 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to be talking about inks for no-line coloring. I first want to let you know the new Colorado Craft Company release is out. I got to make samples for all of their different stamps they've got out this month. They're on both the Ellen Hudson website, the Colorado Craft Company website, and my website. You can click in the links down below to go check them out. I'm going to just be working with dear friend Robin in this video and generally I use the ink on three fade-out ink, but I'm going to test that one against a distress ink later on in this video with watercolor, but I'm going to start out first with the Copic version. With Copic markers, you want to use some kind of a dye ink if you're going to do no-line coloring. The reason for that is if you use pigment inks, they will smear all over the place. You might be successful with pigment inks if you let them dry enough. I don't really know. I have never been patient enough to do that, so you can use a dye ink, but what I like is the fade-out ink from ink on three. They call it a no-line fade-out ink, and it's just a very, very pale color. The whole idea behind no-line coloring is to make it feel like those are pencil lines, so they kind of fade into the coloring itself, and you don't end up with that harsh black line. One of the other things I love about doing no-line coloring is that it allows me to change things up. I could take this robin and turn it into another bird if I wanted, just by making it puffier around the middle or making the tail longer or the beak longer. I can do all kinds of things to it because the ink is so light that I have the ability to work around that and change it up to something else. I'm coloring it as a robin in this instance because I'm looking at a picture of a robin. I went to look one up when I saw the name of the stamp set, and that's one way that you can start to learn how to see colors is to go find a picture of the real thing on the interwebs and find out how that thing is actually, what colors are actually there. The grays on this robin actually started out with a blue violet color at the beginning. It was a BB23 instead of a gray because I saw a light sheen of purple. The more you try this kind of a thing, the more you'll train yourself to be able to see color a little differently. On the belly of him, I saw yellow coming through in the sunshine in the photograph that I was working from, so I put a coat of yellow down first and then started adding other colors to it, allowing a little bit of that yellow to come through the way it did in the picture. The sun hits some of those feathers, it just highlights just a few of them and gives them a nice texture. That's stuff that may or may not be in the stamp. If you stamp it with black ink, you're stuck with whatever is in the black ink. Here I can change it up if I wanted. This particular bird had a little white feather in the middle of this tummy. I don't know what was up with that, whether it was just a stray or if that was just a marking for this particular bird, but I thought it was cute, so I left it in there. With no-line coloring, the whole idea is to try to make the lines disappear. One of the things you could do when you're doing no-line coloring is just color part of the image. You could color just the bird and his legs and leave the tree in that really soft color, but I wanted it to feel like a spring tree, so I started working with putting in a little bit of greens into the bark as well as into all those buds. I don't know which particular type of tree this was intended to be, so I just looked up Tree with Buds in order to see what was out there on the interwebs. When you're looking for color inspiration, that's always a great place to start to see what it looks like in real life. For each of my tree branches, I'm going to be using either a brown or a gray as the base and adding some green into the brown or gray to make it match a little bit better with the buds and give it that spring feel, so there's a little bit of green showing through in some of the branches. So that's the Copic one. Let's look at watercolor next. And I've got the stamping of Distress versus No Line Fade Out Ink. Distress on the left. You can see it stamped kind of unevenly. This is rough watercolor paper, so it's challenging to stamp on it anyway. But let's first test the No Line Fade Out Ink. This is a little test that I've been wanting to run for a while because I've been using a lot of different inks with watercolor to do some No Line Fade Out kind of look anyway. And this ink has been one of the ones that I use a lot for that. I didn't really test out exactly the detail of what I'm looking for in this particular project. I wanted to see whether or not those lines really do melt out at all. Because usually when I start watercoloring, I get all kinds of crazy wacky and I start getting splish splashy. And by that time, I don't even notice whether the lines are still there or not. I don't pay any attention. I don't really care because I've only used the stamp as a guideline. But for some people, they want the lines to stay. Some people, they want them to go. And it really depends on the effect you're looking for. Because when I've done some stamping with distress inks or distress oxides, I get crazy splashy. And I let some of those lines completely wash out. This ink would not be able to do that. If you want an edge to completely disappear and not be shown at all, this ink would not do that. Because it remains right where it is. I was fascinated to see how under that yellow tummy, the lines are still there. They are still as crisp as when I stamped them. So they didn't lose any integrity like a distress oxide ink or a distress ink would or a lot of other types of pigment inks that you might want to use. So it's up to you what kind of edge you want for each one of those lines. If you want it to remain, this is definitely the ink to use. It's also a nice soft color. It's really hard to get an ink that you can use for your no-lying type of watercolor paintings that's light enough like this. They seem to, at least the ones that I've bought, seem to be on the darker side. And it's really hard to do second generation stamping on watercolor paper. What I mean by second generation is you stamp first on a piece of scratch paper. And then once there's less ink left on the stamp, you stamp it right away onto your finished paper. Well, it's already difficult to stamp on the lumpy paper. So I have not had success with second generation stamping on my watercolor papers. But the fact that this one stamps so clearly, that's probably going to become one of my go-tos unless I'm doing my splash splashy, crazy, wild, loose watercolors, then for those, I may still use some Distress Inks because as I said, sometimes there's times when I want the whole edge to just wash out and disappear and blend into the background, this one would leave a line there. And I wouldn't want that necessarily. Let's take a really quick look at the Distress Inks. Talk about that a little bit. One of the things you'll see right away is that since they do melt out with water, they do mix into the color that you've got. So my yellowish color is a little bit on the green side. And when it was all finished, I noticed the Distress Ink on the left was muddier than the No Line fade out on the right. The lines remained cleaner. They got a little mushy on the Distress Side, but they stayed crisper on the fade out ink. So I kind of like the fade out look better, I think, for the type of stamp that this is. But it really depends, as I said, on what kind of a look you want to get overall with your No Line coloring. There's a ton of different ways you can go with it. I'll show you a quick sample here of a card that I made using the No Line fade out ink and colored pencil. So you can use any ink you want with colored pencil. It doesn't matter. As long as even pigment inks are dry, they will work with your colored pencil. So I didn't test anything here because I know that they'll all work. If you're interested in more on No Line coloring, I have a ginormous blog post and I do mean ginormous with all of my Copic watercolor and colored pencil No Line videos. Or at least as many as I could find and put them all into one place. I'll keep adding to it over time. So hopefully that will become a really good resource where you can find all the information you want on a lot of different styles of No Line coloring. And that is about it for me. I'm going to go now. I will see you again very soon. Take care and go make something beautiful and give it away. Make somebody's day. I'll see you guys later. Bye bye.