 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to show you how to color an icy skating pond. And this is another one of those by request because there's lots of skating stamps out there. I'm going to use this one from Waffle Flower called Cold Hands, and it has these really cute little mice in it. And I will be coloring the scene around them. And generally when I set up a scene where I've got lots of stamps, I start out with an idea. If I have a stamp that's just one stamp, a lot of times I just kind of go for it as the card develops. I don't really have a plan ahead. But on this one I did have a plan. I wanted the light to be coming down, kind of sparkling from the center of the card from the sky up above. So I'm leaving some highlights on the tops of all of the areas around the mice. Now this looks like it's really dark to you probably right now. By the time we're done, you're going to get where I'm going with this. And for those who are nervous about going too heavily too dark, at the beginning you can always go in with another marker and lighten it up. So even as I'm kind of softening some of those top edges, that does lighten it up slightly. And if by the time you're done it's too dark, just go in and add some lightness to it with a light marker. I'm going in and adding a little more of the darker color just because I wanted to make sure it got blended really nicely. And then I'll give them some red scarves and hats and mittens and things and I'll make the little birdie red just so I bring that red element out elsewhere onto the card. And do a little bit of shading on them, not a ton, because the scene around them is going to be the thing that's going to make this card really sing. I spent some time on the little mice in the middle, but the rest of it doesn't have to be super fantastically colored and in great detail because the ice skating pond is what's going to make this card really cool. So I have this vision that I wanted to have them kind of in the center of a pond and a tree line on the other side. And I'm taking one marker and creating some, I guess, shadows on the ice. A lot of people think of ice and snow as all being white stuff, but it's not. It actually has color to it. If you pull up some pictures on Google, you will see that. Sometimes it's gray. Sometimes it's more of a bluish color. Bluish is a little happier of a color. So this is my first pass on the pond, but I wanted to get the rest of it in before I decided if I wanted to go darker or not. And here I started going off the page so I will back out so you can see more of the scene. I'm using a slightly different blue, a more muted blue for the snow both in the foreground and the background because I thought it would be nice to have some differentiation between that and the pond. Even though when you're looking out on a snowy scene, you're usually going to see a lot of the same kind of colors in both the ice and the snow. But I wanted to create some focus on that center portion so I wanted those colors to be brighter. So the B9s, since the 9 is a high number, if you've taken my Copic Jumpstart class, you'll know that the high number means that it's a desaturated color. So see how gray that is? And I'm going to add a little bit of the B91 just because it's a slightly brighter color. It's just lighter and it won't be too dim. But in the distance, anything in the far distance in your scene is always going to be a little more desaturated. Your more saturated colors are going to be closer to you. Yes, of course, you're doing a special kind of scene, which you're trying to draw attention to the scene in the background. And now I wanted to build up a sky that was going to go from dark at the top down toward the bottom, where it's going to be a little bit lighter. And I'll create some just really soft mountains in that distance. I want to just some shapes there. So I'll create just a few little swooshes of color to give the sky somewhere to stop at the bottom and create these sort of mini mountains, not real peaks, not huge peaks. If you're in Colorado or something, you might want to draw yourself some bigger mountains and then I'll go over this again. A lot of times with coloring scenes, lots of folks stop far too soon and you need to put more ink on in order to get it to really blend. So that's what I'm doing here is adding more color. And I'm leaving that center section, that little streak in the middle so that I can create that area where the light is going to come down through the sky. I'll do more things to it, in particular like taking this B95 marker and going over it, which is lighter than the B97. So it's going to eat away just a little bit at the B95 on the outside edges and give me that sort of that little shape coming down the center. And I thought I'd add a little bit more to my ice for the time being just to see how dark I want to get that. If I wanted to add more to it, remember that Copic marker always dries a little bit lighter because it wets the paper. And when that moisture starts to dry, the colors will get lighter. So go back and check your work as you go. The trees, I wanted to do something fun with. I wanted them to be a little more on the playful side. And I started putting like a light green in them. And I thought, wait a minute, how about a little bit of pink? Let's throw some pink in there. That would be kind of fun to make them sort of sparkly trees in the distance and then they decided I wanted darker color because the colors and colors I had selected weren't quite rich enough. So I added some more color on top of that and richer pink to go with that as well because I wanted to add some white details to the trees and I needed richer colors so that white detail will show up. And now for the pixie dust coming down from the center of the sky, or you could think of it as spinning up from them as they are twirling around on the ice. One thing that I thought would be really fun with this card, I almost did it for this video, was to rig up a mechanism for them to spin around in the center of the card. And I ran out of time, so we just did coloring instead. That would be a really fun way to create some action, some live action here on the card would be to make them spin. So using the colorless blender and a white pen to emphasize my little pixie dust and depending on how your sky went behind there, you could decide whether or not you wanted to add more or less. Let's strengthen up some shadows down there on that log and then add my white pen detail. And you can see if the color had been much lighter than this, the white pen wouldn't really show up all that much. But I wanted instead of those horizontal lines that are very static, I wanted them to be sort of loopy, happy little lines of garland. Added some stars to the sky and then added just a little bit more color to the outside of the ice, which makes the inside portion sparkle all that much more and be even more intense in the contrast. Added a few shadows underneath of the trees and strengthen up that shadow in the front and all I have to do is add the sentiment on the inside of the card and it's ready for my Christmas box, which is good and full this year. I'm so excited. I'm going to be sending out a ton of Christmas cards, not only to friends and family, but I send a lot of Christmas cards to my patrons as well as to some random folks who are students in my classes. I really do love surprising people who did not expect to get a card in the mail from me. I know the smiles that that brings when you get some happy mail. Hope you enjoyed the video. Click the like button. Make sure you're subscribed and I will see you next time in the next video. Merry Christmas.