 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allknock and today I'm going to be coloring five dogs in a rowboat. How crazy is that? I start to wonder if companies have started to make more dog stamps because they know I will color all the dogs. So this one is from Penny Black and I'm coloring on Stonehenge paper. If you haven't tried this for your colored pencil, it's worth getting a pack of it. These are the colors that I'll be using on my card. I'm not going to have them on the screen today, but you can pick up that JPEG on my blog if you're interested in trying to mimic the colors. But I'd recommend coloring dogs that you know and matching their coloring because that makes it a lot more fun, a lot more personal. And if you're making a card like this for, I don't know, your mother-in-law or your best friend or somebody and they have a dog, make sure you color a dog that looks like theirs. And if you don't know if they have a dog or what color their dog is, go to their Facebook because you know that dog people have pictures of their animals on Facebook. And you know what I was thinking about with this too is that if there's anybody like me that has had a number of dogs throughout their lifetime and you can find that on Facebook, wouldn't it be great to have a whole boat full of all of your dogs from your whole life? Wouldn't that be a cool thing? Not all of the breeds may match the ones you have, but you can try making them in the same colors. Or you can also just dry yourself a boat and take five different dog stamps that do match your dogs and put them there. But this is all one stamp, which is really easy to color that way. So there you go. And I'm going to use just a succession of colors across all of this to color the different dogs and of course making some of them look like my dog. So this is going to be Giala over here on the right. And I'm adding some kind of reddish colors to the brown for the shadows on him with colored pencil. One of the nice things is you can start with your lightest or you can start with your darkest and it really doesn't matter a whole lot because the blending process is still going to be just about the same. And if you're using any blending solutions or anything, it really doesn't matter at all, but you can just keep layering the colors to add more and more richness to it as you go. This Stonehenge paper makes a really nice texture, which I really enjoy for colored pencils. So the tall dog, of course, has to be my Vienna. And she's got big old black ears and then black spots over her eyes. And she's always very distinctive whenever I do dog cards, you'll always see a black and white dog with big black and white spots. And I know that her eyes always seem to disappear, but they do on her face too. You almost can't see them sometimes. You just see blobs. So I colored a bunch of their dog friends from the dog park in this and then just started adding some color to the boat itself and working back and forth. Now with colored pencil, one of my things that I do a lot is stop often to get it get my pencil sharpened. I use a quiet sharp sharpener, which is linked in the doobly do down below if you're interested in it. The prices have come down over the years. When I first bought mine, it was like 60 bucks. And I think they're 25 to 30 now, which is kind of nice. Oh, there are dogs in the distance. You may hear some barking going on in the backyard in the background of this video. They have been having a really good time playing in the backyard and causing all kinds of ruckus. But the quiet sharp pencil gets the pencils very sharp. And no matter what kind of brand you're using, it works really nicely with them. The the little guide thing on the front of it turns to different size circles. So if you have some wider pencils, some thicker pencils, they'll actually fit in that sharpener. Also, if you have pencils that don't get really super sharp, I have a couple of them. I don't know why they do that. There's just a few pencils that don't like to get super sharp. I'll take a handheld sharpener after I use the electric one and just do one quick turn in the handheld. And that will knock off any excess and give me a super sharp point. So some of these places where I'm trying to get the pencil to go into those little nooks and crannies of the paper texture, if it doesn't get sharp enough to go down in there, then sometimes just taking that one turn with a little handheld will be enough to make it super pointy sharp and create that that kind of tip that you really want on your pencil. But the little life preserver thing, I actually looked these up because I thought they were striped. So I always had it in my head that they were red, white, red, and white, and I looked them up on the Internet and I went, oh, they're orange with white little patches around them, those little white bands around them. OK, well, I've been doing that wrong all my life, haven't I? And I suppose maybe the other kind exist, I don't really know. But there you go. You look something up on the Internet and you learn something new every day. So I added a little bit of shading there with the black or the dark gray pencil and then went over it again with the orange to just really intensify that color. And then I decided to use the same color for some of the colors on the dogs to just bring that color around the whole picture. And since I was going to be using blue in the water, I thought I'd also use some blue in some of the colors. And that will tie the whole thing together instead of just keeping on adding more and more colors. Now, with a card like this, you can do the water a couple of different ways. One is you could just do the water underneath of the boat because you can just add a little bit down there and and just do that simple center point. And then it doesn't end up seeming more like a van. Like it's more like a vignette than a scene card. But you can also then just take a black pen and extend that water across the whole card and then do the same coloring throughout the whole thing so that you end up with, say, a darker color at the top and lighter at the bottom or vice versa. And what I did after I got the kind of base color down there was take a cotton ball and start to smush the color around a little bit and get it kind of blended. And I wanted to put some reflection in the water. Now, some people get all excited and they want to have everything reflected perfectly and show the dogs in the water and everything. You can make it a lot easier for yourself by just making the shape of the boat in reverse. So I'm trying to make the the angles kind of match the angles at the top, but they'll just go the opposite direction. And then I want to have a little bit of orange in kind of a semi circle ish. So you get the idea that it's that life preserver. And then just let it drift off at the bottom and not necessarily keep all of that, you know, the whole boat in reflection, but just enough that it feels like a reflection. And then I added a bunch more blue and smushed it around again. I had lost some of that orange, so I wanted to add a little bit more back in and I can add a little bit more back into the boat. But I have that underlying color that's that's nicely blended so then I can just add a little bit more on top and get that that color kind of looking more like a reflection and then just take a quick pass vertically with the cotton ball. For my finished card, I cut it a little bit short so I could put a little black card stock sticking out and tied some twine around the top and the black and the colored panel are popped up on dimensional adhesive onto blue card base. And you've got a friend I thought was a really sweet sentiment. There's two of them that come with the stamp set, but I like that one best. And there we go. I'm all done. And I will see you guys again next time. Supplies are in the doobly-doo and on the blog, as always. And I will see you again later on. Have a great day. Go make something beautiful.