 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, welcome to my virtual studio where I'm going to be talking about which art medium is best for what. I'm often asked how I decide which art medium I'm going to use for which project. And while these are not rules that I follow all the time, there are some suggestions that I can offer for you in thinking about what to do when you want to create a particular project. So I'm going to talk about four different mediums. And the first one will be Copic Markers. They're an alcohol marker and other markers that are alcohol fall in the same category. They're very rich in color. They don't have like white spaces like a pencil wood in between the pigment. They fill in the pigment entirely. They blend really well as long as you get your blending techniques down. And I do have classes that I offer on that as well as lots of videos on YouTube about the topic. You can get a lot of dimension and depth with them because they have colors that are really dark and colors that are really light. And you can make an object look really rounded by applying the colors in that kind of a way. They also have a really broad range of colors. They have a lot of really, really light ones. You can see in that vanilla ice cream there's probably six or eight different shades of tan. Some of them are very dark. Some of them are very light. So you can color something and have a really wide range of colors. And then there's also colors that go from very, very dark to very, very light. In this range of pinks and reds, the background is being done with midtones and the flowers are midtones to lights. So all those dark colors and the richness of the ones in the background make the light colors pop forward. One of the things that Copics are not good for necessarily is full backgrounds. And techniques like putting dots on things can cover the areas where blending doesn't happen really well. And there are a lot of different techniques to do that sort of thing. There's also airbrush. And that's a specialty technique that you can do with Copic markers. And in this particular one, I didn't do an even coat, but you can practice and learn how to do an even coat of color. And you can also use Copics on things like Yupo, which I don't do very often, but it's an interesting and unique kind of specialty that you can do with Copics. Next up is watercolor. Watercolor has a lot of different looks. And the most common that people think of immediately is a loose kind of watercolor. And that can be achieved by adding extra water either before painting or while you're in the process of doing it through brushing it on, spraying it on, all different kinds of things. If you have a large flood area that you want to fill, a large background that you want to be a smooth continuity of color, watercolor is probably one of the better ones to use for that. The pigments run across the paper and gravity can pull the colors to create interesting effects as well as really smooth effects. With watercolors, your wisest to choose imagery that has large areas that you can paint in, especially if you're a beginner, because that's going to make it easier to do and not only the images themselves but even the background can be a large area with just clouds in it and just throwing a little bit of color in there or just grasses and keeping that simple but allowing the color to move around. One of the other joys of watercolor is that you can mix colors either in the palette or on the paper and you can create an infinite variety with just a few watercolors and you can't really do that as much with other mediums. Watercolor also does a really great job of blending on its own once you apply certain types of techniques. So to paint something like an aurora borealis, putting all the colors wet into wet and letting all of that color run using the power of gravity creates that aurora borealis look. One of the drawbacks of watercolor is that it always tends to dry a little bit on the duller side and on the lighter side the way the paint goes on, that's just the nature of watercolor. You can also do layering with watercolor and the orange layer was completely dry before the purple layer of the sky was added on and then when the orange moon is added in it's touching that purple and pushing color into it and then another layer is added on with trees in the foreground and you can continually build up from lighter colors in the distance to darker colors in the foreground to create a scene with many layers in it. Some of that you can do with other mediums but it's done really well in watercolor. My favorite property of water colors is that they do unexpected things. You can never fully plan what's going to happen when you get watercolor paints out. When you touch one wet color to another they move in different ways depending on the pigments themselves, depending on how much water is in either of the two pigments that are being mixed and you can create all kinds of interesting effects and you never know what's going to happen until you start painting. Watercolor is also a medium that you can do large pieces with much more easily. If I were trying to do a large Copic marker drawing like this it might take me a month to do that whereas with watercolor I can get that done in an hour and a half and it's a much quicker process not that art is about being faster but if you're trying to create a large piece and you don't want to take a month to do it then watercolor might be a good option for a project like that. I also use watercolor when I go out and do plein air and that's when you just paint outside in the actual atmosphere of where the thing is that you're painting and I find that I can take a very small amount of supplies for plein air whereas I don't really want to carry a big marker bag with me to go sketching outside. I will sometimes do some urban sketching where I just take a sketchbook and a pen and maybe a little bit of watercolors to add some color to it or add color once I get back home. Watercolor also allows you to combine a lot of different looks into a single art piece and in this one the first pass was done with a lot of spray of water so that the color moved and had very soft edges and I could follow that up with other layers going into a lot more detail in the bird and some of the tree branches and then I could get both the loose washy feel as well as the control that I really like as well just in different parts of the painting itself. Colored pencil is a different medium and it has very different properties one of which is that you can get very fine detail. All kinds of little itty bitty parts of a main image whether it's a stamp or a drawing can be accomplished with pencil because you can get it really sharp. I use an electric pencil sharpener and then at the very end sometimes if I need a super sharp point I take one turn in a handheld just to really secure that I've got a super super sharp point and I can get a lot of detail drawn into any kind of a picture. I also love to layer colors in colored pencil and animals are particularly good for this because their fur has so many colors in it it's not just brown it's not just gray it's a combination of both and in colored pencil you can make those colors layer over top of each other so that you actually look like you're seeing some of the undercoat on the animals fur and you can get a very realistic look by using colored pencils and in this I've even created the whole scene in the background with a lighter touch of colored pencil so you can get very heavy color and very thick pigment or you can vary it and get very little pigment depending on what you're looking for in each part of your picture. Colored pencils can be a very slow medium and often I do vignette scenes when I'm coloring on a card or something I'll do a very small bit of a scene rather than trying to fill a very large area that will take a long time to create. There are any number of methods for blending as well with colored pencil and they give you a different look for any one of them as well. Here I'm using some blending solution on the little bunny rabbit who's driving this sleigh but on the tree I didn't use any blending solution at all and you can see the kind of different textures that pencil can create that no other medium is going to be able to do in that kind of a way. Color pencil can also be used on black paper so black card stock black sketch paper there is a black watercolor paper so you can do luminescent watercolors but it's much easier to do with colored pencil you'll just want to test your colors to see what's going to show up on black you need to pencils that are a little more opaque and some of your colors will be more opaque than others and you can use white in combination with all different kinds of colors as well. Watercolor pencil is the straddling between pencil and watercolor and I often tell people if you want to move toward watercolor and it scares you this is a good one to jump into. I find that with images that have small areas I like to get out the watercolor pencils because again same as with regular colored pencils you can get that pencil really sharp and get it into tiny areas watercolor pencil is also a great medium to use when you don't really feel like coloring very carefully and there are days when I just want to scribble and then I can do that and clean everything up in the water phase and melt all of that beautiful pigment so it becomes watercolor and blends itself so nicely afterward you can even do that a day or two afterward you don't even have to do it at the same time it's helpful with watercolor pencil if you can do some of that blending before you add the water so if you have multiple colors you're trying to blend together do that in the pencil phase here I'm going from a dark blue to a medium blue to a purplish color around the lit objects in the scene and when I start adding water to it the colors tend to blend a lot more easily rather than relying just on the application of water rely a little bit on the pencil as you work sketching with watercolor pencil is especially fun because it's so forgiving if you don't like a line that you drew you can add water to it soften it and go back into it and work it again with another layer of pencil and just keep going until you're satisfied with the drawing itself all of these are my suggestions and there are no rules so do what works for you use the medium that you're passionate about at the moment and see what you can come up with to create the effects you're looking for the full videos for each one of the previews you've seen in this video are linked in a list down below so you can go get more information on any one of those projects and I thank you for coming to visit here in the virtual studio