 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnok and I bring you a portrait of the one and only Nina Simone. I usually do a portrait or two or three during Black History Month and this year I have been swamped with a bunch of things that you will hear about eventually. I've been getting some stuff ready for coming months, things that I've committed to. So I finally thought I would get around to doing a Nina Simone portrait. So I have been listening to Nina Simone for a number of days before doing this, just listening through her playlists on her YouTube channel. She's no longer with us, but somebody keeps uploading new stuff, whoever owns that channel now, as well as you can listen to all her albums. There's a bunch of her albums on her playlists. So you can check out her music. She's really an amazing talent. She had quite the voice. She could play piano and she lived in the United States. She spent some time in Europe. She spent some time in Africa. She has a whole album in French. Lots of really interesting things about her. She had some songs that are iconic for the 60s protest movement stuff. A lot of really hard things were covered in her songs and then I was really delighted to find when I listened to them again, just in one fell swoop, just spending a couple days listening to Nina Simone, hearing a lot more hope than I remembered in her lyrics and I need some hope nowadays. So that was good to hear. Lots of hard stuff in there, but also lots of great lyrics and her talent is just off the charts. So this portrait is done of course in Copic markers with some purples underneath of all of these skin tones and the skin tones are mostly E3s with a couple other things thrown in. There were just dozens and dozens of markers on my table by the time I was done so I can't really tell you what I used. The slower version of this, which is still not totally slow but slower, is available for my patrons. But this first section is just the face and I'll slow it down when we get to the hair because when I did the hair some really cool things happened that I wanted to share. The skin tones though, I wanted to talk a little bit about those purples. I use purples a lot in skin tones but in researching Nina Simone, trying to find good photos of her is really hard. There's a lot of black and white shots of her but her skin is very, very dark. She was just really, really dark black skin woman and beautiful but boy is it hard for cameras to capture very dark skin. You just get glowing eyeballs and that's it and any of you who are dark skinned, I am sorry for you because cameras just don't capture the beauty. So I was looking through the few color photos there were that still exist and a lot of them were color corrected like somebody added color to a black and white photo to try to create something in color so that color was weirdly saturated in weird ways but just from looking at a lot of footage of her and that sort of thing I made some educated guesses as to what I thought her skin tones might be. I have no idea unfortunately lots of her concerts and things were recorded with you know lighting in bars and stuff where musicians play so lighting wasn't even great for that. I do wish that I had been able to see her in person because that would have been amazing but nonetheless I did my best with trying to create recreate something that I thought would be her skin tones and the purples underneath add a lot to that rich dark color. You can't get a lot of those kinds of colors with a lot of Copic markers and I know there's some people that were talking recently I saw on Instagram about using blacks in black skin and I find that black is just a dead color when it comes to skin so I reserve it for things that are truly black black like her outfit in this is black there's some areas on her neck by the way that I did some terrible blending on ignore those for right now because I'll fix those with the technique I'm using in the second half of this which is coming right up that afro technique. Now a while ago I did another video where I figured out how to do an afro in this really cool way by using yellow and purple in the hair to create a kind of a glow around the edge of it to add some light to it it was really cool and I really liked how it came out but I wanted to try something a little different because this is a completely different project and I wanted to see if this would work so I'm using swisper which are basically a makeup applicator thing and applying the Copic marker refill ink directly onto the surface and that's I believe a YR24 and a V25 and what I was hoping to do was figure out how to create that texture she just has a beautiful texture very fine fine texture on her hair and I wanted to see if I could make that happen this is a larger drawing than the previous video that I had done the other one was for a card and this is a full sheet of letter size paper and I didn't feel like just using the marker to try to make those strokes I thought well what happens if I apply it in this way I've used this technique and other things and this was the moment when I realized once the pad dried out mostly so it was just barely damp then I could smush it on the paper and just rubbing it and smushing it in and it made the texture I was looking for I wanted something really soft so that gave me the boldness to just step out and try it with another color as well but of course I got a ton of this brown on there and I had to wait for it to dry out but fortunately I had a lot of brown I wanted to apply because I wanted to join the hair with the hairline that would hopefully make it look like her hair and her her scalp and everything it was all part of the same things that I would get some division but it there wouldn't be a jarring edge in between the two and then eventually that did start to dry out so I could start applying it in that same way that cool just moving it across gives it that really interesting texture lots of cool things that that could be used for to create texture so I put some more color on it because I wanted to work it down closer to her scalp and really get rid of that white line that was in there and so then I had to wait for it to dry out and just keep using it up and then I was going to have to add black as well so my my brain was trying to figure out how I'm going to add black to it and not totally screw this up once I spent all this time on it I probably should have figured out how to try this on a scrap sheet of paper first but you know I I'm not known for always making the smartest decisions I also was trying to stay away from her finger that she was leaning on because I didn't feel like masking it out and figured once I got all this done I would go in with a marker and carry all of that color back down to her finger get rid of that white line so once the brown was all done I started tapping in in the same technique the black of her hair at first I thought okay now I've really created that hard line around her scalp but by the time I was done and was able to create that softness of the edge I softened it right around her scalp and that did actually work out better but what I ended up doing was turning the swisper inside out the makeup pad and it still had ink on the inside and when I started tapping that on top of all that beautiful color underneath of it I got what looked like an inking pattern like I was doing something with you know like other kind of splashing inks or something it was so cool I really loved the way this started working out because Nina was such a creative woman I wanted to have something other than straight-up portrait I wanted something that would feel very creative and this started giving me that looser feeling I everything else I was trying to create something that looked like a person and this was just dealing with the color and the texture of her her hair which was just really cool that it actually worked out this way so turning the pad inside out gave me a different texture that I really liked and then I decided I would also add a background to this the photo that I was working from had a white or shall we say gray background it's very kind of mushy and I decided I wanted to put a dark background around this because I wanted that highlight around her hair to stand out one of the things that you're seeing here in this video unfortunately is the fact that Copic marker is reflective and at the angle that I was shooting at from overhead I just kept getting this reflection I couldn't get rid of it so I figured what the heck we're gonna have to see it with a reflection I tried photographing this when it was done and it was just a nightmare to try to get a picture of what it actually looks like because it is so cool in person but like trying to shoot it from straight on is nearly impossible so you can go over to my blog and see if I found other ways to shoot it because I'm going to keep trying because I really want to share that in a different way because the only way that I found that worked was at an angle while the piece of paper was practically in the dark and it it worked out it just the the particular angle that I saw it at and grabbed my phone and took a picture of it I'm like oh okay that looks correct the color on it but look at that glow on her hair isn't that awesome so it's doing some negative coloring around the hair that makes the hair really stand out and all of that work that I did to make that afro look perfect is totally shining in this picture so it's very excited that that actually worked out so the rest of this around the hand I now have to manually go in and try to replicate the texture and the color that was in all of that that background that I put on there with the makeup sponge which was not exactly an easy feat because I can't get that texture just manually with my marker nibs it was just really difficult I did my best though and added in the black of her hair in the corner trying to sharpen up the edge around her finger the actual texture of that background is kind of modeled that way so it has this kind of really interesting flare to it but it's not as bad as what you see in the picture so yeah I did sign up for a class with this guy who supposedly knows everything there is to know about the camera that I own so I'm hoping I can get some answers from him on how to better use this thing because it's got so many settings and apparently I messed one up recently because things changed they were set just fine before and I've used something up so anyway final details on this and then I set it down on top of my Copic bag and looked over and went okay finally that looks like a good picture I finally got some pretty good color from it still a little bit of a shine but not so bad if you missed Monday's video it's all about coloring black hair so you can check that out in the doobly-doo as well as up here on the screen and all the stuff that I did this week with hair is going to be linked on my blog as well I will see you guys later take care have a great weekend