vanished and that was kind of the end of that one the people who were left there were just feeling uncomfortable enough that they didn't feel like they could even talk about it so we never even said goodbye to each other other than by email it was kind of a dissatisfying ending it's a club that I had mentored for years because they had a lot of new members and really needed some help getting their feet under them and we made a lot of progress but then that ended rapidly thank you corporate america my other club is one that I've been with since 2013 when I started in Toastmasters and it was at a church and then we got Buddha from that church when the pandemic came and we turned into an online only club and online only is zoom once a week oh my gosh that was that was a learning adventure I had never realized how much would go into learning how to be coherent online because when you're talking about being online like where do you look at when you're talking to someone on zoom you have to look at the camera and not look at their face on the zoom screen because otherwise it looks like you're looking at their navel or something like there's all sorts of things that I learned about presenting myself online that I can use going forward it's skills that were valuable even though being on zoom for two years with this club was painful however we finally got to the point where we could meet in person again and my church said we could meet at their location so we did and boy has it been fantastic just being able to see people again and to stop worrying as much about what I was looking at online because that was a constant battle for me I wanted to look at people's faces but I had to talk to them in the camera and then we had a whole different set of issues because we became a hybrid club which means we're partway partway online partway in person we had people who were living far away by that point because we'd been online for two years we had somebody in India we had somebody that was like two hours north and another person that was two hours south of us but the time worked and they would join us online and so we continued setting up the computer we learned how to use all the technology to put their faces the zoom screen up on the big TV in the room and then figure out where to put cameras and had an extra phone that we would turn so that they could see the people sitting at the tables as well as the computer that they would see the person speaking at the podium I mean it was just craziness trying to learn how to do this so that the online experience was a good one but boy did that help all of us so that when we do hybrid meetings for work and for church and for other things that we know some of that stuff we've practiced it and put it into action and we're able to critique ourselves on how did that work what did that look like online versus the person who's sitting in the room and I also learned a lot about how to talk to the computer as if it were one person and then look around the room and talk to other people who were there I mean lots of little things that you might not think are important we learned during this whole process however I got to the point as as the president of the club where I had to assess where we were at as a club and I had to admit that our membership numbers were not looking good and membership is one part of it but the part that had me more concerned was club leadership going forward because as a president one of their things that they do in Toastmasters is you can't serve more than one year as the president so you hand off leadership to other people in the club it helps a club to be healthier because everybody gets a chance to practice being a president of something being in charge of it and as I've been trying to talk to people about you know who wants to serve next year I got to hear more of the heart of where everybody's at what they're busy doing and there isn't anybody in our club who's got capacity to take on leadership and it's been a while again having these conversations and just recently I had to do a speech in which I told people about this status issue that we had to make a decision about and the club decided after you know a vote and discussion that we were going to end the club it's really a hard place to be when you feel like you know the club ended on my watch what's the deal but it's ending for great reasons it's because people are busy they're doing things with their skills so I'm going to celebrate that I'm going to just make it a happy ending as best that I can and the day that I'm recording this voiceover is actually the day we were having our final meeting so I can't give you a report on whether I cried or not I probably will try not to see if I can hold it together but these cards were made for those people in attendance at the club I wanted to have a little something to put on the table for each person to just thank them for the time and effort they've put into the club to this point and wish them success in their future and I've also started a little text group a little text thread among those who wished to be part of it where we're going to organize a monthly dinner we're just going to go out for a meal and continue to support each other and it won't be a big high pressure thing but I'm going to make them take turns take some leadership roles in choosing restaurants and organizing us that sort of thing so we can keep practicing a little of those skills but mostly just remain in friendship with each other because I would miss the stuffing out of these people if I were not able to see them again so that's the purpose of making these cards is to make something happy and joyful I will have an Easter message inside each one as well but this is it's kind of where I'm at with these cards and with my Toastmasters journey sad place happy place uh celebrating and yet grieving there's times in life where you do all of those things at the same time once these were all done in one morning I was able to put the cards together and I found a package a couple packages of acetate cards that I've had for a while and I thought they'd be perfect on these acetate cards and an acetate card shows the adhesive on the back so I put pieces of paper on the inside and the adhesive shows through so if you put a piece of paper over top of that on either side of the acetate you can cover that up and I'm going to cover them up on the back as well but this leaves me a place to write a message on the inside as well as put these on the table so that everybody has something beautiful to look at at this final meeting of our Toastmasters club don't forget I've linked you in the doobly-doo to the other video that has alcohol marker colored pencil and watercolor tulips in wreath format and you can either use today's techniques to make wreaths or use the wreath techniques for those mediums to make today's garden cards already thank you so much for joining me click the like button if you could subscribe if you haven't and have a blessed Easter and I'll see you very soon take care bye bye now