 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter, and I'm going to show you three different ways to finish off a really simple scene. I'm going to be using a Christmas walk. Isn't this cute? I love this little image of these two bears walking along together and since the holidays are moving along quickly and you might be getting to the point where you're panicking about trying to get all your cards done and colored and ready for the holidays. Yeah, it may be I'm channeling a little bit there. But I am going to make a whole bunch of these because the image is really simple. I can make a really simple background and I can also show you how to make a variety of simple backgrounds or levels of simple, depending on what you have time for and availability to do. So I have created an angled sky behind my characters and even the fact of doing that rather than just making a straight horizon behind them makes a story out of it. You know that they're walking along a snowy hillside. They're not just walking along snow. There's a setting for them in that way. And I'm just painting the background on here with some cobalt blue and keeping that part really simple. And you can do just that much and get away with it. You can add a little bit more context here by putting a shadow under them. The shadow joins the little guy's feet and goes up into a shadow up toward the left and then joins to the big guy's feet and kind of just heads up that direction gets a little wider as it goes up the hill since they have their bodies in shadow there. And then I'm going to make just a few little paw prints in here just to give a little more story, a little more context that you know they've been walking along. And you could leave the card just at that if you want. You don't have to do a whole lot more than that. Just make it really simple. You can also make it a night scene. And I'm going to use some indian thrown blue here this time instead to make it a night sky. Same deal. I'm trying to make an angle going down the background of the card so that they're still walking along a hillside. And I'm being careful if you're familiar with watercolor to keep the leading edge wet. The edge that's next to the driest area. You don't want that to keep drying because you'll end up continually getting hard edges. So I just kind of work quickly so that that leading edge always stays wet and I can continue to manipulate it. So got all of that color in here. You can fuss with it and all sorts of things all you want. I tend to hold things a little bit at an angle to try to get the paint to move. But you can choose what you need to do on your paper. I cut these down already to a smaller size so I don't even have to watercolor a full card. I'm making these smaller than usual. And here I'm putting a little bit of the cobalt in for the shadow and just dropping in a tiny bit of the indian thrown. And that just gives me two colors in the shadow. Just a little bit more advanced painting. But as I said before, you could keep it really simple and just use one color. And here I'm doing another one of them and just adding in extra of the blue color. Because I wanted to try something a little more dramatic this time. When you're doing multiples of cards like this, I like to try to learn something from them. So here I wanted to see what happens if I put a little bit of cobalt blue across most of the snow. And I'm leaving the white over on the right hand side just a little bit over there and using a watered down blue. And once it was dry, then I painted my cobalt blue shadows right over top. And that gives me two shades of the blue right there in that snow section. And it's going to make it more of a nighttime card. And when it's night, you're going to see less of the bright white color. So this is just going to be another another step in advanced painting if you want to add a little more to it. And it's really quick to do. It doesn't take a whole lot to do it. But for some of us, if you have no time, you might want to do keeping it really, really simple. And with the bears, I wanted them to feel warm. So sometimes you can paint them with like a gray color, but I painted them with a little bit of yellow ochre just to give them a little bit of warmth against all of the cool blue all around them. And then painted the scarves. And if you're really running short on time and you just don't even have the time to do that much, or if painting with your watercolor brush is too much work or takes too long, go in there with a Copic marker and just throw in a little bit of color in there. Be real careful if you're using like VersaFine ink, because that will make your markers bleed. But you could you could get away with using another medium in there in the scarf if you wanted to. And you could also make it black and white. Just use a Sharpie and fill in every other one on the scarves. So the backgrounds. Finishing those can be as simple as leaving just that blue sky, or you can add just some sketched trees. And I'm using a light touch of a Sharpie. I'm not pressing really hard because I don't really want the lines to be heavy and consistent, I guess. Normally we try for consistency, we want a nice bold line, but I want these to feel very sketchy. That creates a really simple light background, but gives a little bit of a seam to it. You can also do the same kind of a thing, but don't carry the branches with the black pen up so high into the sky. Just doing a lower line, mostly the trunks down below, and then take a white pen and finish off the tops of the trees. That adds a little bit of snow to them. And this is a great place to use a sketchy white pen, the dodgy ones that don't quite have enough ink in them. They don't have a really consistent line. I have a pen that actually works well, but I'm deliberately using it very, very lightly. I'm barely touching the paper so that I get that sketchy line. But if you have one, this is a great use for that. Another way to finish off the background is to do the same thing on the dark sky, the night sky, and mine didn't come out really smooth once they dried. So guess what I'm doing? I'm adding the trees and some snow, because no one's going to know that my trees or my background back there came out a little on the not perfect side, shall we say? So snow always fix everything. It just covers a myriad of problems. And make sure you put some of the snow over top of the images in the front, so it looks like it's snowing on them, not just behind them. Although I suppose they could be out running the snowstorm. So there we go, with three different ways to finish off a really simple background like this, to add something special. Just draw in the trees themselves, draw in the trees with a little bit of snow on top of them, or draw in the trees, and then make the snow falling from the sky instead of worrying about putting it on the trees themselves. And these are really cute, simple little cards now. And I got a whole bunch of them done really quickly. Thanks so much for watching this video, for putting up with my stuffy nose, and for clicking the thumbs up button. I will see you again very soon with another video. Bye-bye.