 Hello there. I'm Sandy Allnock. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I am an artist and it is almost Valentine's Day. How cool is that? I'm going to be drawing some chocolates because this is the season when one gets to buy the giant box of chocolates, right? I bought one but I am always reminded when I buy these big boxes of chocolate that I don't like all of the fillings in all of those. There's just some of them and I just like why? Why is there not caramel inside everything? That makes no sense. So I'm going to eat the ones that I love and I'm going to take the rest to church and let someone else enjoy it. But in the meantime, I want to share an art with you that is candy related. I drew a picture recently, last month during my whimsical sketching adventure and one of them was a box of chocolates. Today I'm going to color it for you in three different mediums. One is transparent, one is semi-opaque, and the third is completely opaque. I'm going to show you how messy these are in real life. Even though they don't look like they're really messy right now, they actually look like a box of chocolates, but I'm going to show you how you are misreading your own art when you just toss it because it doesn't look great yet. You stopped too early. I want to encourage you to keep going when you are working on something. Don't just chuck it in the recycle bin. Keep going. You can purchase this image of the chocolates, just the candies, or you can purchase the entire set, which is buy four, get one free, and that includes birds, a city in a hexagon, flowers, and fish. All of this is fun to color if you are someone who loves to just sit and relax and color. It's going to be linking the doobly-doo to that, but do not go there yet. Let us talk about the sweets first. I'm first going to show you the process using alcohol markers because I have been scribbling in alcohol markers for a long time. If you look with your nose right up to the paper of some of my work, you'll see how messy it is. In this drawing, it's super easy to get messy, and you can download this and color it yourself. Just grab all of your brown markers, whatever brand you've got, and just color in the blobs. Don't even worry about staying within the lines because the fact that there is a dark background around it is going to make all the difference. It's what happens when I do an entire scene around a main image. I am giving myself the ability to not have to worry about being inside the lines and trying to be perfect because perfect is painful and often not even possible. So I'm just scribbling all these colors in here, and then I started getting a little fussy thinking, oh, I'm going to add some shadows and make some curves on the tops of each one of these candies. Don't do that. Just do not do that. I am doing it here, but I'm just going to recommend not bothering because the next step I did was to go around with a number seven or eight gray, whatever kind of dark gray you have. I was a little worried about the lines going away completely if I used a black or a really dark gray. So something a little bit lighter so we get to see some of the value changes between the inside holes and the outside top edge, and then just color in the ribbon any old way you color in the ribbon and grab a pen to add some highlights. You can add all different kinds of highlights on the different candies. Some of them can be sprinkles on top, but for the most part if you just put something in the top left corner-ish of most of the shapes because that's where the light is coming from, just put a little bit of highlight in there with a white gel pen, and you have automatic highlights. You can add drizzles onto some of them, you can add sprinkles, just have fun. And what I decided after I was done was since the box of Russell Stover candies that I have actually has brown plastic instead of black plastic, I thought what happens if I start messing around with changing that to brown, just going right over top of all the gray, it darkened the brown since there was a gray under it and gave me a really nice dark brown where I still get some of the value changes between the part where it's just paper and the marker colors and then the printing of the printable image. So that was coming along really great. But then you might notice that there's some that now stand out as like weird colors. You can still go in after you finish the entire outside background and start covering over some of these, you can blend the shadows from your candies from the really dark areas into the candies themselves. Or if you have some like this was more of a reddish brown, didn't really suit the whole color of this, I just went right back in with a brown color over top of the red. So I could kind of bring those back to more of a candy looking color rather than something bright red. So that's how easy it can be to color this, just scribble all over things and don't worry about it. Those lines in the printable image are going to hold together for you for the entire image. I was not as confident with colored pencils simply because some colored pencils are opaque, which means if you're using a black line drawing underneath, then you can end up softening that black line drawing because some of that opacity tends to just kind of set a little cast over top of it so it's not as black. But I decided to proceed anyway. I printed this on my favorite Stonehenge paper for colored pencils and then just scribbling color. I used my Polychromos, my Luminance and my Prismacolors, all of them, all the brands together worked just fine. And then I got out some Gamsol and dipped my blending stump into it so I could just do a quick blend. Not worrying about going out of the lines, just scribble and start smushing color. The second layer that you put on any of these candies in colored pencil is going to be stronger than the first layer after it's been dealt with with the Gamsol. So I'm going to be able to get more contrasting colors later if you want. I've put some tape around the edges so I can then just scribble in the black. I'm just going to put black in this, not worrying about the brown simply because I have my dark browns already used for the candies and I don't want to end up confusing that too much because I have less colors in the intense side available to me as I'm working with colored pencils than I do with alcohol markers. So I'm going to use the blending stump and the Gamsol again to blend all this. Don't worry if it starts to look too black because eventually as it dries, the paper dries from the Gamsol, then those lines from underneath do start to appear and you can start seeing some of the little shapes of the boxes rise up a little bit. Then I put some color onto my candies, a second layer on some of them, and then I just use the blending stump to blend that as well as blending it into the background. Letting some of that black come into the candies is going to darken them and when we don't have super dark colors in some prismacolors and luminance and polychromos, you can use the black to kind of soften the outside edges so that they look like they're being shaded and set into the little structure of the candy box. I'm just going over top of the extra coloring that I scribbled on here and then blending that into the black as well, but leaving some highlight area in the upper left, which is where the highlight's going to fall. We are going to add some highlight in a white pen, but it helps to have some of the softer highlight in color first. Some of them I wanted to pop the color a little bit more, so I used a mid-tone brown, not like a skin tone kind of light color, but a mid-tone brown to use some warm color on some of them. Some of them were more of a pinkish, some of them were more of a yellowish highlight and just adding those really soft highlights starts to make the candies look rounder and then we can add the sharp detail on top of them with a gel pen. I did try using white by the way for those highlights and a white pencil just made everything look weird. The chocolate didn't look like chocolate anymore, so definitely use mid-tones and then you can use that sparkly bright white highlight of a gel pen to add sprinkles, to add a bit of a shine to your chocolates in the upper left kind of corner or anywhere where you get a raise in the chocolate. So if there's a place where some of it lifts higher than the other places, there's little swirls, little S curves, those are great places to put highlights. So there's the color pencil version, which actually did work and now I'm going to look at the gouache version. This one was the one I really wanted to see if I could do. I printed it on red cardstock and I wasn't even sure if the red cardstock would hold up to gouache. This gouache is an opaque watercolor. It's a water medium and that means it's not really friends with any kind of cardstock, but if you use it in a really solid form, don't use a lot of water with it, make sure you're using it nice and thick, then you can actually get away with that. I painted the entire black background in and then I added in a very, very, very dark gray to start making the divisions between the shapes. And partway through, I realized that the candy box that I had had shapes that were the shape of the candies themselves. So when it was in oval shape, it had an oval hole. So with this, I was able to make that adaptation even though that was not drawn that way in the original picture. So you can have more opportunity to change things when you're working with gouache since it is opaque. So I got through adding all of those little divisions into the plastic and then I started adding the color into each one of the candies. And with gouache, the things that I'm learning about gouache is that I think like a watercolorist and the way you're supposed to work with gouache is going to the darks first. So I lined up on my palette all of the different browns that I have. If you don't have a bunch of different browns, then mix some really dark brown, some medium brown and some light brown in like a reddish kind of brown and then a yellowish kind of brown. That gives you lots of options to play with. So I'm adding my dark brown shadows of different kinds onto each one of the bottoms and right sections of the candies and putting some in where I see the lines just to give myself an idea of what kind of candy it was. Partway through, I realized it didn't really matter because once I covered this up with one layer, I'm going to make up everything else anyway. Like I'm not going to have to actually follow any lines because I can change the shapes of the candies. I can change the kinds of patterns they have on them. But this was an excellent thing to practice. If you're trying to practice your gouache and getting your mixtures thick enough to work well, do it on some colored paper because colored paper is going to show you where your gouache got too thin if you had too much water in it. And this was super helpful for me to practice that myself and get the gouache so that it's thin enough that it'll move and my brush can push it around, but thick enough that it's going to cover all that red. And I have, as you can see on the palette, a whole bunch of different choices. I keep going back and forth between them and just mushing the color onto the paper. And as it dries, it's just starting to come alive that these are looking like very graphical kinds of shapes for candies. Now some of them I ended turning into squares instead of circles because I lost the whole plot when I was painting over top of all this. But it didn't matter because the basic structure was there because of having to print out. And then all I had to do was have fun with the candies on top. So once I got the darkest layer, the darkest shadow layer, I was working on the midtones. And the midtones started filling in making them feel more like candies. And then I had a couple of light colors like a yellow ochre and a burnt sienna. And I'm using them without any white in them because I don't want to get too bright yet. Just adding very slowly, brighter and brighter colors to start building up the dimension of the candies. Now you can still go back and add darks in this if you need a little bit more shape added to something. If you've kind of lost the plot of the the tray, you could go back in and add more tray colors in there. All kinds of things you can do with gouache that you can't do with alcohol markers or colored pencils. It just has a lot more flexibility in making those kind of changes and adjustments as you go. This one little piece of candy, you can kind of see how the process works. I've got my shadow in there, put in my midtone color and then I dried it so that I wouldn't end up like lifting up too much of that color. I could see what was there. Then I could start adding in some highlights in a couple of spots, mushing it around a bit so I could end up with something that felt like a dimensional piece of candy and then I added nuts on top of it with some much brighter color that I had mixed with some white. So then I got that kind of contrast. Now for each one of these, I can also start adding in patterns. I can add in say some dark stripes and once the dark stripes are dry, then I can take my lighter color and paint over top of that dark stripe and I end up with a lighter kind of drizzle of chocolate that has a shadow to it. And again, that's something that you can do with gouache that is much harder to do in other mediums. It's one of the reasons that I like it so much. I've got a lot more flexibility and at this point, I was just having fun playing around with the candies, throwing in some highlights that are a yellow ochre color. They're not white white, but I'm just slowly getting brighter because these these light colors have a little more white mixed in with them. So they're just a tad brighter. And for the final touch, that's when I go in with some actual white white in order to make things really pop. The white of the ribbon was something I had to add in here too because having a red ribbon on a red piece of paper didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. So I didn't mess with that. But I did get a really nice pop from that white bow and I mixed it with some gray by creating a gray with the black and giving that a little bit of dimension. So there is the finished gouache version, but I want to show you how messy it looks close up. Just because something's messy close up when you put your nose up to it doesn't mean it doesn't look realistic when you step back from it. Not that many people are going to put their nose up to your piece of paper. I hope this was helpful so that you could see some messy brush strokes and messy marker strokes that actually still look realistic. It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful. The impressionists worked on the same kind of basis. They trusted that the viewer would translate with their eyes what they were seeing. You can look at a Monet painting and you still see a garden even though there's just a mess of brush strokes there. I want to encourage you next time you find a piece of artwork is not going well and you feel like you've made a mess of it, put it away and then in a few days take it back out and look at it as though you've never seen it before. Pretend someone else did it and I promise you if you don't look at it with your nose pressed up right against the piece of paper you will see beauty. You will not see your mistakes. All right. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm going to be back next time with more chocolate in more mediums. So make sure you've subscribed if you haven't already because who doesn't need more chocolate at this time of year? I'll see you all later. Take care. Bye-bye.