 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today we're going to do a little study on saturation and contrast. So I'm going to be using some new stamps from Girdis Steiner, and this is a guest video, so the blog post will be over on her blog, and there's a link to it online as well as in the description down below. I'm setting up the scene first by placing all the masks down in a pile in the arrangement that I want them from back to front, and using those masks then to get the placement for each of my images. Since I knew I was going to be actually making a couple of these, I just cut the masks out first in order to set it up, and then it allows me to stamp the frontmost one, leave the other masks on the other sheet of paper, replace it, put those stamps down, and just keep working from front to back. You may not be able to do the second row if you have them tucked too close together, so you kind of need to make sure that you have room for both stamps, or I'll stamp them in separate stampings, one behind another, and then finally little Vienna in the background. Doesn't that look just like her, my little pup? So then I peel off all of the wonderful masks, and I'm ready to go. Now I'm going to make two cards, so all I did was put the markers, at least the ones that were still out in a pile and take a picture of them. This is what I think I used. There could have been some more colors because I used a lot. And I'm not going to put all the colors on the screen because I'm just going to talk through it. There's just too many markers, and sometimes too many markers is just too many markers. I'm airbrushing a daytime and a nighttime sky. The daytime one uses a really saturated blue at first, that light blue, and I went over it with a BV, I think this is a BV29 potentially, so that I would dull it down a little bit because it's a cloudy sky, because it's daytime and it's snowing, and I need some clouds in the sky because it's not going to snow if it's perfectly clear. The other one is going to be layers and layers of darker blues and bluish-purple kind of colors, and I decided to even go in with a really dark gray to make it a super nighttime, but I didn't want it to be all black. So I'm letting it be a little bit on the, I guess, splotchy side so it looks like clouds, and just layering a blue over the top to make sure that it feels like blue when it's all done. But it's just going to feel like a cloudy sky back there. And I'll use one of the colors to fix the outlines because sometimes the mask will lift up or I didn't place it down right or that sort of thing. You can just kind of touch up around those areas. The one on the right is going to be saturated colors and the one on the left is going to be desaturated because at night you don't have a lot of light on things and you get a lot of grayed out colors. So the little white parts of the picture on the right are I think a B12 and then it's a B45 over on the left. The second digit in Copic Markers is the one that tells you it's a saturated color or desaturated. Lower numbers are more saturated, higher numbers are more desaturated. And I thought I'd show you that red on the left is a saturated color. It looks garish on that one. And you'll see what I mean when I go over that with a desaturated color. It's more suitable for daytime to have a bright red like that. In a nighttime scene you wouldn't really see that kind of a super bright red. And yes, there are some places that I missed. I will go back and catch those later. So don't stress out about it. This is R89, which is much more suitable to a nighttime scene. It's going to fit much better and not just look like some big garish thing. It'll still look like they're wearing red hats when I'm all done, but it's at least much darker and richer and more desaturated. The white pieces of paper they're holding, the white little song books, are going to be a dark color because if you ever look at a piece of paper outside someone's holding and it's a dark out, you're not going to see it as white. It's going to be much lighter during the daytime. So I'm going to use a much lighter color. Same thing with each one of the dogs. So I'm going to kind of put down the base colors just to show you the comparison for how you might decide to transfer these colors from a daytime to a nighttime scene. And it doesn't mean that you'd have to use any of these colors. That's one of the reasons that I didn't put the colors on the screen. You can use whatever colors you want to use for your dogs. You can even make the multi-color dogs all different kinds of fun things. But you're going to use richer and more desaturated colors. So look at the markers that you have. The second digit on them is often a more desaturated color. Now this dog is a desaturated. He's an E77, I think, on the right hand side because he's a desaturated dog. So it doesn't mean you can use desaturated colors in a daytime scene. But I'm going to take that same color, make the muzzle of the other dog with the E77, and then go in with the E79 to do the darker portions. So I'll go even darker than the little guy on the right hand side. After I finish this, you're going to be telling me, goodness gracious, I'm going to be always doing night scenes because I'm going to show you some easy tips for doing some blending and how it's going to be easier to do some blending on the nighttime scenes than it is on daytime scenes sometimes. So adding my markings to my dog, Vienna, they're on both of them, adding a little bit of gray into her. And now for the shading on a nighttime card. This is, I believe, a number six gray. You can use any one of the grays to just go over the image and look how it just makes it look like the critters are now in the dark. When you add just a wash of gray over everything, and I'm going over that already desaturated blue with more gray and leaving some bare highlights on the tops of each of the surfaces, tops of the hats, tops of the furry brims on the hats, tops of their ears and their noses and things. On the right hand side, I'm going to need more shading. I'm going to need to do more of the dark, medium and light tones in a daytime scene because you can see more, it's more lit up. So you're going to see a lot more of that transition from dark to light because you have more range of color in a nighttime scene. You don't have a lot of range. You get some dark to light and that's what's going to make the image appear at all. But you get much more of that in a daytime scene. So you end up doing a lot more blending, a lot more transition from your dark to your light colors. So if you don't like to blend, you might want to consider doing some nighttime scenes. And they work great for Christmas cards because at Christmas time, you can always make it outside and snowy for lots of the images that we have in our stamp collections. And I know for a lot of people, it's crunch time. You guys are out there working hard in November on finishing up your Christmas cards so you can get them out in the mail. And sometimes it's going to be easier to put a wash of color over the images and then put that quick wash of gray over top and then throw some snow on it. And all will be well. Everybody will think you're an amazing colorist just because of that. Now look at the difference in the saturation on the snow on the left and right. You can definitely see a big difference and I use some light colors to blend them but desaturated at nighttime and much brighter colors work better for the daytime. And then, of course, you want snow all over everything in the front of the animals as well as in the sky behind them. To quickly finish off my cards, I stamp the sentiments on the top of each scene and emboss them in white on the nighttime scene and just stamp them in black onto the daytime scene. And I hope you have enjoyed this and learned a little something from it. If you'd like to get more information on the stamps or the colors or anything, go over to the Girdis Steiner blog and check it out over there. And I will see you again very soon, of course, with another video. We're still cranking on Christmas cards for most of November. And I will see you very soon. Thanks. Have a great day.