 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnok and I've got some new Zig Clean Color products in the studio, so I thought I'd show those to you and color this adorable fox. The good folks at Kuretake Zig sent me a couple of things and one was this mangaka, I don't even know, I'm saying that right, starter set. And it comes with a case that is the coolest little case. And it was a sunny day, so I let the sun stream in for this first portion of the video because I was just so happy to see sun. The case is really nice, comes with a little booklet thing that you can see some techniques for how to blend the colors, gives you an idea of what colors to use on a drawing that they include. But it's a teeny tiny one, so I'm going to do a bigger drawing so you can actually see what I'm doing. Take the markers out of the bag and you see that they are colors that already have existed. If you've already bought all the zigs, you've got these colors. It does come with two mangaka pens. They are basically just drawing pens, a 01 and a 05 size, they do come in other sizes. But I love how this one holds the pens and it just sets open like that. Really nice little case and cute fabric inside. I'm going to be doing the water swatching portion of this, I already set it up and made my little chart so that I could see what colors they were. And I left this for a couple of days. I wanted to see if these colors, and I've never really tested anything this way, if it would really hold up if I let it sit there for a few days and dry. Most of the colors did. There's a few that didn't, and I don't know what the reason is for that. But for the most part, with any water-based markers, you can reactivate them later. What that does mean is if you use it for a piece of art that you're going to handle and touch, if you're going to color on the cover of a notebook or something, you want to put something over it so that you save it and don't let water touch it. You want to protect it in some kind of a way. The reason I swatch these colors with water is that green right there. See that color? It changes wildly from a regular green into a turquoise. There are a few of the colors in the zig line that do that. And you might find it annoying, you might find it really helpful. You might decide, I want that turquoise color, so you're going to use that green pen and add some water to it. There's a blender pen in this set that I have not used in this video. I will be using that on social this week, though, and showing you how that works. And those are the two drawing pens that are waterproof, so you can draw something with those and then color it in with these pens. So since this is called a starter set for people who haven't used these pens before, I thought I'd do some basic techniques on how they blend. The markers have a brush tip to them, not a regular paint brush in that kind of a way, but there's bristles on it and the way that they apply to the paper is really nice. They blend like butter. You can color right over top of the edge of the darker color with the lighter color, and you're basically pulling that color into the new area and getting nice transitions from one to another. See that color at the bottom, that green? That is one of the green colors that you can mix with a blue color because they're close to each other. They'll change color really easily and blend. If you use a completely different color, too, you can often get some decent blends with them. I'll be playing with that this week, so keep an eye out on social. Now I'm drawing in areas for the whites of the eyes that I'm going to leave empty on the outside of the eyes. We'll get to that in just a few minutes, but let's talk about mixing on paper. This is Canson XL paper, and it's a little different than the Canson XL mixed media paper in a sketchbook, so this is a little bit heavier. I highly recommend this paper for these markers just because it takes a lot of abuse. What I'm doing here is starting in a dark area with the brown color. The brown is not really a fox color that I wanted, so I'm going to change that to a reddish brown by just coloring over top of it with the red marker, then adding yellow to start pulling that transition of color toward the highlight on the top of the head. I can get a really nice smooth transition by going different directions with the markers, that sort of thing, and just working at them until I get the blend that I want. As I move the yellow pen across here, you'll see what the actual color of that is because earlier in the blend, it starts taking on the properties of the other colors. Any area you're going to be dragging color from one to another, you'll pull color along with you. Here I've got the brown. I'm going to add the red to it, and then I'm going to drag that red to make an orange color. Just pulling that along with you is going to help you to get a good blend. I'm just dragging the reddish color out into the yellow area. I'm leaving that yellow for the time being until my marker starts emptying out of that excess color because you could easily over-pull color. You could pull too much of that red into the yellow area. It takes a little practice to learn when to stop so that you don't end up overdoing it. Then you may have to go back into those darker areas with some of your mid-tones even to try to get a good transition, but it's pretty easy to do with these pens. You can see how nice that blend looks. I'll do the same thing with the dark brown in the corner and the red, and then start pulling in with the yellow as it starts moving into the more orangey portion. You see where I've got that hard edge, where the yellow has eaten into the brown and the red? I just go back in and I start pulling that color and dragging it back outward. I included glasses on this image because I wanted to show how you would handle those and showing that there's a different color in the glasses than there is outside of it. I'm going to use a lighter version of the colors that are behind it. We've got an orange color. I'm going to go for something a little more in the yellow frame. I started with the yellow that I had used in the top, and I'm transitioning to using a light yellow as it moves down through the glasses on the rest of the face, but I'm going to make sure that the area, you can see there's a hump where the nose is, and I'm going to stop and I'm going to leave a little white area around the eyes and around that place around the snout so that I can communicate that those colors continue underneath of the fox, and then I wanted to darken up some areas so that it starts to look a little more like the rest of the fox. Now that I've got the base yellow, so I'm going to use a tip-to-tip technique. Slow this down a little bit so you touch one marker to another and then just color with it, and it turns that yellow into more of an orange color so that I can start to darken up the area around the glasses without getting as dark as what's behind it, and then it still looks like glass in the front. We're going to handle the coloring of the glasses frames later because I didn't want to color with black in case I needed to go back in and do any other work. When you start working with another color around a really dark color, you can accidentally pull in some excess color and I didn't want to do that, so I will save that for last. For the pupils of the eyes, I am going to blend those from a black into a gray so that I also get that transition of color, that dimension that goes from dark at the top to light at the bottom, just like with the eyes. Now if you're going to use water, you're going to use it carefully, both because of the markers. The markers love to just go crazy with water, they love to just play and play but also because this is printer ink, I've printed this on my computer onto the Kansan XL paper. The ink in my printer does not happen to be waterproof. With light usage of water though, I can get away with it and especially on this paper. So I'm going to use just a very light touch with a brush and a little bit of water to soften out some of these areas in the fur. I just put a few furry marks around the edges and then just soften that out. I'll do the same thing on the belly and on the tail because even though it's white, there is some color. If you look at any white object, there's going to be some shading. So you want to indicate some of that in the drawing like this. And that really pale gray marker works well to do it. Let's talk about shading interior shapes. This drawing does not have a lot of interior shapes indicated. But one obvious one we'll start with is the tail. The tail has a definite division between that and the hindquarters. So we'll put a nice dark shadow there. And on the other side of that line, if we put a light color, we'll get some nice contrast and you'll get a definition between those shapes. I decided to go ahead and put in some highlight areas so that that yellow could be kept a little bit pure. I may not keep all that yellow by the time I'm done, but I wanted to keep a few highlight areas available. So I just colored those first, then put in some shadows. Now that area behind the shoulder is a great place to start putting in a shadow and defining that muscle that goes around the fox. And then some areas where maybe the curve of the paw turns into the paw down at the bottom. Now I'm mixing all these colors here and I realized my yellow marker needed to be cleaned off so I could keep some of that nice bright yellowish color in those highlights. So make sure you have a paper towel or something that you can scribble off on and be able to clean your markers as you go. Because that'll help you to maintain those pure light colors. So I'm going to work around each of the other sections. Pause in the back are going to be darker than pause in the front. That'll help to get that separation. And I'm just working the colors until I get from that dark into the light areas, trying to see if I can retain some of that brighter yellow color so that I have a nice difference between deep dark colors and bright highlight colors. And with these markers, it takes a little finessing, a little practice to do, but you can do it. I am sure of it. So then for the last paw, I'll make it a nice dark paw with just a little bit of highlight at the backside of it. Now choosing background colors, I included in the pack. If you purchase this fox, you'll get it with this background and without. So you can choose whether you want to do that or not. I decided to use colors that were going to pop against this fox. That blue is going to reflect those eyes because there's the same blues that are in the eyes. And the purple is the complementary color to the oranges that are in the fox. And that's going to give the whole thing a lot of energy when you use complementary colors. That sort of thing, really nice way to pick color combinations. Let's get to shading those eyeglass frames now, because I know you're probably wondering how the heck to do those before I did it. I decided to heat dry it. You could use a hairdryer as well, because I didn't want my hand leaning on any of the wet ink. Now, one way to shade glasses when you've got these really thin frames is to put black at the bottom of that top arc and then black at the bottom of the bottom arc. Don't worry too much about the left and right, because if you get the top and the bottom right, then everybody's going to read it correctly. So then I'm going to use my secondary color. I'll use black frames or gray frames on this one, but you could use colored frames as well. Put your second color in and just leave a smaller highlight on the top and a smaller highlight on the bottom, and that's going to make it look like there's light shining on the glasses. And depending on the direction of the light, what else is in the room? Those highlights can be in different areas. So don't stress out about trying to make everything really perfect. Just have some kind of a highlight there so that people look at it and they see some kind of highlight. They don't even understand what they're seeing, but their brain makes the connection that that's a highlight. On an object that is round like this. We're almost done. Going to do a couple of final touches. One is to anchor the picture. Whenever I have a figure or an object, I like to put some kind of shadow under it. And I'm just going to do a really simple light gray shadow using the light gray marker and then use a brush to soften out the edges. Super easy, super simple. Just putting it right under the feet. Almost an oval, a flat oval shape underneath. Now, repairing errors with Zigg clean color markers. Don't use a white pen because these markers are so strong in color. The white pen just doesn't cover it, but you can use a black pen to increase the size of the line. So sometimes if your marker goes out of the lines a little bit, just cover it up by thickening that black line. So there's another set of clean color pens that I'm going to be using in my next video. So stay tuned for that one. It's a much more realistic set of colors, brand new colors. And I can't wait to show them to you in that video when I get my project done. All right, I will see you in a couple of days. Be sure you're subscribed and hit the like button so YouTube knows you want to see more of my videos. OK.