 Hi everybody, it's Sandy and I'm back with more on the free little places where you can display your art and offer it up to somebody else to take home and enjoy. Let's get started making a whole bunch of art and then I'll show you what I've put into this free little art gallery. In my previous video, I showed you a painting that I made on a little framed canvas similar to the ones that are there on the left that I put into my local free little library. That's really close to my house. It's a place that I drive by all the time every time I go somewhere. So it's real easy to stop by and add some art to it. But it's a library. You can put art in a library. There's generally room in front of the books on the shelf but there are also free little art galleries that are intended for people to put art in and take art home, that sort of thing. And I wanted to visit the opposite side of town where there is a free little art gallery. So I decided I'd make a whole bunch of pieces. Some will be watercolor and then others will be colored in alcohol markers so that I can keep a little pack of these in the car. And every time I go somewhere, I'm gonna look up on the map and see where the free little libraries or free little art galleries are and pop in while I'm running around all over the place. The watercolors are drying and I'll show you a little bit more of painting them once they're dry but I thought I'd get them started while I began to work on some of these alcohol marker pieces. These are drawn in Olo markers and they're stamped. And I thought it would be fun to show you some stamps because I know a lot of people think, well, I don't do art. I can't put art in a free little art gallery because all I do, quote unquote, all I do is stamping. Well, guess what? You can make a stamped image look really cute. I know you can. I've seen your work and you can make something that looks really adorable to put on a little easel. You absolutely can do it. So I thought I would do that here. My intention was to make some no-line drawings, like just stamp it in really light colors so that the lines all disappear. But this is illustration board that I'm doing the coloring on. Illustration board is something that I use a lot when I'm packing up art that I'm selling. So when I pack up a painting, I'll sandwich it between these and some other heavier cardboard and with glass scene wrapped around it, all different kinds of fancy things. If you ever order one of my pieces, you'll see what I mean by that. But there's always these scraps left, just these long strips that I can't really do anything else with. I wanna do some gouache paintings on them because this stuff works pretty well for that. But for alcohol markers, it kind of bleeds. The edges get a little fuzzy. So unfortunately, that meant that I had to go back in with a pen. I couldn't do purely the no-line look of art, trying to make those lines disappear because everything just got kind of squishy. And the color, when I would put it around something, would bleed into the wrong areas because it just fuzzed out a little bit. This one, I decided I wanted to try to do something where I'd get one of those sort of Victorian backgrounds. They used to just put a flood of all different kinds of modeled colors in the background. And just, you could see all the brushstrokes and stuff. I thought that'd be kind of cool. So I put all these colors in there so that this little hamster would just be majestic, sitting there with the paintbrush. But you can see the marker kind of came into where the paintbrush is. And I was gonna have to fix that. There's some paint that's supposed to be spilled on the table, on the ground. And that disappeared because the marker just got a little haywire. However, I have gouache to use to fix it. So I decided I would get most of the line work done here so I could then get the gouache out to fix some of those details. But I'm using a Copic Multiliner SP, which is one of the refillable types of ones. You can also, I think, get new nibs for them, I believe. Still haven't, I know I've talked about it a couple of times. I keep meaning to look into that and then share with you how one would refill or change nibs or whatever, but haven't gotten there yet. But painting with a little bit of gouache, which is kind of a thick paint, you can do the same kind of thing with acrylics if you have acrylic paints. And added just some stronger highlights as well as yellow so that I could have that yellow color splashed all over the ground from our messy little hamster. Now to finish up the painting, I just wanted to do a little scene here. So I made a line of the bottom of the trees and then I left some boxes open in there so I could put some buildings in and then put a curve for a field in there so I could have some elements coming out to the foreground. I painted the barn red, put in some dark color, indicating kind of some buildings back there, just not really trying to draw buildings, but just putting some blotches in there and then making a fence line that's going to get kind of closer and closer and closer to the viewer so the posts get bigger and bigger, added a little bit of shadows to them and some grass along that edge. And of course Bob Ross would say put some birds in there so I did. Next up is freckles and this one, I just had no idea what I was gonna do with it so I just started coloring. Olo doesn't have really great greens. I mentioned that before and so I was really challenged trying to figure out what greens to use for this because they either get very, very yellow or very, very blue-greenish and there's not a whole lot in between. I am looking forward to them coming out with some new colors at some point to supplement this but I was too lazy to get up and go get out other brands of markers. So there you go, gonna work with what I got. So I kind of put a sort of shape that might be a lily pad and then added some water and I went, oh, wait a minute, maybe we make this guy nighttime. Like this little frog is gonna be out there at night. So I added a moon in the background and then I realized that the lily pad was way too light, needed to be a brighter color sort of but then the whole frog should have been darker if it was actually nighttime but I was able to change the direction of the eyes so the froggy is looking up at the moon instead of looking straight forward which is the way that the stamp had it and then I also added a big old smile. So he's really happy being outside in the moonlight doing whatever it is frogs do at night. I added some lines not only from the marker in the water but then with the pen and a bit on that quote unquote lily pad which kind of looks more like a rock now and I'm fine with that because he's just sitting on something and then I added some of those little, who's he wuppets, those little reeds in the background coming out of the water. So there you go, that one. Next up is some doodling because I had splashed some watercolor on one of the pieces of paper and it was all dry so I'm just tracing around the shapes. I've done this before in other bigger videos I'll link to some in the doobly-doo-dabble-low and just filling in between that with just some fun lines. I try to get some motion going across a piece like this looking at maybe one section if it were to cross that chasm of yellow would it continue and could I get some flow going across the whole piece rather than random lines in all different directions? I kind of like something that has some flow but I also wanted something with a little variety and I started adding circles, wheels, flowers I'm not really sure what they are a little bit of stonework texture and just kind of breaking up some of those open shapes. I know that lots of you love to doodle as well and this is an excellent way to just make a very small doodle and go put it in one of these boxes and let somebody else enjoy your doodled artwork and it might inspire them to doodle as well especially if you leave some extra pieces of paper inside the box with a sticky note on it saying here here's the paper, go doodle. Now this one, my camera did not record the galaxy I apologize, not sure what was up with that it was probably user error I was probably too excited about the coloring and forgot to hit the button but here we go got the rest of it though this little guy is standing out on his own planet and waving at you and smiling put some strong shadows on there coming from the galaxy and of course gotta add stars to it because why not because stars are a whole thing when it comes to me and my white gel pen and a little bit of highlights on this guy and then he'll be done. It's time for delivery and I went out to find this place all the way across town and it's a triple-decker the top section is a private gallery you can't get into it to take anything or leave anything the middle section is supposed to be the art gallery and the bottom section is supposed to be the library however you have some adaptations that have been happening because the loft here where the private art gallery is see whoever it is is proud of that watercolor painting this is supposed to be the free little art gallery but it's books and there's books in the bottom too that drawer at the bottom there's a drawer unit underneath that is full of books too so they have a lot of books they're giving away here I decided to put my art even though the sign says the art gallery is on the second shelf I decided to put it on the first floor so that if somebody little is walking by they can see it in the tiny window at the very bottom because there's windows and a door carved into the front of this and I wanted to be able to see my art in the window isn't that cute? This was so much fun to do I hope you'll try it Thanks for joining me for this video if you haven't seen the last one please do click on the link in the doobly-doo to go check out my other free little library donation and I will see you again next week with some more fun take care and have a great weekend