 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olak with day 2 of Holiday Scene Week 2019. We're going to make an ice skating rink today. A cute little stamp set from Evelyn T. Designs. It has bears and penguins in it. So dang cute. And I got out some of my Polychromos pencils to do the coloring. These are regular color pencils, not watercolor pencils. And I wanted to make them an ice skating rink. So I've stamped the images in sort of a horizontal format because I wanted a low perspective on them and didn't want it to look like they were too spread out. So the penguins that are on the right hand side were stamped first and then masked out the ones that were behind them so that it has just a little bit of a lower view, lower profile. So I have room on the paper to start making the whole scene around it. And this is colored on some Stonehenge paper. It's one of my favorite drawing papers. It has a really nice surface to it. It's similar if you have some hot press watercolor paper. It's similar ish to that. But it's a drawing paper and I really do like that quite a bit. And I'm going to be using blending stumps and solution to blend with. But it's always helpful if you can get some of your blending started when you're putting the pencil down itself. It's just going to make it easier when you start doing the blending. You could get away with being a lot messier with the pencil and be just fine. But I just find I get better results if I work a little harder at that. So I'm going to use a light gray color to start adding some shading to the one bear. The bear is either like a baby bear or these are giant penguins because I'm pretty sure they're not the same size in reality. And I do realize I have this weird thing where I try to look at things as if they're realistic, but they're all cartoons and it's kind of ridiculous that I get hung up on stuff like that. But there you go. I considered restarting this again and re-stamping it without the bear in there so that I wouldn't be bothered by the fact that he's so tiny. But then I thought he's just going to be a baby bear. He's going to be a baby bear playing with his grown up penguin friends or maybe his penguin school friends or something. Who knows? They're all out there ice skating together. Which is a rather unrealistic thing for these little dressed up penguins and bears nonetheless. Yes, I do have a rather warped mind as I start to think about the pictures that I'm coloring. That's part of the joy and the pain of being a fine artist as well as a crafter because I tend to bring that same mentality to both of them. And some of my fine art gets silly and some of my silly craft fun things get a little fine artsy. And yeah, things just start to cross over in my brain and you never know where it's going to end up going. So I'm going to add red to all of them. And one of the things that I do find when I have a lot of images like this on a card and my background is going to be really complex because I looked on the internet for ice rink pictures and I found a really cool one that I wanted to do. There's a lot of detail in it. And I didn't want all kinds of colors to be on these penguins that would distract from the color in the background. I wanted these guys to really stand out. And to do that, I just use red scarves and hats for everybody. So we've got all of them being black and white and red images. And that will separate it from the colors that are going to be in the background. So if you're going to do something like that, it's helpful to keep the back, the front foreground a little simpler. So I'm going to use baby oil for my solution on these and a blending stump. And I put the baby oil and you can also use Gansol the same way. I put it into this little container and it has a lid on it so it doesn't spill. And I put cotton balls inside of it. That's all it is. It's regular old cotton balls. And the liquid that I put in the jar does not then spill. And it also means that when I dip my blending stump into it, I don't end up getting a like big drippy blob of blending solution. I get just a little bit on the tip of it. And it gives me a lot more control. If you want to have, like I have two cotton balls in there, you could have one cotton ball that just prior to doing your artwork, you could really soak it. So you have one option to get more of the blending solution and another cotton ball that you tap onto to get less. I don't find that I generally need to do that. But if you're doing a special technique, you may find that would be helpful. So I'm starting by blending the light colors first. And I find that I have better success doing that. And I've got to be really careful not to touch the red to the blending stump yet. I did that in one little spot and my little penguin started turning pink. So be aware of that. You could also just do the coloring of the gray first and not add the red until you're ready to do it. But I wanted to get all the little little critters colored in one fell swoop and then do all of the coloring in the background separately. Once all that part was done. So I have to just be a little on the careful side. So getting my color spread out and blended on all of my little penguin butts. That little guy who's kind of laying down in his face there is very much me on the ice skating rink. I am one of the world's biggest klutz's. So I don't ice skate. I have hurt myself badly doing ice skating. I actually really had a bad roller skating thing happen one time. I had a little sister in the big brothers and sisters program and I was throwing her a birthday party. She'd never had a birthday party before and I threw her one with all her friends at the skating rink and the other adults who were there had some other adult chaperones and we all were challenged by the kids to go out and skate to YMCA the 80s song. Was it 80s or was it 70s? I don't remember when that came out. But anyway we were doing the YMCA and they kept saying go faster go faster go faster. And I went around a corner and I lost it and I did the splits. I hurt myself so bad I was laid up for a long time. I almost needed knee surgery but the doctor said I could probably get away with just doing some rehab and it was it was brutal. So I have not really gotten on skate since then. That really scared me off because it was not a good thing trying to show off while doing YMCA. Yeah that's crazy big sisters were having quite the time. So what I'm creating here is an edge to the ice rink and the picture that I was working from was really cool. It had all these twinkling lights out there in the distance. So some of it was people with candles on the outside of the rink and some of it was like street lamp type things. I only wanted a suggestion of it so I wasn't really worried about it looking like anything. There were trees behind it and then a big dark sky but all of that dark color was just to make the twinkle lights show up. So I started going in with the blending solution around some of those little twinkle light sections down there and they're just blobs. I did not put a lot of effort into trying to make them look like they were candles or anything. It was just little twinkly blobs and you'll see as I go over it with different layers of blending and stuff they will look a little bit better. They almost look kind of like little cotton ball type things at this point and you could do all different sorts of things to accomplish this. You could also just put a little fence out there if you didn't want to worry about trying to put in this much detail around all of these little lights because this did take quite some time. This video is sped up so that it's only going to be like I guess 13 minutes or so but it took me probably four or five times the amount of time to do this one. Rather complex. I was trying to save myself some time by using a cotton ball dipped in my cotton balls to blend the color at the top but one of the things that that does is lift up color and there's so the color is actually ending up more on the cotton ball than it was on my actual art piece which was fine because one of things that that does is at least saturate the art piece with the blending solution so that when I put the next layer down it's going to stick better. There's just something about that when it's paper that's already got something on it that it's going to work a little bit better and so what I did for the next bit of blending was to use a blending stump and using the side of it to blend all of that and it's it was actually ridiculously easy to blend once I had all that blending solution underneath from the cotton ball step so it worked pretty well to make that light sky at the top and blending in from the the blue down to the green a little bit and it is actually darker in real life than it looks there so the camera does weird things to my art and you'll see a picture of it when it's all done but I started putting in some blues then underneath of them and trying to create a couple of places and I'm not doing it for every single spot on them I wanted a couple places where it would look like I'm getting some reflections on the ice and that's by just putting a few little blobs I'm almost trying to picture the stamp being upside down and where would the scarf be where might be some of the little black spots from the penguins and putting just a few horizontal lines in that area you could get really carried away trying to make actual reflections but you can give hints at reflections like this and not have to draw in all of that little detail because I've already spent tons of time on the detail in the background there's no need to put a whole lot more into the foreground I want the penguins and the polar bear to be the focus of this so if I start putting you know all kinds of craziness into the ice then that that might take away from that with a dry cotton ball I'm doing a little bit of blending on the icy portions and you can still use the cotton ball on on dry areas you don't have to actually have that have the blending solution on it you can just have it be plain old cotton ball and if you're looking for colored pencil techniques by the way there is a colored pencil jumpstart class over at art-classes.com it has lots of cool fun things you can do with colored pencils and that's what I thought I would share some colored pencil stuff here for students in that class I'm creating now a bit of color at the bottom that's going to push the attention back into the center I am going to be trimming out more off the edges of the card because this is bigger than the card surface than I'm going to be putting on the card I've cut my paper larger so I have room to make a mess on the outside edge but putting that dark color there is going to push the eye back into the picture otherwise your eye just kind of cascades out the front as it comes down to the bottom of the picture and I wanted to sort of make the viewer go back into where the penguins are skating so then of course the white pen comes out because it's Christmas time and I go through a gajillion of the uniball signal white pens actually need to order more of them because I have like 200 cards I make each year and this year I think it might be like close to 250 it's crazy so I've got a lot of snow to make on cards so yeah there you go gotta get me more white pens so there's the finished card I put the sentiment on a little banner on the top portion and added a couple paper layers to it and I even stamped the envelope with the other bear there's two bears in the stamp set and colored the envelope just a little bit as well so there you go there's my little card for today for day two in our holiday scene week make sure you stay tuned the rest of the week be subscribed so you can see all the rest of them and if you want to get any of these stamps before they run out they are all linked in the doobly-doo and over on my blog and we'll see you again tomorrow with another holiday scene video see you then