 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnok, and I'm going to be coloring the last camel, the last one in the picture, because the rest of the card took nine hours, so you don't get the whole thing. And I'm using a Hero Arts stamp set that's called Floral Nativity, and on this one I did remove the floral, I didn't use any of those elements, but I got into a lot of the color blending. You can see the light around the baby Jesus, the light around the city, which I drew, there's no stamp for the city, the light for the sheep is all pointing toward where the baby Jesus is, since that would be the light source in my mind. The light source for the camels, I made it kind of coming from above, so a star or the moon up above, as opposed to them being lit up by the baby Jesus, since they're technically a little further away, and it also meant that I didn't have to fuss with trying to figure out how the light is going to get around Mary to get over to the camels. The camel stamp in the stamp set has what looks to me like Christmas lights hanging around his neck, I don't know where the battery pack would be carried, maybe it's under the humps in the blanket or something, but I thought I would leave the lights on one camel and then remove it from the others by just going over top of it, and I had stamped this on my Stonehenge drawing paper, best color pencil paper in my mind. I had stamped it with no-line ink, which is a very light gray ink, you could also use any ink that you have, like the pads that are running out of ink are great for no-line work, because you can just stamp it a bunch of times so you can just barely see the image, and then you can adjust it, so if you want to make your blanket on the back of the camel a different shape, or like I said you want to take the lights off the camel's neck and make him a more serious camel, you can do that, but I thought it would be kind of funny to have one camel lit up with Christmas lights and everything else in the scene would be very somber and serious, and then when I send this card to mom for Christmas that she would enjoy the little smile she would get out of seeing the camel with lights around his neck, as my mom's birthday is on Christmas, so hopefully she's not watching this video, and I like to send mom a truly Christmas Christmas card and then a birthday card as well, because when somebody has a birthday at Christmas you want to make sure you make them feel special, like they have their own day, even though they're sharing it with Christmas, so this will be her Christmas card, I'll probably send it a little bit early, because my guess is she will put this one out and let it be a decoration in her apartment, and I want to make sure she has that in time to enjoy it, and that sort of thing, if you want to make a card like this, this one is slim line, so it's a long skinny one, it's four by I think eight and a half inches, and you could do that, but I wouldn't recommend doing the whole background unless you got lots and lots of time on your hands, because this did take a very long time, I think it was worth it, because I think it's a beautiful piece of artwork, but for cards, generally most people don't like to spend that much time on one particular card, however, you could make something like this for yourself, and you could frame that and put it in your house, and it would be beautiful as a piece of art that you've made for your own holiday decorations, so there you go. The colors that I've put in the background, this is all done in Polychromos by the way, the colors are all layered, so every area on here has multiple colors for the most part, except maybe the sheep and the little donkey are several grays, but the rest of it is colors layered onto each other, that's what I learned from the teacher that I studied under in college, who is a professional illustrator, and that was her technique, just layering colors, like even that big blue background sky has a blue-green color mixed with a blue violet, so you see the two colors changing and mixing back and forth in that background, but it takes many, many layers and lots of pencil sharpening to get the pencil into all those crevices. When I was in college, I used to use the paper that she had recommended, which is a particular Bristol that is no longer made, was very devastated when that happened, and they just didn't make it anymore, and this Stonehenge paper is as close to that as I think I've ever gotten, so I highly recommend it. It comes in white as well as cream and other very pale colors. They have other Stonehenge papers too. Their watercolor paper isn't so great, but all of their drawing papers are pretty awesome. So at the end, I added a little white highlight to each one of the little light bulbs and some stars to the sky with my white pen, and I sprayed it with a fixative. I don't usually spray my cards because they're cards, but this one, I think my mom's going to hang on to it and she's going to want to get it out every year, so I decided to spray it, and I actually did the heat embossing of the sentiment before spraying it, partially because I wanted to test and see what the spray would do to a embossed sentiment, and it worked just fine, so you could probably do it either way. You could do the spray first or second, but there you go. So there is my amazing over-the-top nine-hour card. I also did some other cards, though, much simpler with this stamp set. If you wanted some ideas on things you could do. The one on the left, I used some flower strands from the set to make sort of a wreath around Mary and Joseph, and I used a white pen to go back in and add some white details into their outfits, because, again, I colored right over them when I colored with my pencils, and so you could also stamp those details back in after doing your coloring. And then I did one that was a very simple one. This was my test to see what colors I wanted to use for the background on the big card, and there you go. That is my video for you for today. I hope this was inspirational. Might get you to go to your studio and get your pencils out and have some fun with them. All the supplies are linked in the doobly-doo, and I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.