 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm an artist and I love to make everything from small and mailable things to large and frameables and everything in between. And today I'm going to be focusing on cards because guess what? It is holiday card season and I have not gotten very far, so I'm going to get down to brass tacks. I want to share with you four of my tips for using some of my favorite things to finish off an image. Just give it that little extra sparkle. I also love to work in all the mediums. So in the second part of the video I will be showing you some sneak peeks into all of the new favorite things classes. There are holiday card classes in four different mediums and I'm not going to tell you anything else because I want to show it to you when we get to that section. Okay, so let's get started. So let's start with those colored images and put some finishing touches on them. I'm going to be using the new set of whiskers on kittens that I've just launched over on the website. I'm so excited. These are part of the class but you can also buy them separately if you don't want a class and they're so cute or different styles. And what I'm doing here for the first tip is if your blending goes badly all you have to do is put a pattern on top of it. Now if it's a sweater you can put stripes or polka dots or snowflakes like I'm doing here. If it is something else like a background put some snow over it like make it snow and no one will notice any of the bad blending underneath. If you need help getting your white gel pens to start working again click on the link in the doobly-do there is a video that shows you how to fix your white gel pens. Okay number two is if you don't like to color with either alcohol markers or with colored pencils because you can't get either one to blend. Let me tell you they work well together. You can get just a small handful of alcohol markers to do a base coat on whatever you're coloring like there's a gray on this cat. And then use your colored pencils on top. If you're used to your colored pencils having all kinds of white gaps in between you kind of can't get it smoothed out. This is so easy because all those white gaps are now gray gaps so you don't even see them. It makes the blending super easy and it doesn't require having you know blending stumps and all that kind of stuff. Just use one base coat of an alcohol marker and then use your pencil on top. And it just works like a charm and you're going to be so happy you're going to be able to blend again even when you thought you couldn't. Tip number three if you have put a white gel pen pattern on something and you want to retain that shading that you worked on underneath use your marker to go right over top of that gel pen to darken the areas that are in shadow. And then you'll have a lighter version of the white polka dots or whatever the texture is that you've added and you'll retain all of that nice shading. Just wipe your marker off on scratch paper so the ink doesn't stay on it. And then have you ever tried putting a dot on cat's eyes or any animal's eyes and it got huge? Well guess what take your colored pencil and carve into it just a little bit. It scratches off that pen from the surface of the paper and makes it a nice manageable size. So four super quick little tips for finishing off your images and if you would like to color these they come as four separate images and yeah they're going to be fun to make cards with. So let's talk about those new classes shall we? The four new classes are all called favorite things holiday cards and there's an alcohol marker version, a colored pencil version, a gouache version, and a watercolor version. And all the images that I have created for them that we'll be coloring are from the song by Julie Andrews my favorite things. You know whiskers on kittens and silver white winters that melt into springs they're not traditional holiday images in some cases and they are in others. Some of them are very deliberately holiday-ish things like you know doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodles turned into just a door. I'm assuming there's a little doorbell there somewhere I didn't draw one in but a door like this you could use this in spring and just decorate the trees and the wreath with flowers instead so some of the images you could use year-round. Now one of the nice things about these classes is that all four of them have different images so you're not going to get a lot of repetition between them but you can still use the images that you get in the downloads to color with all the mediums with one exception this little girl you know girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes she just seemed to need to be in all of the classes so she is in all of them and you will get to color her in all the mediums if you take all of them so she's just a little cutie she would also be beautiful any time of year in different colors for the season and her and her teddy bear dress differently and that kind of thing she's not as easy to color as the other ones and this is considered a level two class so this will be pushing it into like a level three coloring and painting to do her but I think by the time you get to lesson five you'll be just fine so if you're a level two person don't be afraid. Now with the watercolor if you're like me and your printer either won't accept watercolor paper which mine will but it won't print in waterproof ink then when I start painting on something that I've printed it ends up just a gosh awful mess so my recommendation is to either get a lightbox or tape the image onto your window on a sunny day and then you can trace it through there I have come to not like graphite transfer paper very much I'd prefer to do like a pencil drawing because it's a little easier to work with pencil and get the right pressure and stuff but you can't always control when you're not seeing through what it is that you're tracing with the graphite paper so let's see what else can I tell you about these the color palette for all of these I've kept them really simple I've tried to streamline them as much as possible and in the pre-class lessons you'll get to see the lists of colors and stuff but I've chosen you might have noticed a little commonality here that there's a lot of blue going on and the reason for that is because even though I've been planning for this class for a while and drawing the images and getting all that part prepared when I sat down to start doing the artwork and coloring and filming was right after Israel had been attacked so I've been working on it this past week and my heart is just in agony for the people who are suffering right now and who are going to continue to suffer and for me this was a bit of therapy to use these colors the colors of the Israeli flag and it's one of the colors of Ukraine as well and it just just felt like I didn't want to do something so traditional so I didn't do red and green you can certainly do red and green in these classes though you don't have to be held to my little blue and white motif but if you'd like to join me in that kind of art therapy you're welcome to do that so these are level two classes and they're also minis and you might be used to minis on my site being about $18 they're going to be more than that because I'm providing you with all the images for them normally my mini classes are just blank piece of paper and then we start drawing something but here since you're getting all of these beautiful images as downloadables that you can use over and over again you can keep printing them out and make all the cards you want then they're going to be a little more expensive but you can also get discounts and that'll all be over on the website explaining that so if you buy one you get one discount if you buy two you get a bigger discount if you buy all four then it's a buy three get one free so that's kind of the best deal out of all of them if you are like me somebody who uses all the mediums and I know there's like five of you out there so trusting you my peeps are uh yeah gonna be excited about all of this an additional bonus thing that's going to go along with this class is that I am working on I haven't got there yet I'm going to be putting a new class over on art venture that is all about fun folds and it's just going to show you how to make some fun folds that you can use with large images like these when you have an image panel and you still want to do something fun and crazy that class is going to be over there very soon so stay tuned for that I haven't got it done yet because I'm waiting on the paper I ordered paper and it didn't come yet I hope this video taught you something if it did please do tap that like button and if you haven't subscribed yet this is a great time to do that because there's a button right up there or there wherever I ended up putting it and I hope you will also try my tips that I gave you for finishing off an image if you do tag me over on social media I'd love to see what you're creating and all of the links to everything that I discussed today are in the doobly-doo down below so you're welcome to check all those out I will see you out there in art making land go create something every day see you later bye