 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok and it is once again time for an Ellen Hudson release and we've got a really cool lemon or lime tree to make today. These are the colors I'm going to be using for my Copic marker coloring and I'm making mine a lemon tree but you can also turn it into a lime tree if you'd prefer. And the stamps don't come as a tree like this. They come individually so I stamped them at different angles. I have some leaves to go in different ways. I kind of had in my head a direction that the branch would go and then I just took a pen and started drawing the branch in. Now if you don't have a Copic multiliner like I do, you can always just color that in like a light kind of color like a brown color and then go over it with a black pen when you're all finished because if it's not a Copic friendly marker, you don't necessarily want to do all this line work because then your Copic marker will bleed. And I'm just going to add some extra leaves. I could have stamped them but look at all that masking I would have to do. And with these leaves, since I have some stamped already, I can kind of follow along with the leaves that are there and get some general shapes to follow. And as long as some of them looked really good because they were stamped ones, it didn't matter if my leaves didn't look as good as those. I just wanted to have them kind of connected and have them have the branch, that thick dark branch that I drew in look like it's all coming down cascading from one area so that it looks like it's all connected instead of having sort of disjointed branches, if that makes sense. And then the coloring can begin. So I was just looking for one more leaf that I could drop in there. You could also drop the leaves in after you get the coloring done and see which areas might need that. And I might still decide to do some alterations before I finish this. But instead of drawing them in in the first place, you can draw them in a marker and then go over that with a black pen as an outline when you're done. If you're not really ready to decide right away where you want to have each one of those leaves. Because sometimes it will be easier to see once the coloring is there. So I'm going to use some Y17 for a shadow color. But if you know me, you know that Y17 is a really bright orange for this. So guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to jump in with a blue violet color. And you can see the difference between the kind of shadow that blue violet makes on yellow versus that orangey color. And then when I go over the orangey color with the blue violet, it also dulls it down. It just kind of brings it down a little bit and makes it a little less garish. Because with lemons, they're not going to have quite that much garish color. Lemons are lemon yellow. I'm not sure why I had to say that, but in order to hear it, I guess myself. But they're not a really warm, sunny yellow. So I'm going to blend my colors then with a Y08 to just soften those edges just a little bit. You can even use a Y06, but stay in that Y0 for your lemons. If you're going to use limes, Google some pictures of limes and see what kind of colors are going to work to make this a lime tree instead. There are some really funny sentiments in this that you can use with limes. So just I'll leave it to you to go look up the stamp set and see them because they're pretty funny. You know, it's a it's a Julie stamp set. And that's the way Julie rolls. She's always hilarious with the stuff she comes up with. So once I got the blending done, I'm going to add a few dots on here. And that's going to give me some texture that's going to match for my lemons. And if I use this light BV, it's going to add just a little bit of texture in the shadow areas without being that really bright or or kind of garish color. It's just going to be really subtle and make them feel like lemons. So now here's all of the leaves. And this is the point where if you hadn't drawn the leaves in, you could draw them just with your marker. And that way you can sort of adjust them and see where they belong. Are they connected to each other? Are they pointing and hanging in the right direction? And you don't have to make your decisions with your black pen. You get to make them with your green marker, which can often be a lot easier than making them with a big black pen. Now, I decided this was all way too bright. So I darkened them. I picked a G99, which is really dark. But boy, look how bright those lemons start to look and those flowers when I've got that's really rich color on here. If we get too afraid of having contrast, we can end up with a really weak looking picture. But if you're bold in your choices, sometimes even if you look at it like I did when I first went, oh, my goodness, why did I pick a G99? But once I started seeing how that contrast worked against those bright lemons, I thought, yeah, that's what I want to do. So then I took a G94, which is just one step down from the G99 and started going into the leaves that I wanted to be in the background and started pushing those backwards with the green marker because anything that's going to be darker is going to look like it's deeper underneath that branch. And then I'm only leaving a few of those light green colored leaves in the foreground, and they're going to look like they're catching sunlight. So I'm just kind of slowly starting to knock those back one at a time that you could knock them all back and get rid of all of that bright color. But it seemed like it was going to work best if I could just do some of those leaves and allow a little bit of that bright green to come forward. Now, here's where I started just seeing if I could add a little bit more green in between some of these. I wanted to leave some white spaces so they felt like there was some air going through. But I just added a few extra leaves to complement the ones that I had already drawn in there. And I could have done this entirely instead of doing any of the black line work at the beginning, and sometimes that's a little easier, a little less scary. So I'll put a little bit of BG in my flowers because these are white flowers with little yellow centers, so it's really not much color in them. And now I'll take that black pen and go around the outside edges of my extra leaves that I added to just add that finishing touch on my card and there we go. Just added it onto a yellow card base and kept it really simple. Otherwise, squeeze the day is hilarious. I'm often saying seize the day and telling myself to go out there and tackle it, especially when it's a Monday. That's a great saying for a Monday morning. But I also want to show you some cards that I made with the other stamp sets. This one has lots of things we say to ourselves in our little heads. And there's also a set of dies that have these speech bubbles in it. They're going to be fun to use and keeping it wheel. This is this is a hilarious little set that has a bunch of different stamps that you can put together. And I put the dog together on the bike because I thought that would be funny with the balloons. So you can see all of that over on the blog. There's also links in the doobly-doo to the new release and all the stuff used to make my card today. And I will see you guys again next time. Have a great day. Bye bye.