 Hello there, it's Sandy Almok and I'm going to be working in pastel pencils today. I know that's a little unique thing for me here. I don't usually use them, but I'm going to make a card as well as a piece of art that is made from stamps. So I will show you both of these pieces or at least parts of them. I bought recently a treat for myself. I got a small set of Faber-Castell's pit pencils and they're kind of fun. Let you know they're a little messy, but they're fun. And my mom has done a lot of pastel over the years. She sent me all of her old pastel stuff and these pastel shapers are one of the things that was included. I was recently cleaning out the drawer that has just tons of boxes of little pieces of pastels. No pastel pencils, but lots of different pastels and charcoals and things and these were in it. They were all covered in grossness because pastel just leaves shavings everywhere and dust everywhere. So they're all cleaned off and you can clean off those little rubber nibs and I'll be using them. These are the stamp sets that are out right now from Colorado Craft Company if you're interested in birds and flowers and things. And I'm going to be using, as you saw, the hummingbird for one and the bird and the cage for the other. Lots of different ways you can use these stamp sets. This one has a border so you could do an entire border all the way around a card or some such. And I'm going to be starting this one. This was my first one that I tried and it did not go real well. There's some issues with it even though I rescued it. I decided that I was going to stamp it onto some Arches drawing paper. It's a thin drawing paper. It's a little softer than is my normal stonehenge that I use for pencil work because I thought these probably needed something softer. That was just what was in my head. Not the best idea because this did pill up quite a bit as I was working on it. The more I layered the pencil and then the more I used the shapers, the more the pilling happened. And it wasn't super awful. You can't tell like if you were looking at it and you didn't know it was there. You probably wouldn't even notice. But it is what it is and I would not necessarily recommend it. The other issue that I found was that the black ink moved. And I used VersaFine Onyx Black, which is a waterproof ink. And I thought, oh, that'll just stay right where it is. And it did not necessarily. So some of these colors got a little duller because of that. I fixed that by strengthening the blacks that were here. Like I just really gave this bird some strong markings and blended that, which kind of made the blackness that I could see in the shadows on the bird's body not really be so bothersome. Now there's a guy on YouTube who has just a ton of videos on pastel pencils and says to use a blade like this. And my mom had this blade, this one is decades old, was in her box also with the stuff. And I thought I would use it the way Colin Bradley says that you should use your knife for sharpening pencils. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Sometimes I just couldn't get the angle right. And I tried using instead and had better success with an exacter with a big handle on it. So it was big and heavy and I could get a better grip on it because that little knife was just a problem, at least for me it was. But the whole thing did come out. It was all right. And I'll show you how I put the card together at the end because one of the things that you'll want to do is preserve your pastel in ways that you don't have to with other mediums. It's really easy to blend so I like it, but the preservation thing is something we'll talk about a little bit more. This is paper that's made for pastels. Me tentes I think is how you say it. I'm not really positive. But it says pastel on the front. So I took a piece of this and stamped with some no-line ink onto it. So I've got a tone on tone kind of a look. And I stamped it on a big piece. So I could actually put this in a frame if I wanted to. Or I could chop it down and put it on a card, which is potentially what I might end up doing. But let's get started on coloring the hummingbird. I looked online for pictures as I often have been want to do. And the nice thing about using a no-line ink on this is that I could just change all the markings. The lines that are drawn into the stamp are just lines drawn into the stamp. They aren't necessarily markings. So I was able to change that up and create different sections for colors of feathers and create patterns on them. You can layer to some extent pastels, but they are just infinitely blendable. And these little pastel shapers, I have not looked online to see if they're still around because my mom got these decades ago. And the gentleman on YouTube who I was looking at like sells them on his website. They are a product that at the time, 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago or whatever, that was all out of the UK. So I'm hoping they're available. But I don't want to stop this voiceover because my computer is almost running out of juice. So I will look after I get this done and I'll put a note in the doobly-do about them if I find them. But as I said, you could try using Q-tips for blending. You could try using blending stumps. That would probably get you a more precise line. And that sort of thing, just find different tools that you could use to move the color around. And I'm just going to play around with moving all over the bird in different places in different ways to get the color to blend and playing around with these shapers to see what they do. I don't even know what they do, but he does the most amazing work, this Cullen guy. I will put a whole story about him on my blog, whatever I can find, give you his history. He apparently did watercolors too, but I did not take time to go through all of his content to see what else he's got. But he has a very soothing voice. So if you miss Bob Ross, you might like this guy as well because he's got a very calm, soothing voice with an accent and I don't know. I really enjoy just listening to his videos while I was working on these. I just turned a couple on so I could hear some tips from him off to the side while I was working on my birds. And he does some of the most exquisite wildlife drawings that I've seen and they're just so beautiful. I've been seeing a lot more super detailed, hyper realistic types of wildlife illustration on Instagram lately. I have two Instagram accounts. One is my crafty one and one is my fine art one. My crafty one, I cannot seem to train Instagram to send me, when I hit my Reels tab, to send me anything art related. They just send me business stuff and surfboards and gosh knows what, it's just like a weird mix. My other account though, my fine art account, boy, that one is turning into total inspiration and I'm really enjoying being on that account when I search and go to my Explore tab and everything because I'm getting some of the most incredibly inspiring work. And when I've been seeing all this very hyper realistic drawings of animals and wolves and koalas and all kinds of wonderful things, I just like, I want to go do that. And pastels are going to be faster at that than colored pencil. Color pencil is my medium of my youth. I just talked about that in my video yesterday. Yes, I knew two videos in a row because we have two releases out in a row. But pencil was my thing and I still love it, but it takes a long time. This drawing took me, oh, I think maybe an hour. Yesterday's was a day. So you can kind of see the difference between the two in terms of the speed with which one can get the work done and depending on how used to you are doing such things that it might take you longer, who knows. But it was a challenge to get that other piece done and I think the pastels and pastel pencils are going to be much faster for creating that kind of thing because I just love drawing fur. There's just something very relaxing about drawing fur and pastel pencils are going to achieve that, I think, in a more efficient way. I am only going to do one petal from this flower because the other petals are just the same. So I started with one red, layered in another red. I was looking to just get a lot of good solid color in there because one of the things I'm finding is that blending a color out into a soft edge that's just that against paper is not as easy as blending two colors together. But I will learn more about that as I start exploring this medium more because I am brand new to it. And I started layering in purples and greens and blues to start making some of those dark areas because I wanted the flower to be really deep so that the bird was going deep in for nectar as opposed to making something really flat. And you can see once I started using the pastel shaper, the color started kind of blending into that red and popping to the front rather than being this kind of mush mess of dark colors because my pencil collection is not very big, as you can see. There's not a dark red in there, so I had to manufacture one, which is another reason to study color theory. And it's why I could include color theory in all of my different mediums in the classes that I teach because it's so vital, just knowing that I could get some dark shadows for my red flower using greens, blues, and purples was because of color theory and understanding that and understanding how it's worked in other mediums as well because I've done so much color layering in the past as well. One of the other things I was thinking about while I was doing this, too, was that my mom was an oil painter. I should say was, she's still with us. She'd painted in oil, she painted some in acrylics. And a little bit of watercolor, I believe, but she also did pastels. And I was realizing that I take after her in that way in wanting to try a whole lot of different mediums. She was not a person who just chose one medium and stuck with it. So I have that as heritage in my blood, I guess, to try all kinds of different things. For the center of the hibiscus flower that I was looking at because I was looking online for particular types of flowers. I didn't know exactly what a hibiscus would look like, but it had a stem in the center coming out that had yellow flowers on it. So I used yellows and reds to shape them and a little bit of dark color in between them so that they would look like individual flower reds like I was seeing in the picture. Now a tip for when you're working on something that's pastel like this, it's real easy to lay your hand by accident into the middle of whatever it is you're working on. It's super easy to do that. So some people will wear a glove so that at least their oily skin is not against the paper. Some people put a piece of paper underneath of it, but see that underneath the flower on the right where my hand was, I had to use a kneaded eraser to clean that off. So I turned the paper around so that I could get a different angle on it to try to work on the flowers up on the top because I didn't want to reach across the drawing, and I didn't really trust that putting a piece of paper over it wasn't also going to smudge the color. It seemed easier to just try to plan the drawing so that your hand can always be in a different place that, you know, leaning into the drawing from a different area, but it does mean sometimes you'll be drawing upside down if you want to try to do that, but this angle gives you a little closer look at how the blending works and trying to get each of those colors to blend together. Finishing off the bottom section then, finally, to get these stems. Now, I don't know what these stems actually look like. I was looking for hibiscus, and I didn't find any that had these little flowers as well as the big one. So it's possible the red flowers are not hibiscus. I thought at first that maybe they were hibiscus blossoms, but the more I started working on it, I went, you know, they're not hibiscus. That like, look at the shapes of the petals. Maybe they're not. So we have two different types of flowers in here, but mine are all red because that's the way I started going on it, and that's the way it ended up. So there you go. Sometimes you just need to make things up along the way. But this is a really fun experiment to do, and working from a stamp meant that I didn't have to worry about the drawing as well. I sprayed both of these with fixative and with fixative, when you want to spray across them, spray it once, let it dry, spray it again. Just do it from an even, say, 6 to 12 inches away, and let the spray calm slowly down on the paper. Don't just spray it to soak the paper, and then just do a second coat once that dries. So for the finishing off of my card, I did spray it, but I also put it inside an acetate card. Another great use for those acetate cards. I have a whole collection of them I always forget about, but when I was thinking of how I was going to try to keep this thing from smudging all over the place, this just came to my mind, and I thought that would be a perfect way to do this. So I just tied it with a piece of twine. You could also use some adhesive to attach it to the back of the acetate card, but this will keep it together really nice and simply just have to trim off those long strings on the end of my twine. I was debating where to put the bow, and I thought the bird should look at the bow, so that's that. So here's the finished hummingbird drawing that you can check out. I'm kind of excited about how that came out, and then the finished card. Both of them are quite beautiful. All these stamps are currently available at Colorado Craft Company and over at Ellen Hudson. I've got links to both websites in the doobly-doo and over on the blog, and if there's more cards, I will have them on the blog. We'll see how I get things done. All right, I'll talk to you guys later. Take care. Bye-bye.