 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok, artist and crafter, and I have a bunch to show you today about using Copic refills. Your Copic refills, of course, fill your pens, but you can use them for so much more, and I'm going to use them with these new Colorado Craft Company stamps that have giant animals, and they're bigger than a regular card size. You'll just trim them down if you want to put them on an A2, but they've got lots of sentiments with each one. Elephant has hearts that he can kind of have blowing out of his little trunk. You can put glasses on the llama, spots on the giraffe. Lots of fun you can have with these, but I am going to show you how I made these backgrounds. I've had Copic refills on my mind, and I wanted to use up some of these. The reason I wanted to use up some is because they're changing how they're delivering Copic refills. I saw on their website that they have tiny little vials that they're going to be coming up with soon. If you have any Copic refills and you want these bottles like I do, I have a rack for them. They fit them. I don't want a different size. I'm going to go to Ellen Hudson and I'm going to buy up all the refills that I need. I have a bunch of these that have just a few drops left in them, so I thought, oh, I'm going to do some crazy techniques. This is one that I thought about when I was laying at wake at night. I wanted to play around with this when I was trying to figure out what I would do with these stamps. It was kind of half a dream because I started thinking about it before I fell asleep and then decided to get up in the morning and play with it. What I did was take some 99% alcohol. That's what was in that white dish, just plain old 99% alcohol, and saturated the paper with it. I didn't saturate all of it because I knew I was going to trim this down. Then started using up some of the little drops that were left in some of these bottles. I recommend, since I tried this a couple of times and it had some fails, I recommend choosing analogous colors. They're ones that are next to each other on the color wheel, so yellows, reds and oranges work well together. Then I took an eyedropper that I just got at the grocery store in the, I guess it was the wellness aisle, so wherever you get ear drops, eye drops, that sort of thing. They usually have just plain old droppers and dropped in some more of the alcohol. Now, normally I would be using my big bottle of colorless blender. I don't know if they're going to take away my giant bottle of colorless blender. I love my colorless blender, so I don't want to use it up. I'm going to buy some extra bottles just in case they go away and they replace them with small vials as well. And after that, I dried everything. This is all done on Nina cardstock, by the way. So you can do this on other papers. If you use some of the Copic papers that are a little less sturdy, I guess they're a little thinner marker papers. It may not work because this amount of alcohol might warp them. I don't really know, but the Nina cardstock worked really well. And I just let all the color blend right across the animals. I'll show you a couple of different ways that I'm doing this. I have been into doodling lately and just taking a pen and making doodling lines. And one of the things that I found helps me to get loose with my doodles. So I stopped trying to draw things and just draw fun shapes and fun lines is to follow something else. So I'm following wherever the outlines are in where the colors blended and just putting a line across that and then joining it and creating some shapes within it. And then I kind of get away from drawing anything that's too regular or that sort of thing. So this one I did with a white pen and have all these cute white lines in the background. And I left one gap for the sentiment. Now this one I decided to go a little different route and just dump the stuff in from the bowl instead of using the dropper to put it on the paper because I just wanted a big old swoosh of it. And this one I thought I wanted to do in more natural colors and see how that would work instead of using the really bright colors that I did on the giraffe. So I got out some of the warm kinds of grays and cool kinds of grays and neutrals and that sort of thing. And like I said, if you have any where you just have a couple drops left and you're going to buy a new reinker anyway, just use it up, get it done. Find some other techniques as well with Copic Reinkers and do some fun things with them and put the colors on. And then when you've got all this solution floated across the surface of the paper, you get to just watch everything move so you can tilt this around. I'm working on a craft assistant. It's my favorite thing to work on when I'm doing messy stuff because this sucker cleans up really well. It's a 12 by 12 piece of metal that washes off really nicely. And I like the fact that it's black. So I get a real clear view of what I'm doing when I'm working on this white paper. So here I added some blue, green, just using up random colors. But I wanted this to feel really natural. So as I realized that all this solution was lightening the colors enough, I went a little stronger with the color. I recommend starting with lighter color rather than going too intense too quickly because you can very quickly get out of hand with it. And that might not always be what you want. And depending on whether or not you want to leave it in the individual drops like I did in the last one or if you want stripes, this I was thinking could look like grass. So I kind of let it tilt so that I would get some stripes in it and some really interesting shapes that way. And I heat dried it just to get the alcohol out of it and get the paper so that it wasn't so completely drippy and saturated because I had an idea for how to make the grass even more grass like and that sort of thing. So I took the paper and I turned it kind of at an angle. So it's almost 90 degrees and then put some drops on and just let them drip down the page. And that's going to give me vertical grass stripes. You, of course, can just draw that stuff in yourself. But it's kind of fun to take your pen and draw in some of those grassy shapes. So I gave the elephant a back and then just started making plants in front of him. He doesn't have anything to join him to the ground. He has no back and no legs or anything. So I thought grasses in front of him might hide the fact that he doesn't have a whole lot else going on there. And I'm just taking a Copic multiliner to do this. If you're not going to do any Copic work on top of this, then you can use any black pen, whatever you want. If you're going to use something that's going to need to be Copic friendly. So if you're going to add more color to it, like I am in this particular one, I'm going to add a little something. Then you can actually use something that is Copic friendly, like a multiliner. And that would keep the ink from blending and stuff into whatever ink you're using. So if you use a non Copic friendly pen, you're going to end up with some mushy messes. And here I added some darkness to the elephant's body just by taking a medium gray marker and coloring in between the grasses. Because I wanted his little tusks and things to pop out and to show. So I added a little color in there and then a little bit more behind his ear and underneath of him so that I could end up getting a little more difference in there. And you can add all kinds of things to this. You can actually color in the elephant on top of it. But I like how all of this modeled color just works. It looks like watercolor almost. So it was kind of neat to see how this one worked out every time. This is going to be different, depending on what colors you use and how much you move the paper and when you let it dry and when you let it just sit there on its own. And these are also I'm making really big cards, but you'll want to trim them down. If you want them to fit in an A2 envelope, you'll have to trim your design down so that maybe just part of the elephant's head sticks into the card, etc. And this little guy, of course, was my favorite out of the set of three. Just like he just makes me laugh. The fact that he's got glasses is particularly funny. And so I'm using up a bunch of my very light blues and very light purples. A couple of these I already had a new new re-inker for. I just hadn't gotten rid of it yet because I still had a couple of drops left in each one of these. So it's a great way to use them up on something really fun. I'm keeping most of the color to the outside since this little guy is supposed to be white and I wanted to have some some dots in there. But I've got the lighter colors in the middle. I just kept putting more colors till the center part was light. And once it was all dry, I added additional little drops of the alcohol. Again, you can use drops of the colorless blender to do this, but the alcohol is cheaper. Don't ever put colorless blender into your marker. I cannot vouch for what that will do to your nib. It might eat it. It might eat the marker. I don't know what it'll do, but for something like this, when you're just doing the background part, it kind of works pretty decently. So now I've got a bunch of this this color just starting to move. I've got lots of moisture on the paper, that kind of thing. It's kind of cool to watch all the little globules start to to eat away at the color that's underneath of them and stuff. And then I'll dry it up. You'll notice there's a little bit of a greenish color coming through. There was a little bit left from the elephant on the craft assistant behind it. So it picked up a little color, so clean up after yourself. And here I'm going to add even more dots after it was completely, completely dry to make some very, very specific, super round bubbles in the background. I've done some things with bubbles in the background before, but this one is kind of off the rails fun. And for this one, I also decided not to just leave it as the bubbles, but you could leave it at that. You don't really have to go any further than that if you don't want to. And then I took my Copic Multiliner and just doodled around the dots. And that was so much fun. I, like I said, I love the doodling thing lately. It's just very relaxing. I've been short on mojo. Hello, phone been short on mojo lately. And doodling is one of those things that helps me to get the creative juices flowing without actually having to think too hard. Because when I'm just following the lines of following where all the little bloops are in the paper, then I'm just filling it in between them. So sometimes I put lines, you know, next to each other in between them. Sometimes I join them with little shapes. Lots of little things you can do. And the more you put in the background, the more the llama will pop out forward from it. You could also color in your llama and add more color to him so that the background is lighter and he's darker. So you can go either way. But I enjoyed the lines and it was just fun to do a lot of card like this. And just keep moving around the whole thing. And what I do is, as you can tell, is to kind of go across the whole thing once and then go back in and start adding darker sections into a few places, make some of them solid black, maybe do some polka dots that are reversed out. So drawing around each one of those circles, sometimes just color the whole thing in or make the lines horizontally closer next to each other. So it looks like a darker color and you get more depth in that background when you do it that way. And just keep moving around the whole thing until it's all done. And you're happy with what you got going. Now you could make each one of those little circles into flowers. You can do all kinds of fun stuff. And I added a little bit of pink to his nose because I think he needed a pink nose because he's cute. So there you go, my cards were so much fun to make today. If you're interested in getting these, the links to the supplies and everything are in the doobly-doo as always. And I hope to see you again very soon. Remember, if you need any Copic refills and you want these bottles so that they match all your other bottles, you may want to go get them now. Remember, Ellen Hudson always has them on sale. Thank you so much. Leave a comment in the doobly-doo and I will see you again next time.