 Hello there! I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube with today's video all about making an underwater Christmas card. With as obsessed as I have been lately with underwater scenes I had to get Lawn Fawn's Christmas Fishes set when it came out and I used a gajillion markers for this. Yes, that happens in my world. I end up with having to balance the markers against my hand when I take that little picture to post on my blog and there is a picture in my mind as I'm doing this that I wanted to get across and I wanted this to be in more natural colors. I didn't want it to be super bright so I used a YR for the glow around the kelp tree and created just a little bit of a glow around that. That led to some other challenges which was trying to figure out how to transition out to the underwater color. I tried going with a lighter yellow and stuff and I was going to maybe have some yellow highlights on some of the little fish that were around it but then how do I get out there to the blue? Of course green is a transition. I thought I'd try some YG00. Maybe kind of sort of see what happened. I'm still in brights. Now I've got to bring it back down to neutrals so I went over that with some YG91 and I just kind of kept going through this progression and for those who really want to learn how to do this kind of stuff it is always an experiment. There's no magic. There's nothing that I know that makes me any smarter at this than you. I'm just a little braver probably. That might be about the big difference between me and your your average colorist is that I'm willing to try things because I stamped this a couple times so I could try it several times since I had my misty out and was going crazy with my masking. Just do it more than once and then you're ready to try it again if what you tried didn't work. One of the other things that I did with this particular video for those who have taken the underwater Copic class and you might be fascinated with this I have put this one in as a bonus lesson but not just this video but I've put the whole real-time thing in there so you can go in and listen to Christmas music and watch this card being made in real-time. You don't have to pay extra if you've already bought the class. It comes with it as a bonus lesson at the end but I wanted to give you the opportunity to kind of try it along with me and if you've taken the class then you know what all of these techniques are for how to build up dark color around the edges and do bubbles for transitions and all that kind of thing that we've talked about in the class so that I offer to those who have taken that class already or if you're new and you take that one then you will get that as the bonus lesson. There is no voiceover for it just Christmas music. There's also a couple of tips in the text in that lesson as well but you can see how I'm kind of slowly building up that gradation from the outside edge toward the inside and I just keep rotating back and forth between the dark colors and then the medium dark color and then the lighter color and I have to work my way back toward the center again to get that blending to work and as I crisscross all of those colors then figuring out well what's the next logical color to try to make that transition work better and eventually I got down to having to go with a really light color and starting to to really kind of pull that in but the light color is not just any light color this one is a desaturated color because I wanted that desaturated look and then to finally get the blending to blend out softly I had to go for a B000 just because I had to I did add some color in the sand at the bottom and I wanted it to be dark because of course it's a nighttime I don't know if they have nighttime under the ocean it's kind of always nighttime there but nonetheless I put some blue in that brown just because I kind of had to in order not not make it look like it's stuck out like a sore thumb because I really want that focus to remain on the kelp tree in the middle and so I kind of tossed some dark greens along the base of each one of those pieces of kelp and then a lighter little piece for the rest of it let lighter color for the the end portions and they have all these little doodly bobs on the kelp as we know from having drawn kelp in the class and colored those in the green now each one of the fish and the hats are going to be hit by the glow coming out from the center toward the outside of the the image so I put the lighter color toward the inside where the tree is and the darker color on the very outside and just kind of pull that color together so that that it looks like the light is hitting each one of these things from the middle and one of the cutest little stamps I think in this stamp set is that little seashell that has a bow around it because it's so unexpected I was kind of thinking it would be nice if they had a gift and then I looked at that little stamp I thought it was just a little seashell and I realized it had a bow on it and was just tickled pink when I could stamp that little sucker so again with these other colors I'm keeping the lighter one on the side facing the tree so on the left side the shadow is on the left and on the right side the shadows on the right so it's not like your normal lighting since it's coming from the middle pointing out toward the outside of the images and had a little bit of shadows in the white now personally these are not realistic because you're not going to have Santa Claus hats on fish anyway so like worrying about the lighting on these trying to get the shading right is probably a little bit on the silly side and hello to the crow outside my window hopefully that did not come through really loud and screamy like it seemed to in my ear next up I added some bubbles both in a darker color and in a lighter color to sort of help that transition along and you can work on just putting a gajillion bubbles in here put more layers of the dark around the outside edges but I knew I was going to trim this down a bit so I didn't worry about it too much added some white highlights to some of the bubbles in the center just making a little sea around them and don't forget to put some bubbles in front of things so that it looks like they're all within the bubble cloud instead of just being behind or in front of the bubble cloud kind of pull them together and of course that is with my signal white gel pen which is invaluable during the Christmas season I go through maybe 15 or so of these pens for the 250 or so Christmas cards I make each year yeah I make a lot of Christmas cards send lots to my family and friends of course but also tons to my patrons so if you would like to get a Christmas card from me that might be a good thing for you to do is to go sign up to be a patron and you may get a Christmas card in the mail from yours truly thank you so much for visiting my youtube channel today make sure you subscribe if you haven't already share with your friends so they can subscribe as well and I will see you guys later on bye bye