 Hey there, it's Sandy with some lessons I learned and you might learn from drawing Hermie the elf and let me know in the comments what other characters I should do this season. There are three reasons why I chose Hermie the elf for today. One is because Jules Bass just died. Yeah, he just passed on. He and his partner were responsible for so many of the holiday TV shows that I have loved since I was a kid. I still love them. I still watch them every year and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is one of them and has Hermie the elf as one of the characters in it. The second reason I chose it is because this is a really good kind of image if you want to practice seeing shadows. When you're looking at something that's a real object, a real face in reality, you're going to get a lot of bounce light from all over the place. You're going to get an image of a person that you've seen. You've seen people all the time and it's really difficult to focus your mind on seeing the plane of a cheek and seeing the angle of a nose and those kinds of things can be difficult for some folks to visualize because when you look at a face, you just say, well, that's a face. I don't know where the highlights and shadows are on an image like this. It was sculpted out of whatever it is they made these things out of and it was put into a lighting setting. They lit the set for the show, for the program and so there's really crystal clear lighting in a lot of these. So you can go to Google and find lots of different stop animation stills and try drawing those and or at least try studying them and look to see where the lights and shadows and things are. So that's second thing is just making that recommendation. And the third reason I chose Hermie is because Hermie wants to be a dentist. He doesn't want to be an elf. Everybody else says, but you know, you're supposed to be an elf. And sometimes in life, there's other people that want you to do things that you don't feel like you want to do. You want to do something different. Hermie was just called to be a dentist. That's what he wanted to do. And I've experienced that in 2022, I've changed things up on this YouTube channel and started making videos beyond just stamping and cards. And there are people who still, still to this day are still yelling at me that they want me to go back and do those other things. And it's not that I don't still do them sometimes. I do have a card making video coming up in a week. So stay tuned for that. But the things that I love to do are working bigger. I get more learning out of working larger and working on a large drawing like this is just easier for me to not only get the artwork done because it's nice and big. I can really move the marker around. I can really get into the details better than on a very itty-bitty image, but I also can teach better from it because you can see what I'm doing. It's not just a little tiny flicks of a marker. And then it's done. Here I'm doing larger strokes. So you can start to see how the colors building and how the shadows are starting to form in this particular one. I was struggling with colors because I was trying to roughly replicate the colors that are there. The picture I think is blue or more purpley than it might have been in real life. I don't know what the real colors were because every picture you see of Hermie the elf out there is a different hue. There's some where they pushed the color of his outfit to look more green. There's some where it looks more purplish. There's some like this picture looks very bluish. I opted for a blue green, which is what I think it is because I saw another picture that had a different elf, the boss elf, the mean one. He's wearing a distinct green. And the elves are wearing a distinct green in that picture. So I think that might be closer realistic. So that's what I'll be messing with. But the skin tones here are on the pinkish side, at least in the picture. Didn't want them quite that pink since I don't trust the photo that much. But I started off, you might have seen with some yellowish color that I was adding to it. And the yellowish is going to work as a base underneath the pinks that I'll keep adding in many, many layers over top of this. And that's basically how I get to the skin tones when I'm drawing something. Well, this is not skin because it's a stop motion character. But get what I mean. I did decide to draw right through the mouth eventually because I realized I could just draw that right over top of whatever colors there. And then I don't have the marker stopping at the edge of that mouth every time I go across that area. But as I was building up the colors, I just went back and forth between a whole pile of markers here on my table, like a ridiculous number of markers to do these skin tones so that I could just grab a little bit, something more pinkish, a little bit more duller in one area, a little brighter in another area. And here's where I started going in with some purples. The purple is the opposite color from yellow on the color whale. So it's going to give me some nicer shadows. And I start with a darker purple, add in a little bit more of a lighter purple and then go over that with the skin tones I've already been using, which pulls the purplishness out, even though it leaves just a glow of that underneath each of the parts of the skin. So the other thing that one of the other reasons that I really liked this particular photo and that I do recommend maybe trying to draw some of these stop animation types of pictures is because of that shadow under the hair. That is not a shadow. Most people would just go, OK, I'm just going to throw a big old dark shadow across a quarter of the image like that just seems a little crazy. But in a stop animation video, this one, it's well lit like this. You're going to get some interesting shadows and they're going to be crisper than you would get on a person's face necessarily because they're they're lit with like actual light bulbs, you know, coming in on a person, you're going to get ambient light. You're going to get sunlight that's going to have some soft edges to it. This has nice, crisp, sharp edges so you can really see those shapes. You can also see there's two of those shadows underneath of that piece of hair. That's because there's a couple of lights. There's lights at different angles and they're creating that. Now, you don't need to know that there are lights at different angles. You don't need to know where they are. You need to look at what you see and draw what you're seeing with your eyeballs. That's what I am constantly trying to get folks to to pay attention to, is to learn to see because that's going to change how you draw, how you shade and how you color. If you can start to really train your eye to be looking at what's there, not what you think is there, but what's actually there. And here on the the hair, I started off with a very light yellow moved in with a darker yellow, but there's a lot of folks that would stop here or maybe just jump straight to brown colors. And if if you do, you know, no shame, no harm, no foul. But if you're looking for replicating what's there, that big shadow area on the right hand side of the loop of hair, that's not just browns. There's other colors in there. And so it's a matter of figuring out what those colors are. I'm using, again, purple for the shadow violet color and I'm going to create some of the darker areas that are in between some of those little bits of hair. And then later, I'm going to go over the whole area with a lighter purple. So that's going to give me various layers to the hair, but not by using a brown. A brown is going to get added later, but it's going to dull down some of those colors. It's not doesn't have screamy, bright, cartoony, yellow hair. He's got blonde hair. It's yellow, but it's not an incredibly bright one. So that second yellow that I put down needed to be tamed. And that's what the purples are doing. The purples are taming it. You could also do the same kind of a thing with grays, and that will soften them as well. I kind of like the life that you get from a bit of purple. And it also ties in the fact that I use purple elsewhere. I like to use some of the same colors across the drawing in various areas of it. And once that purple is down, I'll go back over it with yellow again. Just start to build up more of the colors. When coloring with alcohol markers, you can continue to layer colors and make subtle color shifts over and over and over again until you are satisfied with the result. Because as long as you're not oversaturating the paper and working too quickly, then you can just keep working on it. It's generally not going to pill up on a paper like this. Solar white that I use. As I was layering more colors on the hair, though, I started realizing I wanted it put just a little bit of browns in there. Now that I had the yellows dulled down enough, I didn't know exactly how much I did put some pink in to try to turn some of those yellows a little bit more orange. But before I went further, I decided to add the hat and the elves are actually wearing pointy hats with red pink. I'm not sure if it's red or pink ribbons around them. And I decided to add more of the hat into my picture because in the photograph, it looks like a beanie. All you see is the bottom edge of the hat. And it seemed like it would be better to add the triangle hat with the red ribbon around it. And the angle of the curve for the ribbon should be the same as the angle of the hat itself. So I just kept adjusting until I got those two kind of jiving together and also made sure that the ribbon was a little bit wider than the hat itself. So it looks like it's wrapped around the outside edge of it because I actually found some photographs. Surprisingly, I did not realize this. I'm going to have to really watch this cartoon more closely that they have a knot in the back of the hat. So when they they made these little figures, they actually tied ribbons around them, little ribbons, little little knot or bows or something in the back of them. I'm not sure what it is. I chose to make the shadow on the left because I was thinking of that strong light that's making a shadow underneath of the hair, which is probably above and to the right, just a little bit. But I had to really make a guess at that because I was adapting it. I also use less on the right hand side for the hat. I didn't want too much of a triangle, just a little bit to create some negative coloring around the hair. And here is where I felt then confident to add a stronger brown in the shadow on the face, as well as a stronger brown in the hair. Just a few strokes to give some definition and went in with some lighter colors to soften them because then they started getting too strong and I didn't want them to be too much, just wanted enough. Get down to the color and note where the shadows are on that one. There's a shadow on the right hand side that's stronger than the one on the left hand side and also created some texture using the markers as well. As I am finishing up this drawing, I will remind you if you're watching it this week while this video has just gone live, then it is Thanksgiving week, which means that Friday is Black Friday and the reason they call it Black Friday is because all of us who run small businesses, a lot of times Black Friday is the first time we're in the Black for the year. So we're running in the red before that. I am no different than a lot of other small businesses. So if you have classes you'd like to take, I would love it. If you would go over to the website, why don't you go over today, tomorrow while it's really calm before the Black Friday craziness hits, go over and fill your cart with classes you dream of taking someday. You don't have to buy them all, but fill your cart with them so that when the coupon code comes out on Friday, then you will have an idea of what it would cost for you to take all those classes. And you might find with the sale that you can afford that. But you might also find that you can't afford that and that you need Santa Claus to get you a gift certificate for classes. This will give you a good idea of how much to ask Santa Claus for. You'd ask him for a specific class and they and Santa can give you that amount. But on Christmas Eve, the sale percentage is going to be the same as the Black Friday percentage. So this is just a way for you to gauge how much to ask Santa Claus for this year if you would like to ask him for gift cards. So on Friday, I'll have lots more information. I'm also going to show you some 3D objects that I have made that are going to be for sale because I've been working on, as you may realize, a lot of wood burning things that I have been making. I've got some fine art for sale. I've got some new ornaments in all different kinds of mediums for sale. I'm just going to like have fun making stuff this week and anything that I'm willing to part with. I'm going to put in the shop. So you're going to want to stop by and see what's there in my little online crafty bazaar. And I would love to know if you liked this kind of video because I'd like to do more of these during the December month instead of a sabbatical, just do something that I love doing, just drawing in all different mediums. So let me know what characters that you think I should draw. And I will see you again on Friday. Have a great Thanksgiving and go create something. Don't just cook. We'll make something. I'll see you later. Bye.