 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnack, artist and papercrafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to bring you another in my Holiday Backgrounds series and I'm going to use a stamp set called Happy Holidays from Darcy's. It has a really cute little kitty and cute little puppy to color and then sentiments that are dog and cat related. There's Doxen through the snow, Happy Holidays and of course, Meowie Christmas. But I decided I was going to make both of them on a card, which will make using one of the sentiments a little more challenging because I need to make the sentiment focused on either the dog or the cat. You'll see how that works out at the end. But I'm going to color them as if they are jumping in and out of the picture. Sometimes if you have characters that are in action, if you have them off to the left and right hand side of the paper, it almost gives them a little more action because they're breaking that plane. So I'm using some really dark browns here. E49 is the darkest brown of all of the browns in the Copic Collection and it's a little tough to get the mid-tone color to blend out a little bit and to soften that edge. I could have done a little more flicking with it, but I didn't want to chance getting too much of that really dark color in there because it is really, really dark and it'll take over real quickly. So I'm just scribbling over top of it with the E37 and that lightens it. If you take in my Copic Jumpstart class, you'll know kind of a little more about how that works because a lighter color will eat away at some of the darker color. That's how it does some of that blending. So I'm trying to put enough of the E37 down, just really saturating that paper well so that the dark color starts to lighten. Just right along that edge and even when I switch back to the E23, the lightest color, I'll still go over some of that dark because that's going to pull out a little more of that darkness as well and make it a little more soft blending. A friend of mine has a very, very dark brown doxin, so that's what I thought I'd do this in honor of her pup. So now I've got some red and green that I'm going to throw in here and actually on this little tiny detail, if you pay attention to all of the shading on the animals themselves and on that ornament, you can really get away with not shading the scarf and hat and that sort of thing. You can just color them straight up because nobody's going to be looking at them to see it, pardon me, if they're dimensional. They're going to be looking at the animals themselves, so I'm not really worrying about anything other filling in those colors on their scarves and their hats and things. Makes it a lot easier to get the coloring done. So a little puff is finished and now I'm going to move on to the kitty. I wanted the kitty to be a light gray color with all the different brown spots on it, so I started with a dark color or a medium to dark color. It just depends on what you think of as dark. I wanted it to be a light gray, so I consider it a C5 to be dark. I'm blending that out with a C3 to lighten that up and then going over it with a C1, you can see that C1 even eats away again at that C5 and lightens it and then I'll just fill in the whole inside to really give myself a nice soft blend. I'm not worried too much about that gray going over top of those spots because I'm going to color them in with brown. So if you're going to color them in with something darker, it's really easy to just go right over top of them and not have to worry about coloring around them with your markers. So I'm using the same browns that I used in the Dachshund to do a couple different color spots as well as adding just one little little bit of warm grays in there. And now I'm going to use the same green and red that I use in the other critter, but I'll just do a little bit of reverse. So I'll have a green scarf with red polka dots and that sort of thing. So there's a little more green on one animal than the other. Using that E49, that really dark color to touch up noses and then work on the ornament. Now the ornament, I just wanted to point out one thing and I thought I could illustrate it well by doing this with the marker. Sometimes it helps when you're coloring something and trying to leave a highlight. It'll help to leave the highlight while you're coloring. But I want to show you something that you'll see when we get to the end of this that isn't super helpful to do that when you have these lines across the Christmas ornament. Because see right across where that white stripe goes? You'll have little black lines. So sometimes it's going to be more helpful to make your highlights with a white pen rather than doing it with the markers themselves. Because that sort of just looks like that that highlight is broken up. But I started putting some shadows in here with a dark green. I'm just going to do two color shadows on this and not get real fussy with it. Then go back in there with my lighter green and just blend out some of that color a little bit further. Just going over that with a little soft blend. I did forget to go back and do the red before I start in with the next step of the white pen. So do as I say not as I do. I would do the red first before messing with this. And you can do just a single highlight or you can even add a funky shape to it a little bit to just add something that looks like a reflection. But see how different it looks when that white goes all the way across those black lines? It looks much more like a highlight. So now I went in with a little bit of the darker red to try to add a little dimension there. Once I already have the white in there it's a little tougher to do it. I wanted these two guys to look like they're outside in the snow. Even though this is an ornament hanging on the tree we're going to pretend that the tree outside is decorated. So I'm going to take my light green and just color in the entire background along the slope so that there's snow on the bottom but there's green all the way in the background. So they're at the base of a Christmas tree. And next I'll take that same dark green that I used before and start to make some lines in here. I want the darkest green to be at the very bottom so that'll be the richest part. And then leave some flicked lines at the top because I want to create the suggestion of pine boughs just little pine branches. Not a whole lot of detail in it. I just want enough that when somebody looks at it they think oh that's pine tree. And having all this dark at the bottom is also going to make the little dog and the little cat pop a little bit more because I'm putting that darker color behind them so that their lighter colors are the ones that show. You can see I'm using a really light touch with the marker when I get to that flicking portion. Kind of swinging my marker back and forth so that I end up with really soft flicked lines that start to feel a little bit like pine boughs. You can make them go different directions if you're sort of thinking your mind which directions your pine boughs are going to hang down from. And make sure you get that feel depending on what the angle is that you're coloring them at. If you're doing this with different stamps your whole line structure and your your tree structure might be very different than this. And I'm going to kind of feel in more of this at the top just because I don't want to have too much light up at the top of one. There to be a little bit less way up there in the corner. Scribble some of that in. And now I'm going to go back in to fix some of the areas where I colored right over top of the ears. And I did that with my gray marker so you can use a color of splendor but you can also go back in with the gray to remove some of that green. And now I'm going to add another layer of this dark green to just darken in some of those areas. You can see that another layer of the color just adds more richness to it and it'll smooth some of it out as well as you can get some different textures in there and increase some of that texture. We carry more of those flip lines up into the section up at the top. Now one of the wonderful things about Christmas cards is that a white pen can totally change an entire card. So what I'm doing now is I added a string onto the ornament so it definitely looks like it's swinging. And I'm going to add snow everywhere. The gel pens, boy I tell you they can add so much festivity to a card by just adding snow. I'm adding it right over top of the image as well. It can hide areas that you didn't color really well so if there's a spot you want to put a little drop of something, if you had some blending that didn't work, put a little bit of snow right over top of it. And it'll look like the snow is in front of them if you put the snow over the image. If you only put it behind when it looks like it's only snowing in the background sometimes if you have just a sky back there it'll look a little bit more like stars than it will look like snow. But putting it right over top means that a lot of that coloring ends up not really being all that important because what you've got is a whole lot of snow attracting the person's eye. Now to create the illusion that they're up above the ground I'm putting the shadows way down below. So depending on how far above your critter is jumping you want to have it a little bit higher or lower to the ground. So I've added a piece of ribbon and a sentiment on a circle and popped that panel of all of that beautiful coloring so that I can end up having this beautiful little card that's so much fun and so festive with the little kitty and puppy running around. If you would like to see more of my holiday backgrounds there's two of them here you can click on or you can click on that playlist and that will take you to the full playlist of my holiday backgrounds which include not only my christmasy type of backgrounds my winter type of backgrounds but also some halloween type of ones as well getting to the fall and winter seasons in that playlist. All right thank you so much be sure to subscribe and hit the like button and I'll see you next time.