 Hello there, I'm Sandy Olnok and today I've got four hacks for you, four different things that you can make out of something you may already have in your house if you can't get out to an art store to get them during the quarantine and also some colored pencil demos. My first hack is making your own blending stumps. I only recommend this if you're quarantined and you can't get anywhere and you need a blending stump really bad you can't go buy one but the ones you buy like these from the store are really good ones. I mean their wound really tight is what I mean I shouldn't say really good ones they're all just you know really inexpensive but if you're stuck on quarantine and you don't have one grab a sheet of copier paper and the first sheet you're going to trim off about a little corner down there it's gonna make it easier to start believe you me and I tape down the opposite end so I can tug on this thing as I roll it and I'm going to start by trying to make this first roll as tiny as I can but I'm gonna start by making a big one you can see how large it is but it's training the leading edge of the paper to get into the right direction otherwise I ended up just continually folding it it's just really hard to start when you're trying to get it really tiny and then I just pulled it back toward me and just kept kind of shoving it in there and trying to get it tighter and tighter and tighter until it was really tiny and I'm sorry my hands are in the way but there's no real way to show you like real closely so you can actually see a whole lot of this at this stage but the reason for cutting off that triangle of paper is so you only have to deal with the pointed end the end on the right hand side is going to be the point of my blending stump the other side doesn't matter at all and as you start rolling you want to roll the point end tighter than you do the back end because what that's going to do if you kind of focus on being really tight at the point it's going to start making the point slowly get longer than the piece of paper so here you can see it's it's getting taller there and it's turning into a little bit of a point we'll be able to sharpen that in a little bit but if you get it started like this it really helps when you're trying to get it sharpened and if you're going to just do a small one then do this was one piece of paper tape it and you'll be done and you can start your sharpening I wanted to make one that was thicker so I'm going to tap it on the table surface you can see it is hollow on the backside and that's going to give me a flat one again a little flat end on it I'm going to unroll it just a little bit and add another piece of paper to it just tuck it inside the roll and then start again with all of the rolling and you can make one that's hugely thick if you want rock on and add more but I'm going to do the same thing I want the point to very slowly start to stick out from the right hand side so I can create a little bit of a point try not to let the this first part until the first piece of paper gets all the way rolled inside you don't want that hanging out or else you'll have little frayed bits hanging off the end of your blending stump and then just keep rolling these get easier as they get fatter so the beginning is the hard part and then I'm going to be able to sharpen that one and tape this closed so it's nice and stable and voila my big fat blending stump now it has this tail end on the back and it bends up to a certain point so I just hack them off past that depends on how long you want yours to be but the outside end is hollow and then the inside see mine is not perfectly tight and I couldn't get any really tight this one is the other one that that I made and it's got a little bit tighter on the inside there but some people I've seen hack at it with a knife to try to sharpen it and I think that's kind of a lot of work my preference is just to use a stump sharpener it does take a little while depending on how sharp you want it and when you're making a homemade one if you have those air gaps in the middle then sometimes it doesn't come out really perfectly and if you over sharpen you're going to just exaggerate the fact that this is a handmade one the ones that they make by machines you can sharpen those till the cows come home and you generally don't find an air pocket in the middle but with a handmade one you're going to so I've got my two blending stumps that I have made myself one with one strip of paper and one with two strips now let's talk about making that stump sharpener because if you are under quarantine and you can't get out to an art store you might need one so look what I found in the garage okay I found it in my neighbor's garage it was not my garage but I I borrowed it I didn't tell him he wasn't going to get it back so I got the stir stick and some sandpaper fine grit and I cut it to fit I made one that's longer than the one that I buy because I usually want to get a longer stroke going and I thought it might be helpful to have one that's longer you could make one the entire stir stick long you can cut it short whatever you want to do staple it and then nail the ends in so you don't stab anything and then you've got a really great stump sharpener now stump sharpers can be used for sharpening of course but they can also be used to clean them so if you get green on them for instance and you're going to be blending some brown or some blue you might want to get the green off and you can use the stump sharpener to do that as well trim it off a little scissors if you end up getting little goobers hanging off of it blending solutions I've talked about these a lot but lots of people use Gamsol and that's made for doing things like color pencil blending might not be made for that but that's a lot of people use for it but you can also use baby oil so if you're at home you can't get any Gamsol get some baby oil with mine I put them in these little jars with a cotton ball inside them and the fluid in there and that means I can put it on my desk or wherever I'm working and if I tip it over I'm not going to make a spilled mess but I can just tap my blending stump on one of the cotton balls my final hack is making patterned pencil you can do that in a couple ways my preference is to use a tea strainer you can use anything that has a really fine mesh and you will see that demonstrated in the demo at the end of this video you can also use the stump sander and sharpen your pencil on it and tap that onto your piece of paper there is a tutorial video over at MFT today if you would like to go see that it's got lots of pencil techniques in it and for the rest of this video I'm going to turn on some music and you can enjoy the sketch I have done of the Garden of Get Semeny it's from a photograph that I took when I was in Israel over 12 years ago or so thank you very much for watching this links in the doobly-doo I'll see you again soon