 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok and I'm here to wish you a desaturated little Christmas. Desaturated colors are duller colors and even with cute cartoon images like this, I picked out some dullish colors to use for this particular card and I'll explain why as we go along and I'm going to start by coloring my objects just with a quick wash of color and the reason why is because I'm going to add all of my shadows later on so I'm just going to run through and throw some initial color in each one of them. This reindeer is an ode to one of my followers who always reminds me that in her country all of the reindeer are gray and I know there are gray reindeer. We always make them brown but I'm going to make this one gray so I hope she's watching this because I'm doing it just for her. Okay, well not just for her but it was this initial portion of the image that got me thinking about using desaturated colors anyway since I had gray animals and black animals and then the white polar bear and stuff and I thought it'd be kind of fun to see if I could do something that was more muted than your normal Christmas card and I'm going to allow the background and the snow to be the powerful types of colors and keep all the muted colors in my central image but do some really strong lighting with each one of them. And I'm using this this E15 is not something I would necessarily call desaturated because it's an E1. If you know anything about the Copic numbers the first digit is what tells you whether or not it's desaturated. The higher numbers are more desaturated and then even this YR23 I wouldn't necessarily put in the desaturated category in terms of its numericalness but I ended up putting it in that because it's duller than your Y0s and your Y1s. Those are very bright kinds of yellows and this is just a duller flatter kind of yellow especially once I add some gray to it later. I wanted to make this cool background thing with it and for those who have taken the underwater scenes class this is kind of a version of one of the lessons in the underwater scenes class but it's going to be a snow thing instead and I'm starting by just putting down some B91 and my B91 was running out of ink so I only got so far before I gave up on that and switched over to different colors because you know how that works when your marker starts running out of ink and then you got to figure out what else to do with it you can either stop everything and go re-ink it or you can change your plan and my plan changed to switching now to B99. Now 9 of course is a high number which means this is going to be a very desaturated color and I'm going to kind of keep that overall desaturatedness in the outside areas. Those areas outside of where this highlight is coming from and I'm picturing some sort of spotlight in the upper portion whether it's a street lamp or something that's shining light on our little characters. I don't know why there's a street lamp out in the forest but there you go because sometimes you just have a street lamp out in the middle of the forest I think so I'm going to do this left hand section just to show you a little bit about how to do some blending on something like this it can be challenging to blend large areas and I'm going to go over it with a couple of colors and a couple of layers of them so I'll just do it over and over and over again until it starts to smooth out sometimes it just takes working at it and working at it until suddenly it just comes together. If it goes totally awry then let it dry and then go back into it later but after a couple layers of the B99 into the B97 into the B95 it started actually smoothing out nicely. The saturated portion here is going to be this B32 I wanted that really bright color to be part of the light but I didn't want white on there because I want the snow to be white and that's going to take a little work to make the snow really white white and things that are white are white because of the things that are around them so I've decided I'd do a little experiment here with seeing how much blue can I put in the snow before it starts not looking like white snow so I'm blending out some colors just from the bottom edges to give me a little depth out in the corners and it's not just all one big flat thing and got some really nice blending going across I'm not too worried about the marker that catches on the edge and gives me a little line of extra color because I can always cut that off when I trim my my panel down for my card and now I'm going to add some darker shadows right underneath the characters and that's going to give a stronger impression of really strong light coming from above because I'm going to have a darker shadow and I'm just going to work my way out to a lighter color around the edge so I do get a soft shadow around them reaffirm some of that b32 that had since disappeared and look how it still looks like snow even though it's not white so we don't have to leave everything pure white all the time now this is when some people are going to start freaking out and being scared and I apologize to you now for scaring you but I wanted some really strong lighting here and I grabbed my c6 I probably should have grabbed it like an n or a t those tend to work a little bit better for this particular kind of thing when I'm using grays for overall shadows over everything I've done this a little bit in some of my spooky types of colorings when I'm I have lots of desaturated gray shadows on things don't usually do a whole lot for Christmas cards and I thought it'd be interesting to see how this would work but the one thing I noticed right away as I started working on it is that I really I was okay with having all this dark color as long as I could blend it out because it was giving me that richness that complimented the b99 in the background because the b99 has blue in it so it feels more saturated even though it's a b9 color and then the rest of these colors start to feel more alive because they are in a totally different color way than the background I'm not sure if that makes sense but that's what my head was thinking when I did this so now I'm taking another of the the gray markers I'm using a neutral this time because I should have done that last time and I'm just going over everything and desaturating all of it I'm blending out some areas so that I'm leaving white highlights and adding some some darker colors in some of those white areas because I want my whites to be really white white they're going to look better if you if you leave the white instead of drawing back in with a white pen I didn't do that here but you know it was an experiment sometimes I turn the camera on and I experiment and this is one of those times a little mouse down here is furthest away from the light so he's going to have the least of the super light highlights and then even this penguin is just going to have a little light hitting the top of his hat and then part of his face but the rest of it is going to go into shadow just continue to soften all these shadows and all these colors until now I'm going to dive into a darker color again because I wasn't feeling I wasn't feeling the love of the darkness that that number three didn't quite do it for me and you'll notice that the t's in the ends are relatively interchangeable from my experience they both work about the same and I'm going over these colors now and making them even darker than that number three so it's not quite as much as the six but it's darker than the three so it's it's giving me a little more of that contrast I was looking for because now you can start to see the white highlights pop the white doesn't show up unless there's something around the white and that's pretty much with any of your coloring if you don't have a contrast between light and dark objects you're not going to see them that's how our eye sees things now if your colors get too muted like these got really really muted then I'm going to take my base colors the initial colors and go over them one more time it's going to retain some of that darkness that I've put underneath but it will bring some of that color back out so it's not completely dulled out and then my final step of course since it's a Christmas card is going to be the uniball signal white pen which is one of my favorite things to use at Christmas time I recently bought a couple of extras so I can get through lots of Christmas cards and I'm firming up some of the highlights on a few of these things I'm not putting in tons of highlights I just want the very tippy tops of all of the characters and their objects and their hats and their you know those kinds of things but not a ton of it because if you put too much you can dilute what's there you can dilute the power of what is around a few tips with the uniball signal pen since it is that time of year and I know a lot of people say they have trouble trying to use it and it doesn't come out right and that sort of thing try writing on your finger for a second because that will kind of warm it up and then don't press really hard because consider that there is a ball inside of that pen and you want the fluid to roll around the ball if you push really hard it doesn't have room to roll around the ball and many people tell me that that alone is a valuable tip so there you go I wanted my sentiment to look like it was behind the bear's ear so I masked him out used my powder tool so that the powder doesn't stick to the rest of the coloring and stamped the sentiment in VersaMark ink and you can see it kind of goes right behind the bear and then before I heat set it I pulled very carefully the little mask off and then I could do the heat setting wait till it dries and then dust off that powder and it comes out just lovely and look how the snow shows up so nicely because it's against all this dark rich color very cool isn't it I hope you enjoyed that and got a little something out of it go get out your white pen to make some Christmas cards because it is that time of year time to get started so we're not in a panic when the end comes all right I'll see you guys later bye bye