 Well, hello there. It's Sandy Olnok, and I am going to be drawing Santa's view, or at least a little portion of it. I showed a sneak peek of this on my Fine Art page. So some of you saw a little sneak peek of it, and my Fine Art page is over on Instagram, Sandy Olnok Fine Art, as opposed to just Sandy Olnok, which is where I've been sharing cards and things. But this is my Fine Art page, and I sat on the sofa for most of the last week in the evenings just working on this drawing. And it's in my sketchbook. It's on Stonehenge paper in a Stonehenge spiral sketchbook, and I'm using Polychromos pencils, except for this white one. I couldn't find my white Polychromos, so I stole one from my Prismacolor box to be able to layer over top of these blues. When I was coloring with the blues themselves, they ended up being too strong, and they needed to feel a little more like snow. As soon as I went over it with white, it felt a lot more like snow. The whole idea behind this picture was trying to give myself challenges, and that's part of what this sabbatical is all about for me, taking a sabbatical from cards so I can focus on more art concepts. And when I did a couple weeks ago, I did a picture of looking from a tree down onto somebody making snow angels. You may remember that video. I had this starting to burn my head at the time, that I haven't done anything with bird's-eye views. That was the first thing that really tried that way, and I wanted to try something with architecture in a bird's-eye view. And since Christmas is coming and it was kind of fun to think about holiday-themed or winter-themed art during this sabbatical, this seemed like a good thing to do. It was like, what would a town look like at Christmas from overhead? Well, I went to the internet to hopefully get some help. Not that I was looking for something to copy, but I was looking for drone photos over festivals and just trying to find things where I could get the general idea of the shapes of the buildings and what they'd look like. Part of my challenge with this was that I have it as a square, so there's almost not a single perspective here. I've got several perspectives going on based on each of the quadrants and their relationship to that big tree in the middle. Most of the perspective is fairly good in this except for the church. There's a few things wrong with the church. I haven't quite figured out how to handle them, but it is what it is. If it's good enough for our shoes and hand grenades, as my dad used to say, I'm not sure what that means, but it's good enough for our shoes and hand grenades. So the perspective was one thing that I was challenging myself to think through. The other thing was the lighting because there are a gazillion light sources in this. I wanted it to be a night scene because if Santa was flying over, he's a little early because there's still a lot of people out there in the street. They better go home and get ready because Santa's coming. But thinking about all these different lanterns that I was planting around town and how bright would they be? How bright is that Christmas tree casting light out into the town square? How bright are all of those little street lights in the park behind City Hall? What do they do to each one of the trees? Do they cast a little shadow behind it and then there's shafts of light that come through? In each one of these sections there was just a little different problem to work out. Even though this was just for fun, this was not anything that I'm trying to achieve something with or I'm going to publish or anything like that, it's just an exercise to see if I could accomplish what was in my head, this birds-eye view. So much of the pencil layering was also just something that I love to do. I love, you may have seen in my other color pencil videos, I love to build up color with pencil and then knock it back by layering something over top of it. So here I'm doing a lot of layering over with that white pencil to make it feel more like snow and then adding shadows back in and all that kind of stuff. There's some of that pencil layering in my classes, so if you take any of my color pencil classes, which there's a link to the category in the description down below, but there's a lot you can do with layers rather than just taking what's coming out of the pencil and using it by itself. The texture of the paper is also a really big deal in trying to make something like this work and Stonehenge paper is one of the best that I've found. If you haven't tried it, it's worth getting a pat of it and see which think of it. There are whites and creams and all different kinds of colors and stuff. Just the white sketchbook is just a really nice thing to have. If Santa needs to get you something, then that would be a really fun thing to ask for from him and I know that at this point I'm not sure that places like Blick can get it to you in time for Santa to have it wrapped under the tree, but I think Amazon carries them, so I'll put links to both down in the doobly-doo. They also have pads of it, so if you're a card maker and you want to cut it into card-sized pieces, you can do that as well, but for me a sketchbook frees me up from feeling like I have to produce a project. I can just sit and draw, which is what I was doing here as I was creating this whole thing. Just enjoying the process of drawing and coloring and adding all the different detailed elements to it. I'm adding a whole bunch of people here now to the scene and they're really basically upside down triangles as I'm adding them and I'm doing them mostly in reds, greens, and then the navy blue color that I was using, just switching back and forth between those, rather than having a million colors in this, I kept it basically to the pencils you see on the left side of the sketchbook and the green thing on the right side is actually a stick eraser. If you do something like this it would be helpful to have a stick eraser because it helped with some of those lights and trying to get them back after I had colored over top of them. So trying to create a little of the feeling of the bird's eye soaring over the different sections of town here. Not sure if that really worked. It didn't work trying to videotape it that way, so if I tried to do that with stills it might help, but there are stills of this whole thing that you can see over on my blog as well. If you want to study it more and get ideas on how you could try a project like this, you're welcome to do that. And that's about all I have to say about this project, other than it was way fun and I challenge you to challenge yourself. What's hard for you is going to be different than what's hard for me, but try something. Try something that's just a little stretch beyond where you're at now and see if you can do it because that'll give you confidence to take the next step and the next step and the next step. Don't think of it as having to be a finished project, just give yourself the freedom to play. And I will see you in another video very soon. Bye bye.