 Hi there, I'm Sandy Aldock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to color a horse in a barn with Polychromos pencils and I'll make a scene out of it and turn it into an easel guard so it'll be speed coloring. I'm using Technique Tuesday's horse stamp set that has a cat in it. It also has stamps for year-round sentiments. Lots of different ones, lots which are rather funny. Why be in a unicorn when you can be a horse? And here are some of the supplies that I'll be using and that ink on three is a new to me stamp pad and it is a no-line stamp pad so it does a very light gray line as you can see and it seems to hold detail really well but of course this is my very first testing of it so I can't guarantee it for anything so I will eventually, once I test it with a bunch of mediums and that sort of thing, I will probably give you a heads up on what I think of several of the inks that I purchased from them and let you know so stay tuned for that later on. The paper that I'm using is actually, believe it or not, Arches Hot Press watercolor paper. I've had this pad sitting around for ages. I'm not a big fan of the Hot Press paper but I couldn't figure out what to do with it so guess what? I'm using it for color pencil. It seems to have a texture very similar to the Stonehenge which I like so much. If you're in the color pencil jump start class, you'll know how much I rave about that and I do love it. The color is about the same. It's a little more cream than the Stonehenge but it's quite nice and the texture is about the same. It's got a really fine texture so you don't end up with large white areas. I don't have the colors on the screen and I'm trying to figure out whether or not to try to do that with my color pencil videos or not. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't because color pencil I go back and forth with so much it becomes extremely time consuming to do that with color pencil videos. With Copic it seems to be easier to do and easier for my brain to track as well because I can look at what a marker is doing and know what color it is. It's much harder especially when I'm using several brands of pencil to keep track of them all but I am going to try to do what I did this time which was swatch out the colors after I was done and kind of guess at which browns were used for which parts of the drawing and I will have that on the blog so if you really need to see the colors you can find them but I do recommend that you figure out how to use your own pencils and not always rely on the teacher. Lots of the watercolor classes that I take the students come in and drive the teachers nuts by saying what color did you use? What color did you use? What color did you use? And they get as frustrated as I do because as a professional artist I know that there's no way that someone else even if they're using the exact same colors can replicate exactly what I've done and I can't replicate what the teacher has done so I just look to get a little bit close if I use colors they do great if I don't that's great and I learn by doing. If you're always trying to copy someone else you're going to never develop that confidence in yourself so I want you to have that confidence to just choose your colors. Here I used a brown with some yellow content in it for the undercoat and then I'm using more of a chocolate brown above it for some shading and I'm using baby oil and a blending stump to blend the two together and then I'm going to go over it again with the more chocolate brown kind of color and a little bit of black as well to start adding that depth so intensifying that color as we learned in the color pencil jump start class. I'm going to just keep adding a little bit more definition you can pull up pictures of horses on Google and look for where the muscles are because they're not indicated on a horse like this but what I was trying to do was look for where some of those body parts are and to try to put shadows behind things so I pull one muscle out in front of another so for instance on this front leg I put shadows behind the leg and on the chest on the other side so that that leg starts to pull out forward from the horse's body and then put a shadow behind the hindquarters and before it gets to the leg so that that back leg recedes back and the horse's body starts to pull forward from the back leg that sort of thing I'm not actually looking at any horse pictures I recommend you might want to do that because I have probably have the structure of a horse all wrong but I was trying to just have fun coloring and not get all stressed out about trying to find every single horse muscle because I'm not a horse expert by any means but I thought it would be fun to at least try a horse because I haven't done one in forever because nobody makes any horse stamps I guess so I'm gonna use a little bit of the blending solution again on the gray because the gray is actually going to be a black mane and tail so I will start going in with the black now to start adding more contrast the lighting for this is coming from outside and the outside is off to the right and you'll see when I get the scene in there that it's we're standing inside the barn with the horse and the cat and the light is coming through the barn door this was based on one that I did coloring I did of this image when I was at my stamp group recently and I was playing around with it using Copics but it was really intensive work with Copic markers so I didn't feel like doing that again so I will have a picture of that one over on my blog so you can at least see what the Copic version looked like and how I'm simplifying it for colored pencil because color pencil to color that much would take forever the video as it is would have been an hour and a half long if I had had it in real time so that is why I don't have colored pencil videos in real time they do end up sped up to create the scene I'm just really doing a box for the door so a vertical and then horizontal for the top of the door and then I'm going to use a different brown this brown is a little less saturated so find one that's a little more of a grayish brown just so that the horse doesn't blend completely into it and then I'm coloring from the the door side from the door edge and then I want to bleed it off the side so I'm just trying to get my inside color on that inside section fairly contrasty and then when I get to the outside of the horse is when it's going to have to start bleeding off because the the Copic one covered the entire sheet of paper and that's much easier to do with Copic markers a lot of people wonder why I choose to use pencil for one thing and Copic for another or watercolor for another some of it is just I feel like working in one medium or another and other times there's just there's all different kinds of reasons if I wanted a full background on this I would never do this in colored pencil it would take probably four or five hours to do this whole thing there are some techniques in that the jumpstart class that might help with that but you'll have to take the class to find those out but I'm just using pencil itself a really really light pencil to create this vignette around like the backside of the horse so it just starts to slowly slowly bleed off the page into white and instead of trying to make it all filled in solid because that's just so hard I'm creating a little bit of light coming in from the outside so I have that angle underneath like where the horse is should be on about the same angle as the shadows and things and then I even created a little shadow under you can see very very lightly under the cat's butt so that creates a rectangle of light coming in from outside put a little grass out there in the field and then I'm going to use a couple of colors kind of rainbow colors to make a little bit of a sunset out in the distance that's casting all of this light into our little little barn seam and it's going from yellow to an orange to a red violet and then it'll go into violet and then into blue as it goes all the way up but I'm using as you can see a super light touch because I don't want this color back here to contrast too much and take away from the horse the horse is the important thing here and I just want a suggestion of a background image I don't really want to have much more than that I just want to keep it very very light so that I have a little bit of color here and just something faint off in the distance and be able to to have people's imagination fill in the blanks there so scribble that in and if you have trouble getting the blending on the outside edge you could just carry that off to one edge or what I'm doing is using a dry blending stump to blend some of that color together you can also use your needed eraser in context along with it if you need to adding little trees right along here so that I can have a tree line out in the distance and then I wanted to increase the the line that is around the door because that's where the light's hitting it so I used a stick eraser to do that and then I drew a fence with a very sharp pencil so there is the finished artwork and now the trouble of putting it on a card like what are you going to do with something after you spent that much time with it well I'm going to do an easel card because I haven't done one in ages so five and a half and then two and three quarters is where I put my score lines and so the way you need to fold it is to have it so it folds in half and then has one end that lifts up and then you're going to put the adhesive on that side and I'm going to use score tape because I always do I've cut the card base so it's thinner than my my dies that I used for cutting that black layer and the the picture layer and then on the inside I added another panel of the cream paper so I use the same watercolor paper and then I've cut out a little little thing so I can put my sentiment on it and then I wrote just up on the top instructions on how to stand up an easel card so that the recipient knows that's what they're supposed to do because this is like this cool little card that kind of needs to be standing up on an easel because I spent so much time on it I wanted to be standing up and looking beautiful so an easel card really helps to give it that extra little something something so thank you for spending a few minutes with me if you're interested in the jump start class it's linked on screen as well as in the description down below supplies are below as well as on my blog and I'll see you guys next time