 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnach, artist, Bible Journaler, crafter here on YouTube. And this video is for those of you who are artist-adjacent, meaning you want to delight and surprise the artist in your life by giving them a gift that they didn't even know they needed. This video is all about mediums, and you may know that your artist friend, family member, etc., loves to color things, but you don't know what to get them. How do you know what they already have? How do you know what they need? How do you know what's good? Well, this video is going to talk all about that, but what I need you to do is be willing to snoop a little bit. Let's go snooping. Shh, be very, very quiet. Sneak into your artist's studio and peek around. You could turn on a flashlight. Keep the dog quiet, maybe bring them a treat so they stay quiet, and see what mediums are hanging around near them. Those are Copic markers. There's watercolor here, and they've got this really cool tonic glass mat, great gift idea for a paper crafter, and there's pencils, colored pencils that are in a case. And we're going to look at each one of these three mediums. There's going to be the focus for this video. Then or around any of their mediums, they're going to have some color charts, probably. So look and see what they have. There's a Copic hex chart, a Prismacolor hex chart. They may have other kinds of charts that aren't in hexagon format, but most of the people aren't going to have all of the colors filled in. So you're going to look for areas that are not filled in. You're going to look for colors that don't have color in them already, because that probably means they don't have that color. Snap a picture of this so that when you go to your computer to place an order, or you go to a store to pick them off the shelf, you know what they have. And that'll be your handy dandy cheat sheet. If you're getting Copic markers, this can be confusing. There's a couple of different body styles. Don't get the square one. You want to get either the sketch, which is the oval one, or the chow, which is the round body one. The sketch has more colors available in it than the chow. But if they like the chow markers, then get them colors that are available in the chow. And again, refer to that color chart so you know what you can get when you're in the store shopping. This is the re-inker bottle. And if they have any re-inker bottles that are almost empty, get them a new one of that. They will be amazed that you knew to get them that. You can also get them some new nibs. That's a great stocking stuffer. Just get them a couple packs of those. And then a white gel pen is always helpful for adding little sparkle white highlights of some kind or another. For coloring with Copic markers, I always recommend Nina cardstock. This is a full ream. You can get smaller packs as well. And you want to make sure you get the classic crest cover. The solar white is the color that most people use most often. But it also comes in two other colors. There's a desert storm and a cream. And you can get them some of the others for a treat so they can try something different. I get the 80 pound. If they only have 100 pound in their craft room, get them 100 but 80 pound generally will work. These also work for colored pencil. So they can do their colored pencil work on that. Or you can give them a treat and get them some Stonehenge. Comes in a warm white or a regular white. It's a really, really nice paper for colored pencils. And I just treated myself to a sketchbook made with Stonehenge paper which was really fun and I've already started doing a drawing in there. So if you have a colored pencil artist given that as a treat. Some other things for colored pencil folks would be a bottle of Gamsol. There's a bunch of different brands but you can get some Gamsol and some blending stumps. They come in packs with a bunch of different sizes. Artists can always use more of those. Get them a little handheld pencil sharpener so that they can get their pencils nice and sharp when they're not at their desk. It doesn't matter what kind. All of those seem to work pretty well. But at their desk, this one, it's a behemoth. It's really big. It's really heavy. But it works so well. You will be beloved if you get one of these. You can see mine is rather dirty and well used. Another great stocking stuffer would be a whole bunch of different kinds of erasers so that they can try out different effects they can get from different erasers. It's always fun to have new things to just play around with and try. Let's move into watercolor. And these are some of my favorite watercolor papers in their arches. Cold press, rough and hot press. I don't use the hot press very much. But cold press is most common. If they have a student grade watercolor paper, especially this XL, get them some of the arches because it'll be such a treat. Get the cold press one, the green cover. And they will just think you're amazing for getting them such good paper. Next is the paints themselves. A lot of folks will have a premade set like some of these. Those are not artist quality watercolors. Most of the artist quality stuff comes in tubes. There's a 5 milliliter and a 15 milliliter. And what I have done with mine is squeeze them out into these little half pans in a palette. This whole thing can be an expense as you start to grow your collection. If they're just starting out, this might be overkill to get the pans and everything. But a really good super beginning start would be getting them a dot card. This is my palette. It actually matches the palette underneath of this card. But these are all dots of paint. They can take a brush, touch it to that, and paint with it, and get an idea of what it's like to watercolor without having to go to the expense of buying a million things. But Daniel Smith also came out just recently with these new sets. And I'm going to talk about each one of them and what makes each one a little bit different. This first one is the biggest out of all of them. And it's the most expensive. But it has all 15 colors in the palette. And it comes with an extra blank palette. And I've painted something to swatch out the colors for myself. I like seeing things in actual context. So I painted these tubes of paint and just kind of filled in little swatches of each one of the colors. So I have them for a reference. And Jane Blundell came up with this set. And if you look up Jane Blundell and get one of her books, she does a lot on mixing colors. And she has a lot more science behind why she picked those. The floral set only has six colors in there. You have room for more colors in the palette. So there's yellows and there's a pink that you can mix with other colors to get a red. So you can mix it with other colors in this palette. I mixed it with a little green and a little yellow to make that red. But I'm going to give you a list on my blog of some suggested additional colors to get. So if your artist has already purchased one of these sets, you can go on my blog and find out what you can add to it. The earth set is really fun. It has bronzeite in it. That color right almost in the middle there. And it's got sparkle. I'm not sure how well you can see the sparkle here on YouTube, but it's very cool. If they like to paint animals and rocks and cities and things that are in earth tones, that's a great one. And I'm going to give you some colors to make that a good landscape set as well. The colors of inspiration set is not really one that's intended for them all to be painted together. These are a lot of the newer Daniel Smith colors. So it's also got, it's got wisteria and lavender, but it's also got that moon glow, one of my very favorite colors nowadays. I absolutely love it, but you can see you can get light versions of them. You can get dark versions. You can mix colors. The area over here on the left is moon glow plus serpentine and then the serpentine by itself is over on the right. So that green can turn into a brown when you mix it with other colors. But I'll give you more suggestions on my blog as well. Blues, if they like to paint like seascapes and clouds and that kind of thing with lots of blues in them, I'll have some ideas with some green so you can make this more of a type of set that you can use for landscapes and scenery, but it is perfect, absolutely perfect for doing ocean scenes and skies. Love, love, love this set. The sketcher was put together because it's supposed to be for mixing. If you take yellow, red, and blue, you can mix any color out of yellow, red, and blue. You'll get different kinds of things based on what kind of yellow, red, and blue you use. The background here is all done with those three colors and you can see it's different when you put the blue next to the yellow and the pink next to the blue, et cetera. But these other colors on the right hand side are also a version of a yellow, red, and blue and they're going to make more muted colors. So I am looking forward to practicing with some of those and seeing what kind of colors I can make using this sketcher set. Once you've picked out paints, they're going to need some brushes and if you get an artist, these silver black velvet brushes, they are gonna think you're amazing. I recommend an eight and a 12 if you haven't gotten any at all, at least get the eight and then if they've already got those, get them some other sizes. They're gonna think you're amazing for reading their mind and knowing how much they love these brushes. So when you get them, they will have these little caps on them, leave them on while they're gift wrapped so that the bristles will stay intact as they are being unwrapped. Now for Bible journaling, you can get Bibles with all different kinds of covers, with all different kinds of insides. I like the ones that have columns on the left and right, but there's also some with interleaved pages in between, different sizes, all different kinds of things. I'll link you to a Bible Buyer's Guide in the description below as well as over on the blog. So you can maybe send them to that and ask them to pick out a Bible if you'd like to do a gift card to somewhere because it's a very personal decision what translation as well as what kind of pages that they wanna make their art on. And for a medium, I would suggest regular colored pencils. Prismacolor are one of my favorite brands and you can get a small set at a really decent price. You can also get Inktense pencils on the right, which are watercolor pencils and you color with the pencil and then touch some water to it with a brush. So get them a number eight brush. You could also get them one of the dot cards for Bible journaling so they can try out watercolor or get them one of the small sets or even the ultimate set that has all 15 colors in it. And you can kind of decide what investment you wanna make into it. You can also get them my books. I wrote two books recently and this one has a lot of how tos for the art itself as well as how to keep in touch with God while you're doing your Bible journaling because we wanna keep our focus correct while we're doing things. And you can get this one along with the workbook. The workbook is printed on Bible paper so the artist is able to practice some of the techniques that they're learning before they go to their Bible and they won't feel like they're going to wreck their Bible all of a sudden so they can practice, they can see how much water it can handle, et cetera, and test out their mediums. This is one of the pages I've done in here. The flowers were already printed in the book as well as the piano keys and I colored the rest with colored pencils. This is with Prismacolor. I added another flower and followed the same model of the flowers that I was coloring on the other side and added some bugs to it and stuff. Before we tiptoe out of the craft room, I wanna show you one more thing in this book which is some relatively intense watercolor. This is Daniel Smith Watercolors applied in a very heavy fashion to see if it bleeds through and nothing bleeds through. How sweet is that? A quick word on counterfeit art or craft products for those who don't live in our world. Buying cheap knockoffs is like buying a discount engagement ring from some dude on a street corner. Your artist is going to know the difference when they try to use a counterfeit product. Please buy gifts from reputable retailers. There are even a lot of counterfeit products on sites like Amazon and unless you're knowledgeable enough to figure out if it's the real thing or not, please refrain. In my blog post, I've linked to safe places to purchase the real thing. I hope you've enjoyed that little bit of sniffing around inside of a studio. I also wanna offer to you one more option for giving a gift that matters to an artist and that is giving the gift of education. I teach over at art-classes.com and classes are going to be on sale from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, but they're also going to be on sale Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. And why is that? Because if you want to give a class to someone that you know, you can sign them up for a gift card on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning because the instant you buy the gift card, it's gonna send the gift card to them by email. And if you don't wanna surprise them on Black Friday weekend by letting them know that's what you got, then you can give it to them on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning. They can get the sale prices then and your gift card goes further because they're gonna be able to buy the class at a discount, all right? These are watercolor classes. They're pencil classes. They're drawing classes. They're Copic marker classes, all different kinds of fun stuff. So give the gift of education and I think that's about it for this video. Be sure to stop by the blog. Lots more ideas. There's even a stocking stuffer section. If you wanna find some little things that Santa can tuck in for the artist who you love. Take care and Merry Christmas.