 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnok and today I am going to be sharing a sketchbook drawing and a card. Card is at the end. There's another Ellen Hudson release today. But I wanted to share the sketchbook drawing first and just have a chat about something because I've had some things rolling out around in my brain every once in a while. I go into, oh my gosh, I should try this kind of a mode. And that's the mode I've been in. I tried something recently on social media, on especially Instagram and a little bit on Facebook, but more on Instagram where I share what I call tiny tutorials. They're little carousels, you know, 8 to 10 pictures. And they're on a super tiny, super focused topic, something very, very, very, very specific. And these tiny tutorials are doing a couple of things. One is they're challenging me as a graphic designer to simplify and to get the most important things, to be the most important things and not get lost in all the details and do some beautiful graphics. So my degree is finally being used, yay for that. But third is to find different ways to teach. I am a teacher at heart. I don't have teacher training, but I love to teach. I love to see people learning. And I've noticed something, and maybe this is my challenge with YouTube. I've noticed something with YouTube watchers over time, that there are concepts that I mention every single time I do Copic or every single time I do Color Pencil. And if you're a regular watcher, you probably go, oh my gosh, she's saying that again. Yeah, I know. I'm saying it again because there are people who are coming to these videos for the first time ever. If I just assume everybody has heard all 1200 of my previous videos, that would be silly of me to assume that of everybody. There's always going to be new people who haven't heard those things. But I think one of the mistakes that I may have made here on YouTube is teaching too much in one video. I've often said, you know, if you come away from one of my videos that's packed with information and you only come away with one thing, then one thing is better than no thing. So just take away one thing. Because we can't remember the 20 things that I've taught in that video. We just, we're not built that way. The tiny tutorials have really reiterated that to me because the response to them has been really strong and people are getting the idea a whole lot better than in my videos that are packed full of me blathering about a million different tips. It's just kind of a weird thing that happens in the world. And I wanted to try to see if I could find a way to bring that hyper focus that I'm learning from those tiny tutorials and bring that to my videos here on YouTube. I've been really pondering this for months now and I think I may have stumbled onto something and I hope that you'll stick with me as I experiment with it because it's going to take me some time to figure out how that's going to work. But when I am making a card, which is what I do a lot because a lot of my followers are card makers. When I make a card, I only have a half inch to show you how to do a blend or a half inch to show you how to create a background texture like I'm doing here in this drawing. That's not much for you to see and it doesn't really show you the whole big picture of what this technique can do. If I were to take a drawing like this one, which I used for one of my tiny tutorials last week, if I take this drawing and show it to you and you can see the color developing over time, that might make it clearer than that half inch where I'm coloring just that little tiny section of a stamp. And I'm going to experiment with trying to make my videos more focused on a specific technique of blending, a specific type of idea, a concept or something and then show you how it would apply to the card as opposed to just doing the card and trying to tell you everything possible about that stamp and that card and that scene and whatever else it is. It doesn't mean I'm going to switch entirely to those kinds of videos right now. I just want to experiment with it and throw in a couple of those. So if you see something that looks like it's going to be a fine art video and you panic and you're like, I don't want to watch that. That's crazy. There's no card there. I want you to stop, take a deep breath and watch it anyway and see if my focus on a specific thing makes a difference in what you learn from it and what you can take away and apply to whatever you're creating. So here the focus is on creating that nice, flat background. The tiny tutorial is not about that, but this video is because I had the sense to film it while I was drawing this in order to create a background that was flat enough that I could put text over it because this was going to be part of a graphic but also was going to be interesting. I needed to figure out how to make the color shift from one color to another. So on the left, it was the pink and the orange back and forth with each other trying to make two colors go back and forth. I chose colors that are very close to each other in order to do this. It's going to be really hard to do it with a really dark and a really light color or a dark and a medium. But with two medium tones, this is really easy to create a really interesting blend of the two colors that doesn't have an undulating feel to it. It has a very nice flat feel if you're doing a sky. This will work really well to give you some really beautiful colors without having a whole lot of weird kind of dark to light shifts in it. The one on the right hand side is a little different. So I had different challenges in both of these colorways. On the left, two of the colors, the orange and the pink, were about the same in terms of their depth of color. One was not light, one was not dark. And the third color is a light color. The other combination, the blue and the green that I'm using, are practically the same in terms of their depth of color. And if you put the two of them together, you could get the same kind of background that I got for the pink one, the pink and orange one. I decided to go a different route with that and see what it taught me. This was just something that as I was doing it, I thought, well, why not? Why would I try to make it exactly like the other one? Let me see if I can do something different. So the purple in this one is darker than the other two colors, which means I've got a much bigger difference in color between the two as I'm trying to blend them. You can see right there that the blue is very pale, very soft, and the purple is significantly darker. So how do you make that work? Well, layering them makes a big difference. Layering the blue first, if you get really heavy with it, especially with Prismacolors, you can start to build up a bit of waxiness underneath of it. So you need to be careful of that. But also remembering that color pencils have some opacity to them. So with that opacity, you can actually get some color changes that you need to make as you develop the darker color. So as the purple would get too dark in some spots, I was trying to make it as nice and flat as the other one was. But since it's a darker color, it's going to show any of the places where I got too dark with it too quickly. I could go over some of that area with the blue pencil that's opaque. And it would lighten the purple. And it also shifted it from being a total purple into being a purplish blue, because I had enough blue throughout this mix. It was significantly harder to do that than to have those two colors that were the same. If I had done this in the blue and green, it would have been a whole lot easier to get a nice, even blend between them. So if you're trying to do that nice, soft blend between two colors, choose two. They're really, really similar to each other so that you get a soft color shift without getting any of that dark to light color shift. And that makes a huge difference. This whole technique was taught to me by my graphic design professor. She was the professor at the university. I was studying under her. And she was also a children's illustrator. And she did colored pencil this way. Now she didn't do very flat pastel colors like this. She did normal types of wildlife art and stuff in her children's books. I will be doing one of my children's illustrator series, honoring her work at some point in the future so you'll get to see some of her books. But we sat at her dining room table for all kinds of nights during the school year and she would just sit there and show me her little tiny tips and tricks. And I think the ones that I remembered the best are when we were working on a very specific problem in something specific I was trying to draw that she would give me help with as opposed to every idea being thrown at me all at once. And I think that too is just another thought as I was going back in my mind while I was doing this piece and thinking about her and those evenings of drawing alongside of her that she seemed to know that. She seemed to know what point my brain was gonna turn off because she was pouring too much into it. And I wanna see if I can learn that skill of trying to focus what I'm teaching enough that I don't overload brains but I impart really useful information that then you can take this idea of making a flat area of color. You can do a background with it. You could also color whatever image you're doing in a very soft and flat way and choose your colors appropriately so that you can get color shifts. If you're coloring an animal and you wanna have some color shifts in it, choose a brown and a gray that are really similar to each other in terms of light and dark so that you can get those color shifts. But anyway, let's look at the tiny tutorial. I'll give you a little treat and show you that. I was looking for color trends recently. Had a really hot day and I sat in front of a fan with my phone and told myself I was doing color research. And I found that there were these muted color ways as you've seen in the drawing. The peaches and cream was the first one I used and the second one was cool evening and these are my names, I just made them up. But a lot of different sites had these color ways that were muted colors, they were really soft and they felt like colors that were a transition for me from the hot neons of early summer and swimsuits and all that kind of thing into where we're heading, which is gonna be fall. And I wanna try using some of these color ways and see what they do to my art. Do they change what I'm doing? Do they make things happen differently? I don't know what's gonna happen. But it's interesting to challenge myself to do that. So in the tiny tutorial, I also had examples using those color combinations as well as the lists of those colors in different mediums and I will link you to the tiny tutorial in the doobly-doo so you can go see that for yourself and write down those colors if you would like. So now that the drawing is done and I was able to put it into the tiny tutorial and share it over on social media, let's get to making a card and I chose to use the cool evening color way for the card and using some new stamps from Ellen Hudson and New Die as well. These are limited availability because the Summer of Stamping is just during the summer. I don't know if she's gonna keep those around but if you are really interested in any of the new release stuff, a link to the whole page is down in the doobly-doo. This is the fourth week of the Summer of Stamping. What I did was color the images so they're on the left hand side and they are on Stonehenge and I have some hot-pressed watercolor paper. I was blessed by my family with some hot-pressed watercolor paper a few years ago, a lot of it. I don't know quite what the deal was. I didn't ask for that on my Christmas list but they wanted to bless me with it so that was good. But now I wanna use it up because I don't like painting on it so I do find it's okay for using with colored pencils and I've said that a number of times. You know, you can use that. It's a similar texture to Stonehenge, not quite the same texture but similar. So I thought okay, I have a piece of that and I have a piece of Stonehenge so I'll just use both of them and just get the card done. So I was coloring the letters. I left some highlights on the tops of the letters, put the shading on the bottom and used some of the same shading ideas. I was using the purple to shade the green in order to get a little bit of depth in the letters and just leaving the highlights white. Change the color out for each one of the letters so that they would be in each of the three colors in the color way. And you can see I'm fighting a little bit with trying to do this on the texture of the paper. I had to put a little more pressure on this and I don't think I had ever actually tried using both of these papers at once on one card and was immediately able to feel the difference between the two papers. This one is a little bit harder to do but as I said, I am trying to use it up. I'm trying to get it out of my house. You may find you love it more than Stonehenge but I do love the Stonehenge. I took the piece of paper that I die cut from, put scotch tape on the back so I could nest in the colored piece and have a nice flat background with the sentiment in it and I saved all the little pieces that came out of the die cut so I could pop them back into the letters and have a very finished flat surface. The card is a five by five square because I needed to leave enough room for these guys. I colored them in the same color ways in the same layering type of texture to try to get these to look right and leaving the skin tones white on them made the people really pops, that was fine but look at the difference between the Stonehenge paper for the stamped images and the hot press watercolor paper. I had no idea it was that gray. Yeah, that was like a ha moment for me. So there you go. If you're interested in something much wider, Stonehenge is the thing to get and I will link the pad as well as the sketchbook and the doobly-doo in case you need to go grab some because it's super white paper. All right, that's it for me. I will see you again very soon. Links to all the stuff are in the doobly-doo and over on the blog as well and I will see you soon, bye.