 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to take this sketch and turn it into a finished colored pencil drawing and very excited about this. He's so realistic, he just might melt if we're not careful. So nobody sends your heat my way. We want to keep our snowman intact. Let's do this. Indulge me for just one quick minute while I tell you about a new class that just launched this week. I want to make sure if you're watching a colored pencil video, you know there's a class that you can take to learn five different scenes in colored pencil. And these can be used for all different kinds of art projects that you're doing. If you're interested, it's an inexpensive class, it's intermediate level, link in the doobly-doo and it's called Winter Wonderland. All right, this video is sponsored by Tohito. They emailed and asked if they could send me this tracing light pad and at first I thought I don't really need one. How often would I use it and then I rethought because I used to have one and I lost the cord for it. I threw it away, I think. So this one came with a package that has these pictures that you can trace and some paper that you can use. So you can have that if you're interested in it. I was not, but nonetheless it also comes with a pencil, an unsharpened pencil, an instruction sheet and then a sheet of plastic that's over the whole thing to protect the cover of it. And it's a USB cord. You can either work on it while it's plugged in or you can plug it in and charge it up and then use it without being plugged in. Works great both ways, has different shades of light and goes up and down in the amount of light and you'll see it used a couple times in today's project. I began by making a sketch first and sketches generally help me to understand which parts of a picture I like the most and which ones maybe I'll add more detail in, which ones less and that scarf was one of the things that I decided I was going to add more into and I stopped drawing the trees in the background because I realized I didn't really need to draw them out to trace, but I did want to trace the snowman and get the elements in there using the light pad. So I turned off the lights because every light pad works better when the lights are off and then proceeded to trace the main outlines of the snowman using a blue colored pencil. It's because I wanted to do the background in powdered colored pencil and I didn't want to drag graphite through it. So I put some white tape on the outside of this watercolor paper. Note to self never use this tape on Arch's Hot Press because it ripped my paper when I was done, but at least it only ripped the outside white part. Got my pencils out, which I keep in these drawers and then started to work on the sky and trees first. So I decided the background is going to be the hardest part. I trusted myself to get the snowman right, but I thought let me do the background first in case I screw that up and then I won't have to worry about when I get to the snowman. I'll know at least the background is set. So the first step was to grate some powdered pigment onto the paper using my tea strainer that I got at my grocery store. There is a link in the doobly-doo, but check your grocery store and see what they've got. You never know where you're going to find art supplies. You just want a very fine grate to make very fine powder. Your pencil does bigger powder crystals or bits and pieces than graphite does, and you'll see me grab some graphite later on in this project just for that specific reason. It does make a really nice soft texture, and it definitely has some texture, especially on this Hot Press watercolor paper. I got the light pad back out because I wanted to use some eclipse tape to create a mask for just the sides of the snowman because I wanted to bring that powdered pigment at the bottom closer to the snowman's body, and I couldn't do that with just a big old cotton ball. So that was really easy to do, and this eclipse tape is basically the stickiness of a sticky note, but it comes in a roll, so you can make big chunks like this. And then I just continued pushing the powdered pigment with the cotton ball right up to the edge of my masks, peel them off, and I've got a nice, crisp edge for my drawing. Bada boom, bada bing. So dust that off with the dusting brush. That is a dusting brush I've had since college. That thing has seen a few years in its day. So next I'm going to draw the trees, and I didn't film a ton of the trees, but I have a section of them I'm going to show you, and I started with this metallic pencil, and this is metallic blue. They don't make this one anymore, but this one is part of a group of pencils that was sent to me by one of my followers, Jane, who sent me just packages of pencils a couple of different times, and she had old pencils, and this is one of the old ones. If you ever get a Prismacolor set or even an individual pencil, somebody hands you some stuff, and it's got either Eagle or Barrel, B-E-R-O-L, or Sanford on it, then those are basically vintage Prismacolor pencils, because they used to be made elsewhere, and they used to have those names on them. I used to have, I just remember the Barrel Prismacolors were the ones I had in college, and those are long gone, of course, by now, but they've moved their shipping to Mexico and all sorts of other things. But nonetheless, I was having fun using some colors that I normally don't have, because these are in the vintage set. I did figure out why they've killed off this metallic blue, though, because it did not work all that well. I ended up switching and using other blues for this, and what I'm doing is putting a coat of kind of a grayish blue down first, and I did that by switching to a different grayish blue instead of the metallic, and then starting to darken it. So part of it was using blending solution, and here I'm using the U.S. Art Supplies oil medium odorless thinner, and then adding some thicker lines and blackening some of them up so I had some contrast. Now, I didn't film all of that. I was sitting on the sofa. I gave up on sitting at the table because, yeah, fireworks and having to sit next to my dog, I needed to go sit by her. So you didn't get all that filmed, but I saved these trees at the bottom so you can kind of see what I was doing, creating some gray trees using a cotton ball to soften them. So that would push them a little more into the misty distance, and then adding a slightly lighter blue as I got closer toward that sunlight spot. And, you know, even lighter blue as I got even further into the white. So it just slowly started building that gradation, not only from the powdered pigment around the outside edges, which doesn't need to be perfect, obviously, since I was putting on all these trees all over it. I'm not sure why I labored so hard on that, but there you go. And occasionally using a little bit of blending solution in here, probably not the best idea, because then I ended up fighting the trees in that section. I just wanted something darker and so then I had to go back and fix that by using some deeper colors to create something that didn't then look like big blobs on the page. So my trees got darker than they were intended, but such as life sometimes. But those branches were really fun to do. I loved doing little tiny, fussy work like that. There's just something very brainless about them, which I can spend all my day doing that. It feels like doodling to me and trying to make them look like realistic tree branches. So next up, I decided to work on adding some color to the snowman because what I really wanted to get to was the hat and scarf. Those were the things I was really going to have a blast with, but I needed to get the gray in here first for the snowman so that I could end up not dragging any of the the color of the scarf and the hat into the snowman's body. So I made masks in the same way as I'd made the mask earlier, just putting it on the light pad and tracing it. And then I could put gray in here. I had that torn mask across the bottom because I wanted a little division between where the snowman is sitting, like into the snow and have just a slight division of color in there. And by the time it's all done, it's a very minimal difference between the two of them. So you could get away without doing that mask at all. But I love the moment of peeling them all off, even that little carrot nose. And now he's starting to take shape. So I get to do the funnest part, which is drawing this scarf and the hat because I really wanted to do the knitted texture on them. And that meant lots and lots of layers, ridiculous numbers of layers. I have decided I don't really like hot press paper for pencil drawings. Like I just don't think it's my my jam. It was very difficult because I kept getting too much texture on this. I just wanted something crisper and it was a challenge to get to that. And I had to keep adding more and more details. And I found another one of the vintage pencils among the collection, which made me happy. So every once in a while, I stumble on one and it feels a little different. The cores are just a little bit different because they were made in a totally different place and that sort of thing. So I just I love me some vintage pencils. If you ever find any, let me know. I would love to use them even if you aren't a color pencil user. And if you see some Sanford or barrel pencils out there or even some Eagles, I'll take Eagles. Those are just fun to use. All right. So next up for the shading on this, I use purples to shade in the yellow hat. And well, I guess it's more of an orange hat by the time it was all said and done because of all the blending I had to do. It was supposed to be a fully yellow hat. So I just layered and layered and layered and did blending in between and more layers and use darker purples to create those. The texture in the hat and same with the scarf, just using layers and following the curve of the fabric is really fun. It was somewhat fun on that the horizontal piece. But when I get to the vertical piece, it just made me so happy. I just I love creating that illusion of the texture. Those those ribs in the fabric going up and down over and underneath each of those sections where the whole piece of fabric moves. So tackle them one section at a time like that one going up and over the highlight areas and then anywhere that recedes you want to go down and under so that it creates that illusion of the the ribbing in the fabric of the scarf moving as the scarf kind of turns and twists as it's laying there. I just love challenges like that. And the crystalline snow texture is probably another challenge that I did this for in the first place. It's the reason that I wanted to work on a snow thing this week. And I wanted to see what it would be like to create this in pencil. And I got out my electric eraser. Now, this is like a thirty five, thirty eight dollar eraser. There's an eight dollar one, I think eight or nine dollars that I'll put in the supply list because it works just as well as this. And all I did was tap it on the surface of the paper and then use a kneaded eraser to kind of transition and soften up some of those areas. If you do too much, you can always just go over with a cotton ball and smush it all back out again and lighten some of that or at least bring the highlights down in the low lights up. And next is the rocks. Got to have the rocks inserted into the snow for the eyes and the nose. So I used gray for that and gave them some black shadows underneath of them and did a bunch for the mouth as well. They didn't look like they were sitting in the snow quite yet. Until I did this, I used the brush and I had a little bit of the blending solution on and just pulled out from some of the areas that looked almost like corners to create some shadows so that the the rocks look like they were pushed into the texture of the snow. And it's probably the thing that like made me the happiest in this drawing that I made that work, because I wasn't sure how to do it. I had no idea and the picture. Collection that I had of snowmen because I was studying snowmen before I did this drawing to see not how people drew them, but what they really look like. I couldn't find any photos of what real rocks looked like in the situation that I've got going on here. So I was pretty tickled that that little trick worked. I did the same thing for the buttons, creating the buttons with their little black holes in the center. Using the electric eraser, I actually sharpen the eraser to a point by using a pair of scissors and just made a pencil point shape out of it. So I can make tiny, tiny dots and then use the brush again to set these in, just push them into the snow. Didn't even bother me if it kind of reflected a little of the red around the buttons, because that's what light would do anyway. Next up was to add a little more shading onto the snowman. Even though the back lit nature of this picture has the highlights on both sides, both left and right, the shadows right by the scarf, that is created by the scarf hiding the light of the sun from that portion of the snowman. So that's going to be the darkest place on the snowman. And then used a q-tip to soften that up, added a few little sparkles. I didn't want to add too many because there's no light directly shining onto the front side of the snowman. It's all bounce light from around the snowy situation that he's in. And then I was left with just roughing up some footprints in the snow down below, adding the footprints in the ground was because every snowman is going to have footprints around it because that's what it takes to build a snowman. And I was especially glad that I had the graphite mixed in with the gray pencil down here, as well as in the rest of the snow on the snowman's body, because graphite lifts better than does colored pencil. It just does a better job when you're using, especially an electric eraser or trying to lift anything back to white, graphite does it better. So consider mixing that in with your gray colored pencils. So there we go, the finished snowman with a quick zoom in. So you can see all that luscious detail. I am pretty excited with the results of this. Hopefully he won't melt. We are supposed to start getting some warmer weather here finally. And I hope that this guy does not melt. Don't anybody send me your hot weather. I want warm weather. I want normal summer, but I don't want hot. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, click the like button because that really helps the channel out, share it with your friends. And if you want to learn how to draw simpler snowman smaller, then you can go watch Monday's video, which apparently delighted a lot of people. So yay for that. And the winter wonderland class linked in the doobly-doo, all of these things. In case you need to learn how to make some winter scenes for snowmen that you would like to draw. And that is it for me. I will see you later. Thank you to Tohito for the light pad. It is awesome. And I'll see you guys later. Bye.