 Well, hi everybody. It's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel an artist and paper crafter here And I'm gonna be showing you how to color a blizzard today. I'll be using a stamp set that I got this summer I was at a stamp store while I was teaching this summer and I saw this stamp set on the shelf from stamping Bella and This little girl just flying totally through the air sideways I thought it's gonna be a really interesting challenge to make it look like a blizzard How do we do that when we're pulling with Copic markers? So that's what I'm gonna be doing today. This is part of my holiday background series And you can go over to my blog to see the rest of them if you want to catch up on other holiday backgrounds I've done over the years. They're all collected into one little happy group. So you can find a lot of ideas for your holiday cards This one I'm going to be trying to put enough color down on the image itself and in the background And I can add a lot of snow on top I knew I wanted to do her kind of in pink and green I wasn't sure what shade of pink because I needed to have something here That's going to have enough beef to it that it's not going to disappear entirely once I get the snow in there You'll see how that works out at the end because You want to have enough strength to the color that snow shows up if you do really pale colors It's just gonna be a harder look to achieve So I started out by using a lot more pinks here And eventually I'll add more reds But I kind of work up to it because Sometimes it's easier to start with lighter colors and then build up with darker as you go and see how they compare to each other So I just started blending with the RV 2 3 To just kind of soften out some of those shadows and try to make her dress pink And that was when I was still in the idea of calling it pink Eventually I went for a little more red in the dress But at least this gets me started. So I have some real solid color here to be working with Blend out some of these other areas and then I decided to jump into the green using a YG instead of a traditional green and That is because I wanted to make this kind of a non traditional color scheme on this card And I'm going to use even more crazy rainbow colors in the background as well But I wanted to have these colors in the front to be strong enough that they're going to stand up against the ones that are in the background And on her hat I realized I hadn't colored the hat portion in the pink and I think I wanted that To kind of carry through from the skirt and the details on her jacket to pull a little more pink in there And get that blended out a little bit more When you're going to do a blizzard like this you really don't actually have to Worry too much about the blending because the snow is going to cover a lot of that But what I was concerned about here was getting enough color down I was going to just do the blending underneath now and This is where when you're going to add texture to something doing the blending underneath get that done first So you can add the texture on top unless you want the texture to be kind of mushy And I wanted the lines to almost look like a little corduroy dress So I'm now just going over top of all the coloring with the final red color So I end up with something that looks a little more like corduroy and those lines will hold up If I had done my shading over top then all the lines would get kind of mushy There's sometimes when doing coloring over top of this texture would work great Like if you're doing wood and you want that texture to sort of melt into it But on something like this on both her dress and her hat I wanted those lines to just be sort of on top I'm using a G color to shade on this YG And that's one of those things that you'll need to be careful if you do if you mix the two of them together Because sometimes the G's look a little more yellow green and the YG's look a little more green And here I kind of picked a color that was really a blue green looking green This G zero nine is pretty strong So I'm going in with my mid-tone in a definite YG, a YG25 But I'm going over lots of that that green It's going to take some of the sting out of that blue portion of the shadow and add just a little bit more In terms of the yellow color and help help that to take over some of those shadows a little bit And then I'll be able to smooth that out and smooth the transition and Unify the whole jacket a little bit more by going back in now with my yellow green over the top of the whole thing I see original color and I started her jacket with Again, lots of this is going to be covered up completely by the snow and That is going to negate having to really make your blending super perfect We just want it to look good enough that when they look through the snow. They definitely see the image through all of it Next up I'll just add a little bit of color into her hair and a couple of different Kind of reddish colors and I'll tie that to her feet and make sure her boots are the same color Some similar colors going on together could have used pink boots or green boots as well But I thought since I was going to do some Reddish brown colors for her hair then making her boots match would work pretty well Get some shadows going there and then blend it with a mid-tone This is not one of those areas where the hair is really crucial. You just need to have some color in there And then I'm throwing a little bit of color into the whites of the candy cane Before I get started on the background So here is where the wind and the blizzard are going to start to take shape I'm just going to kind of pick a shape pick a place to start and Make a shape. It doesn't matter a whole lot. What shape just make it fairly smooth and wispy across the whole background When you're working around an image like this is going to be a little harder to do this if you wanted to make a whole background like this and then Cut out or die cut your image and put it on top. It might be a little easier to get smooth swooshies across it so You can you know do something like this With an image you just need to kind of with your eye travel across the image and make sure everything carries through so that the white lines in between are going to kind of match up They should be from from what I figured out. They should be fairly Uneven you want some areas in the wispies to be really fat some to get a little bit thinner But all of them to kind of blow in that same sort of wispy Direction you can make some even curl into a curly queue and really make that wind whip around quite a bit But I'm not penciling it in Before I start either because I'm using a light color and I can go back and adjust some of these shapes as I go around But it's kind of fun to just make wild Wind shapes in the background and just stretch out this color across here I'm letting my marker kind of go on its side So I'm using it in its widest form so that I can really Just make really long wisps and fill in some solid areas with my markers Now you could stop right here and only have a portion of the paper with this background But I'm going to continue across the entire sky and finish it all out by just laying laying my color right over top of it And keep going around these images And toward the outside Excuse me for the outside areas. It's also possible to do this while just Just leaving some solid areas toward the top of the bottom You don't have to have these wispies carry across absolutely everything And let it get a little simpler up toward the outside edges I'm going to give myself some ground with just the sky above it and You could leave it with just the blue, but I thought oh what fun if I add some rainbow colors to it So I'm taking my my lights RV marker And I'm just going to go over a few areas and I'm going into the white as well so you don't have to stay just in the blue and Go right over top with a really light glaze of another color Super easy to do just don't scribble a whole lot You want to leave some of that blue the the linearness that you've created Just let that be underneath and then I'm even going to throw in a yellow green color a really light one So you want to do this with pale colors and let it just be super soft and go over top to create a little interest underneath of all the snow that you're going to create and Then begins the fun of all the snow. This is where the real work takes place So if you're not patient This is one of those images you might not really want to work on or you could work on it in a very small Area in the center of a card and do something else around the rest of it rather than do the entire card like I'm doing I'm just using my gel pen my white gel pen whatever white gel pen you have that works for you I like the signau uniball gel pen But others have success with other types other brands of gel pens But this happens to be my favorite and I'm just putting snow everywhere But you can make your wisps of snow go along some of those lines So that you have heavier lines right along the wisps in the background So they carry across the front of the image and you get heavier white And in those those wisps so they look like they're going across the front of her But I'm also covering up you can see some of the black lines as black dots that were drawn in the stamp set And you can see the difference between the bottom section and the top section The difference that it makes and just covering those up just make some blobs of snow really big It's okay to cover up some of the stamp set portion and here is my finished card and just pop that panel onto a red card base and Let it be and just let that snowy Blustery snowstorm go across the card and it was just a lot of fun to do. It's very playful for a Christmas card So thank you so much for joining me today There's a couple other videos if you're interested in some more with some holiday backgrounds And you can hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet already you can click through for more on the blog And there's also more cards over on the blog using this kind of a background technique If you would like to see some more ideas for how to use this idea with different stamp sets. Thank you so much I will see you guys next time. Have an awesome day. Bye. Bye