 Hi there, it's Sandy and I'm going to see if this is the weirdest pencil sharpener ever because it's kind of weird. I've seen this with a bunch of the people on Instagram who do drawing and I've seen this really strange pencil lead and I'm like, what the heck? And then I saw somebody finally post this AFMAT pencil sharpener. It's totally hand crank and it's easy to hand crank. It's not difficult to use. If you have arthritis, it wouldn't be hard to use, but look at that point. It's not ultra sharp though. Not sharp the way that my quiet sharp gets or my hand held so you won't get that needle type of point. But I was curious to see how this would work. So I'll sharpen up four of my pencils. I decided I would sacrifice them if this didn't work and the pencil leads keep breaking then it's only four pencils I can replace four and I tried the Polychromos first. I'll do tests later with the others because the Polychromos leads, these are oil-based pencils so they're more stable. They're not going to break as easily as wax-based pencils like the Luminance or the Polychromos and I probably won't do this with the Luminance at all because I don't want to lose even the tiniest bit of any of those. But look at these pencil points. Oh my gosh. Insanity, right? Aren't they crazy? So what I decided to do for my project to test this out was take a memory box stamp and it's these pretty cactus cacti and stamp them onto some vellum and then turned it on the back so I'm coloring on the back side of a piece of heavy weight vellum. And the stamping didn't stamp really strongly on the other side. It was, you know, I just used some Lawn Fawn Jet Black ink so it wasn't like it was heavy versifying or anything. And so it's kind of a grayish line anyway. But it's debating whether or not I would use this for the front side of the picture or the back so I just thought, well, give it a try and see. I haven't colored on vellum and ages doing anything so let's give it a try. Because really what I wanted was large areas to color so that I could see how these pencils performed in doing this. Were they going to feel weird and awkward and were the tips going to break all the time because they're so long. And they didn't. I was very surprised. There was one pencil I'll use later on in this that did break and I don't know whether it's that particular pencil or the type of thing that I was trying to do with it, had just a couple little tiny, just the very bare minimum that of the tip broke off. So the rest of them though seem to work amazingly fine. I was very surprised by it. I did decide to try a brush with Gamsol on this because I had such large areas and I had shared on social media a tiny tutorial. I've talked about these before. I'll put a link to the tiny tutorial on Instagram so that you can go see it. And it was basically some blending supplies for dry blending and for solvent blending. And I did mention a brush and I haven't used a brush very much, but I know other artists do all the time. So I thought I'd try it. This is performing differently simply because it's on vellum. So that first one that one to the left of where I'm working, it's lighter because the brush was very, very wet when I put it down. And I realized quickly that that was going to just pull off all the pencil. So I didn't do that anymore, made sure it was a little bit drier. But it's going to work differently on regular paper than it will on vellum because the vellum is a really slick surface. But once the paper had been wetted with this, the rest of the pencil layers went down really well, just like it does with other blending solutions. When you put the blending solution down and then color over it, you get a lot stronger pigmentation, easier blending, that kind of thing. So I'm just going to run around and do some some starter blending on this because I wanted to make the cactus look realistic. They're kind of cartoony looking drawings. But I wanted to see if I could really make them into realistic looking ones. And with these kinds of shapes, it's a matter of trying to picture in your head, are there some that are tilting toward you? Are there some that are tilting away? And the drawing here doesn't give you any direction. So any one of these could be pulled toward you as though it's facing in your direction, like the cactus is leaning toward you, or it could be leaning away. And it all depends on how you do the shadows for it. So I'm going to do the shadows with a black pencil. And I'm going to put the deepest color at the bottom of each one of the shapes. These are flat types of cactus. They have this sort of flat shape, slightly dimensional, slightly puffy, but not very very. But I'm going to try on some of them to see if I can create a seam on the side, you know, like the place where the edge turns the other direction so that my light is in the upper right hand side, and the shadow is going to fall on the left. And then the flower on this one, I put a shadow behind it so it curves down to the back side of the piece of cactus. I'm not sure what you call these, a section of cactus. And I'll do the same here. So you can see how that gives it direction immediately when you put a shadow behind the flower. The big middle one is going to be the driver for what the whole thing is. Where does this thing lean overall? Right now it looks like it's leaning backwards. But as soon as I put a shadow here on this foreground one, all of a sudden that one tilts toward you. You can almost see it happen as I'm doing the pencil work. It tilts toward you because there's a shadow under it. Before, there was no shadow so it looked like it was on the opposite side of that section of cactus from you. The same thing is going to happen with this bottom one. I'm going to put a shadow from the middle section onto this bottom one. And all of a sudden the middle one is going to tilt toward you. So you can change the direction of each one of these sections just by where you put a very slight shadow from the section that's above it. Each one of these that I'm coloring is working fairly well with the gamsol under it. But the next step is going to be a little on the weird side when we get to one of the other cacti because one of the things I discovered was that gamsol wants to not be wet when you're using it on this. But we'll get to that in a moment. I did put these white and black spikes on it and cream I should say. And the cream pencil is the one that the tip broke a couple little times on me. Just the very, very tiny edge of the point of the pencil. And again, I don't know if that was just because the cream pencil was compromised in some fashion or if it was the nature of doing all those little tiny spikes that was making that happen. So next up is this one. And here I'm going to go put the gamsol in again, but it's such a small shape that it didn't have any time to dry. So as soon as I started putting the other colors on it, it was like drawing into soup. It was very strange and the colors got kind of weird and muddy. But that determined what I was going to do with the rest of this. Because I opted at that point to just say, you know, that looks terrible. It does look dimensional, but it didn't look really good. And you may not be able to see that here. You might think, oh, that looks fabulous. In real life, it looked pretty terrible and I was not really interested in having it on the front of a card. The other issue with this is that when I touch the pencil anywhere, it does smush because it's on vellum. So it's not got a lot of paper surface to attach itself to. So it was going to need some really serious spray fixative or something maybe to hold it. And I didn't know if spray fixative was going to work on vellum. So I decided I was going to use this as the back of the art and I'm going to flip it over and work on the other side to finish off the drawing and put that on the card, which will protect it from getting smushed as well as hide the fact that I got a little soupy with my coloring on that one guy. So it does look quite nice. That light gray line that had stamped, since it wasn't perfect, still worked fine. And I went back in with the cream pencil to add the spikes back in since those were drawn on the opposite side of the green pencil. So they were on the backside. They don't show. So in order to make them show, I just added them on top. And if you're doing something like this on vellum, you can then choose to highlight other areas in the drawing and pull them forward. So I wanted to put some highlights on the small cactus at the bottom, as well as I wanted those pink flowers at the top, the red flowers to really stand out. So I could put extra color on top of them. And since that color is on this side of the vellum, it got really bright. So everything else got nice and muted. And the red flowers really pop in this particular instance. So for the finishing of the card, I trimmed it down, put it on a piece of white card stock and then layer that onto black and cut off kind of the left and bottom to snug the scene up a little bit, added a square of sentiment and a bow on tops. It looks like a tag, but the colors in this made me think Christmas and it was a thank you card. So I think this is going to be a thank you for one of my patrons, because I try to send you either a thank you card or a holiday card during the fall and winter season. So I have one done. I need hundreds, but I have one done. We'll see you guys later. Take care.