 Hi there! My name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I want to color an ice fishing pond for you today. I'm going to be using a stamp set from my favorite things. Thank you to them for sending this to me. Polar bear pals. They're sitting bears and waving bears. There's one tiny bear and the rest are bigger bears. They have a little bucket full of fish and lots of sentiments. Most of them are birthday and thinking of you types of sentiments. There's a love one in there. And there's also I come bearing gifts which you could make into a Christmas card. I love stamp sets that work both for the holidays and for other times of year because I know I'm going to get more use out of it if I can use it for more than just Christmas cards. And this is one of those stamp sets that I think I will definitely do. There was a set of polar bears that came out. I think it was last year. Might have been the year before. I got it late. I got it way late after it doesn't seem to be available in many places anymore. So I kind of missed the boat on being able to color Bertie Brown's polar bears. And was really happy that she did another set with some different bears. And I could make a video out of this one. Yowza yowza. So I'm going to start by coloring the bears with coping markers and coloring my shadow first. Most of the time I start with my lightest color. But since I'm going to end up stopping short of white, I'm going to leave some white highlights on here. I wanted to start with my darks and work my way to the lights instead. This is one of those rare occasions when I tend to start with the darks rather than with the lights. My light is coming from the right hand side. So I'm putting my shadows on the left side of each portion of the bear. And on some of them I'm leaving room for bounced light. Bounced light is when you don't put the shadow all the way against the line and allow a little bit of lighter color on the far side. So if you look on the bear that I'm coloring right now, on that arm, there's that little spot there right along where that arm would fall into the shadow that's right behind it. But if you allow that little bit of bounced light to happen there, it's going to separate that arm out from the shadow behind. I'm not sure if that makes sense. But the shadow on that side of the arm went all the way to the edge of it would run straight into the shadow behind. So that's just one of those ways that you can add a little bit of separation between different portions of a stamp. Even though this is a technique I often will use for shiny objects, it also works really well on something like this where you're trying to make one portion of an image pop in front of another portion. And speaking of things in front of other things, the mama bear holding the baby bear is one stamp. And I stamped that one in front, that one and the little bucket of fishies. And then I masked them out so I could stamp the daddy bear behind it. I'm assuming it's a daddy bear. So I could stamp a bear behind and it all looks like it's one image. And I love to mask images together so that I can use multiples on a card really easily. And using my MISTI to do that makes everything go a lot better. You can check the video at the end of this particular video. One of them will be a little detail on masking and showing you how I do some masking and how that process works, especially with the MISTI. So I'm taking my mid-tone color and spreading out that shadow into the rest of the image. Now there are some folks who will get a little scared because I'm putting a lot of color in here. It's going to seem like, oh my gosh, they're white bears. Why are you putting so much gray down? If you're scared, then don't start with a C4 for your dark. I mean I've even started darker than that at times. It depends on where the rest of the image goes because by the time this is done you're going to see these are still white bears. But I want to do a little differentiation between the bear color and the background color. So I'm going to put enough cool gray on here that I actually have some difference between them and their background. That is one of the things you'll need to be a little careful of when you're doing a scene that's kind of white bears on a white background. How do you make them look like? One is a furry bear and the other is snowy ice. And using the cool grays here is going to help to pull them into looking more like bears and the background to look like it's a background. And when we get to that I'll talk a little bit more about alternate colors you can use. I'm blending this out with a C00 and I'm letting that modeling happen. M-O-T-T-L-I-N-G. And that kind of thing happens a little bit when we start putting a lot of color down on our paper. And many times we work really hard to try to get rid of it. But I'm trying to create some of it and I'm doing that by just kind of scribbling with the marker. It's a really light color so it's not going to look a whole lot like scribble. It's going to be giving them a little bit of a fur texture. Now for some it's going to be too much fur texture and I'm going to go through another step to clean some of that up. But I'm going to leave some of it as well because I want them to look kind of fuzzy-ish. And if they were super smooth they would look, I don't know, I guess they are cartoonish. But they would look even more cartoonish if they were absolutely perfect. So I wanted to make sure that I let them be a little bit on the fuzzy side. And now I'm taking that mid-tone and this is where the smoothing out happens. And I'm just doing a light stroke over top of those areas real quickly. I'm not scribbling back and forth a whole lot. If you scribble back and forth a whole lot you're going to add way too much color. And here I can just add a little bit of smoothness and increase that shadow just a tiny bit. And it's going to smooth out some of that texture that I left but leave some of it underneath as well. It's going to give me kind of a cross between the fuzziness and the smoothness. And you can go even further than that and do more smoothing out if that's really what your goal is. Now I'm going to start on the scene around them because I want to make sure that I kind of get that sketched in and get it started. So I'm going to draw just a little weird shape. It should be a rough shape that would be the hole in the ice that they're sitting next to. And I'm just going to fill that in with some blue-green color. It doesn't really matter if you use blue-greens or use blues, whatever colors. I just decided to use blue-greens because it's different. And I pulled out a whole selection of the different blue-greens that I have. Because here you just want a lot of different colors to make this water. You don't really need any specific blue-greens. Just have some lights, some darks. And I'm taking the dark one, going right around the edge of where the water is, and leaving a little edge of the ice on that top section. You can see that I kind of drew a secondary line. And now below that, in that intersection, this is where the water is, I'm just going to keep adding more colors. And that section at the top is just the side of the ice. That's the edge of the ice. And I want to add a little dimension to it, but most of my water is going to look different down below. And I'm leaving some of these lines because that's going to make it look like water. I'm going to try to smooth some things out, but I also want to create some depth in that water itself. And here's a, you know, you don't have to do this portion to create that side. But I'm going to pick a few spots to create some darkness and then blend them out using a lighter color. And even though I have all these colors on the screen, there's a lot of different colors you can swap back and forth between. Just keep going over them until you get that kind of, you know, that look of water by just going over them again and again. And the darkest areas would be right next to the ice for the most part, at least in this picture in particular. So now I'm going to finish out these little fishies, little bucket of fish, and I'm going to carry some colors through the entire image. So the color that's in those little fish, I'm going to use in the scarves. You could make each scarf a different color and, you know, kind of just brighten it up with a lot of different colors. But I'm just going to try to keep my colors relatively similar to each other throughout the image. It's going to really bring the whole thing together and unify it a lot. So I'm going to use my pale green here on the scarf. And as I was doing this, I was trying to figure out what other color I wanted to use. Do I want to jump to a pink or something? I thought, you know, I'm going to go with one of the darker blue-green colors that I had used in the water because that will unify the image a little bit as well. And I'm going to use it just really solid. And throughout this, notice there's no dimension being added to the scarf. I'm doing no shading whatsoever. You don't have to shade everything if you shade the important things well. And I've said this in videos before, if you focus on the areas that you want people to look at and you want them to pay attention to, the other areas you can just do whatever in. And that's what I'm doing here. With the scarves, it doesn't matter whether these are fully dimensional or not. You can go back and add a lot of dimension to them, absolutely. But I'm going to just leave them really simple because there's going to be a lot else going on in this background as well, even though it's going to be kind of a simple look. I'll take a couple of warm gray markers now to do the little bucket. And I'm using warm gray just so that there's a difference between that and the bears. I didn't want it to be the same kind of color. I turned upside down so I could do this a little quicker. And I picked a horizon line and just started coloring with this BG marker. Again, a blue-green, kind of fun to use for a sky. It's just something different. And some of these lighter blue-greens look just like blues. It doesn't really matter a whole lot, but since it's got a little tiny bit of the blue-greenness in it, then it's a good place to start with adding a lot more color in here that we unify and work together with everything else that we've already got going on here. When you're doing a large area like this for a sky, you can go back and forth again and again. I'm kind of working around some of these areas around their ears, but you can just go back and forth until you get the whole thing smoothed out. When you have something like the ears interfering in it, it's a little harder to make strokes that go completely across the whole sky and make it perfectly smooth and perfectly even. And that's one of the areas where I thought, let me try doing a little something in here to show you how to make that work in your favor if you don't get it really smooth. Because right around their ears, they don't really get a whole lot of that super smoothness because my stroke is interrupted by having those ears pick up into the sky. So I'm going to use a BG02, just a little bit darker than the BG01 I had started with. And I'm just wiping it across the surface and doing kind of a pendulum motion so I'm flicking both directions and leaving some areas that are lighter. It's going to give me these horizontal, very pale clouds in the background. And, you know, you could leave some more white in there in order to create some more distinct sky. And I'm going to create one cloud where I just kind of do some little scallops and color the area behind it just to make sure that the idea that I intended to make the sky look like this is a little clearer. But you can see that having it perfectly smooth now doesn't matter a whole lot because it looks like there's these really soft clouds in the sky in the background. So now I'm just going to add a little bit of color in the snow down below them. I'm going to use some color to make the shadows underneath of them. Stretch that color out a little bit further. And then I'm going to use some BG10 in the background here. Now I had a blobby BG10 marker. But as I started, you know, having it blob on the surface I realized, you know, that's actually going to make it look like lumpy snow. So I realized that, you know, snow doesn't have to be perfectly smooth because it still came across as snow in my image. Isn't that a cool idea? So here I'm adding just a little bit of dark shadow right underneath each of the bears and the bucket to just add a little bit more contrast and give them a little more of an anchor to the snow. And that is about it for the coloring on the outside of the card. I'll show you what I did with the rest of it. So first I added the stamped sentiment waving high, wishing you were here. Which means I can send this card anytime during the holiday season or afterward depending on when I needed a hello card. I also stamped the envelope and colored it a little bit with my Copics. I used the small bear image. And I masked it out just a little bit with a post-it note so I could stamp the hello there right behind his shoulder. Tuck that sentiment in so it kind of fits right there with the image on the envelope. And on the inside I did the ice skating bear. And I can write my note right alongside of him and have a little happy image on the inside of the card. Which is a heck of a lot of fun. So on the left is the video that I told you about about masking if you want to see that one. In the center is a video I recently did over on the MFT YouTube channel so you can go check that one out. Another bit of coloring that I'm doing over there. Once a month I'll be joining them as a guest designer on their blog and their YouTube channel. And on the right hand side is another one of my MFT coloring videos. Thank you so much for joining me. Hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet already and I'll see you next time.