 Hi there! My name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I want to bring you another in the 24 Tags of Christmas for 2016. Every year I do this series of six videos in a row, and I make four of each tag and give them away here on YouTube and over on my blog, so you'll want to be sure to leave comments, and in both places if you'd like double chances in order to win, and stay tuned all week to have as many chances as possible to win a tag in the mail. Today I'm going to use a little stamp from Pink Ink, and it's called Pair of Skates, a wood-mounted stamp, and I'm going to do some partial die cutting. I've got my plates for my die cutter, and I'm letting one edge hang off so that it does not die cut. You can see it's only partially cut through, and then I'll take a pair of scissors and trim a strip that's going to hang off toward the top of the paper. You'll see how that comes into play when I assemble my tag here. So I'm going to color this in colored pencil. I'm doing this on some Nina Desert Storm cardstock, and this is something I often use with my Copic markers, but I'm going to use some green pencil and some red pencil to add a little bit of color to this. It's some pretty quick and easy color. There's a lot of detail in here, but the greens in the background, I'm just doing some super quick scribbling of color in here. I'm not going to worry about shading or anything on this background portion, because I'm going to do some things with dimension and make these skates really pop on this pretty little tag. You can use any brand of pencils, of course, with it. I like to use Prismacolor pencils, and there are links to all the supplies in the doobly-doo down below. I use a pencil sharpener called a Quiet Sharp pencil sharpener, which is something that gets them extremely, extremely sharp, and it has auto stop, so it doesn't eat up your whole pencil. So there'll be a link to that in the supplies list down below as well, and over on my blog. I picked a red pencil to just add some color to the berries that are in here, and then I'm going to add some color to the shoestrings as well. And the shoestrings are actually part of the bow, so they've tied the bow out of shoestrings, which I thought was a really cute thing to add to this to make it a little more Christmassy and tie it to the skates rather than just have a piece of ribbon on there. Kind of fun. There's a couple portions up here that I'm not sure which part was part of the ribbon and which is part of the shoestring, so if you get this stamp, you can decide on your own whether or not you want to color that red or green. I left a few parts that I could color with red later, and then since the shoelaces are going to be dangling down into the high skates, then the skates are also going to have some red in them. However, since I'm going to do some layering with this, I'm going to only color partially down my tag using the red, and I'll now switch down, and I'm using a silver pencil. It's actually a shiny silver pencil, and I'm going to color the blades on my skates, just fill them in with basic straight-up color, and add just a slight amount of shading and contrast using a black pencil, because I want it to have a little bit of contrast there, but not a whole ton, because what's really going to pop is going to be the next step on this, which is going to be to start coloring the skates themselves on white cardstock. My original thought had been to use a white pencil and color them on the Desert Storm cardstock and make them a one-layer tag, but I realized it would be a lot easier to use the white paper to do that, that carrying through of the white, and it's also going to make them pop a lot more. So now I can just add a little bit of red detail for the shoelaces, and a little bit of gray or black detail in the skates themselves to add some dimension, and you can decide how much dimension you want to add, this may be more than you're interested in, but what I'm doing is adding some shading behind each one of the pieces of fabric, you can sort of see there's little stitch lines around each of the panels on the skates, and adding a little bit of shading around that makes them look like they're dimensional. You could alternately, if you're really into fussy cutting, you could layer each one of those pieces and glue them on top of each other, it would really add some dimension without coloring really at all, except to color in those shoelaces, which would be kind of cool, but I'm using a really soft pressure to use this same dark pencil that I used heavily for the bottom edge of the skates to just add very very light color to the rest, and just a little bit of shading from the outside in, and I'm not stressing about the direction of the lighting, I just want to add a little bit of shading so that heel panel looks like it's popping forward, and that sort of thing, get a little bit of dimension around it, and using a super light pressure allows you to have some flexibility in how dark you make it, because you can keep going over it. If you get too heavy with the pressure, it's a lot harder to remove color than it is to add just a little bit more and even it out, and the sharp pencil makes a really really really big difference as well, because you can get into any of the texture of the paper with just that sharp sharp nib of the pencil. So add a little bit to that back skate as well, and get some some soft coloring in there, and then part of the shoelaces is going to stick out over the top here, so had to add a little bit of red in there. I'm taking a kneaded eraser, and I'm going to go over those areas that I colored that are supposed to be shaded, that really light gray color, because I didn't want them quite as dark, but since I had such a light touch with the pencil, I could go over them really lightly with the kneaded eraser, and get rid of some of that. I fussy cut out the skate shapes themselves, so I made it as simple shape as I could, so I didn't have a lot of fussy cutting, and then added it on to my tag. I put a little B creative tape along the edge now of that top strip, and then used a pencil to fold it around, so I would create a loop on the top of my tag. This is a great way to add a loop onto anything that you need a loop onto, so remember that you can just leave that little tab on the top. I did forget to color in the little silver things on the buckles of the skates, so I did that after I got them all finished, and then I took a little glossy accents to add to the berries. Just add a little extra shimmer and shine to it, a little bonus thing to add, you could also do that with stickles, and make them a little bit more fun that way. And what a pretty little tag. I stamped the skates in red onto a brown bag, and the ribbon, I just looped twice through that hole and then tied a bow at the top, super easy to do without having to do any heavy knotting, and the person could take the ribbon off and use it again if you're using a really light touch to that knot, and having it double looped inside that loop makes it very sturdy, it's not going to fall off or anything. And this would also double as a Christmas ornament, wouldn't that be kind of fun? So I made four of these for the series, and if you are interested in potentially winning one of these, I'm doing a giveaway, so leave comments in the doobly-doo down below. You can also leave comments over on my blog and have another chance to win. You can hit that 24-14 or 2015 to get to the playlists from those years, and you can click on any of the previous videos that are already available to see the rest in this year's series. Thank you so much for joining me for this. I hope you're enjoying the series because I'm having a blast making all of these tags. Can't wait to send them out in the mail to the lucky winners. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Bye-bye.