 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to use one color of color pencil to color some peonies. And this is going to be part of a blog hop celebrating Sugar Pea Design's fourth birthday. So happy birthday to them, and this is the stamp set I'm going to use, which is the beautiful little peonies. And all you need to do this is black paper, white ink, and a white pencil. So I have stamped my flowers all up along one side. They're each separate flowers. The big one comes with the leaves that go with it, the little whole branch of leaves. And then just start coloring from the outside edges in. And when you do this, I want to make you aware of something, which is that the lines on the stamp that are on there are normally stamped in black or a dark color. And then you put your highlights on and they work their way toward those dark shadows. But when you stamp in white on black, suddenly those shadows become white because you've stamped them in white ink. And this white Yeti ink is pigment ink. You may want to let it dry a little bit, but it works fine with the pencil if you want to work with that. If you want to do other mediums, you may want to let it dry longer. Make sure that you let it dry before you go touching it a whole lot, which is one of the reasons why I've only stamped one side of this because I'm going to stamp the other side because I want to do an all over background with this, but I didn't want to get my hand in all the ink. So I'm able to sort of hover my pinky over the ones that are underneath of me. But the rest of it, I want to make sure that I don't go smudging things, particularly, although on something like this, you can sort of cover that up, put a leaf there if you end up smushing something and it'll be totally fine. But what you want to do with a flower like this, since the shadows are now white and then the outside edges are white, is make sure you consciously leave some black parts. You're going to basically be recreating some shadows. And I'm keeping my pencil really sharp, so I'm going off screen to use my pencil sharpener, my quiet sharp pencil sharpener, which is kind of a huge monster. Several of you have bought it and told me you love it, but you agree that it is really big. It's bigger than I expected, but it works really well. And it sharpens your point without eating up your pencil because some of those that don't have an auto stop feature, we just hold a pencil in there and you don't know if it's done yet. This one just stops eating your pencil once it's finished. But I'm picking different petals and just putting some highlights on them and allowing other places to be dark. Don't stress out about where the light source is. You're just going to try to create some highlights and shadows. And as this particular flower develops, you'll start to see more of where I'm kind of just leaving some random places. And don't leave them with just gray. Leave them with some actual black showing because you want to have that contrast so that your flower looks all soft and poofy. And I was amazed when I got this done how soft and poofy these flowers can actually look. It was not quite what I expected. And even when I stamped this, I realized after I started coloring that my shadows were suddenly light. So I was working this out as I went, but I wanted you to be able to see in real time how I colored this one flower and just watch it go from a hard line, hard edged flower into this really soft, poofy, almost cotton ball-like type of flower. And the cool thing is you only need one colored pencil for that. Now, if you were going to do other colors and try to do other colored pencils on this, I had considered doing that, but you could do this white first and then do the other color on top. But just make sure you don't press hard enough with your white pencil that it gets waxy because if you want to put another color over it, you're going to have some issues. And you also want to be careful when you're going to be coloring over the white ink. If you're going to color over top of white ink, then you're going to get that white undercoat. So it's going to make your color look brighter. So my recommendation would be to test on another piece of paper, just a little scrap or something on one flower and see what colors are going to work and how much of the white you need to put down before you start putting other colors on top of it. And maybe I'll have to do a flower like that at some point so I can kind of walk you through more detail on that, sort of an idea. But the other tip that I would give you would be if you want to stamp this and then just leave it to dry and know whether or not it's dry enough to work with, then stamp one of the flowers at the same time on a scrap piece of paper and wait for that to dry and just keep testing it with your finger by rubbing it and then you'll know when that one's dry that your main piece will be dry. But now I'm speeding up because you got to see one flower and it's kind of magical to watch it develop quickly. But yeah, it was a really fun kind of card to make and it has this very Victorian sort of a feel. And so as I color in the rest and then add in the other stamped images you'll kind of get that feel as well. The cool thing about this on top of just having the white ink and the white pencil is you can add in other things. So if you have a little spot that you didn't fill in by stamping a leaf you can actually stamp a little leaf or a stem or a piece of grass to fill in one of those spots. And generally I just squint to see if there looks like there's an area that's too dark and could use a little something, something and add a little bit to it. So kind of wait until you're done with the end and then see what the overall effect is that you're getting as you do all your coloring. Cause you can always add those kinds of things later. You can even stamp other leaves in there later to finish it off. But for me, I was just having fun doing the coloring and it's easier to do. You can see the flower here is a bud and it's easier to do a highlight on one end and then down to the shadow part letting that gradation slowly go down. It's a little easier with flowers like that than with the giant peony. And the giant peony is just the hardest one but you can tell now that there are some dark areas and I didn't have any science to them. There isn't really a science to how to do this and make it look right. But it's really a beautiful way to soften out all those lines. And now you can even see comparatively the finished flower to the unfinished flower the difference that just that little bit of pencil can make. And you can buy pencils in the one-offs over at Dick Blick. So if you just need a white pencil and you don't want to invest in a whole bunch of pencils but you want to try this, you can go get one and go find some other things that you need because who wants to pay shipping on just one pencil. But yeah, color pencils, a lot of fun to work with. And oh, another tip that I'll give you before I go is the paper should be very flat. Don't use a textured paper for this. It's just gonna be a lot easier if your paper is really smooth. So there is that as well. So when I finished all of this, I put my sentiment on a popped panel. I just kind of cut the banner edge on the left into two points and I have the whole thing popped onto a black cardstock as well so that I could keep it all very elegant and beautiful. And I hope you go to the blog hop that is going on right now. It's also Good Friday, so I'm gonna wish you all happy Easter because that's coming up on Sunday. And I guess I'm gonna see you next week. After Easter is over, I will be back with more videos so make sure you subscribe so you can catch more. There's more videos here on the screen if you wanna go click on something else but make sure you go see the blog hop and enter for prizes. And I will see you guys later on. Have a really awesome weekend.