 Hi there! I am Sandy Alllock and I am an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and it's time to start the Halloween cards. I always do some spooky shadow videos because there's always some great Halloween types of images and this frightfully sweet set from MFT is a door bowl. All these little cute critters who are all dressed up for Halloween. I've stamped them onto some craft cardstock. This is actually Nina Classic Crest Desert Storm, not actually craft. Craft paper will act very differently than the Nina does. I started by stamping the image in the front so I stamped my little hedgehog and then masked him out and stamped the two animals behind him. I actually had to stamp them separately because they overlapped when I laid the stamps down but I wanted everybody kind of snug in one group. The way little kids would just be all kind of packed on a sidewalk. They'd all be huddled together and you'd just see kind of their eyes. I had to make sure all of their eyes stuck out in wherever they were looking and I also made it so that the hedgehog in the front had the lowest feet and then the ones in the back, their feet just went up higher just a very slight bit which gives them a little bit more of that depth as well. For each one of these I'm doing some kind of simple coloring just to get the shapes down because when you have this many shapes in one space it's hard to tell where one starts and the other stops. Which part is actually an ear, where is there an arm, and which animal does that arm belong to can get kind of visually confusing. So you can go through and color each one specifically or you can start just blocking in color. I'm going to have some backlighting behind them because it's always fun to do some crazy lighting for Halloween cards. Even though they can all be lit from the front they can be walking toward a streetlight while they're doing their trick-or-treating. It's also kind of fun to give them backlighting because then they look very dramatic and spooky. So that's what I'm going to do with them but I need to have at least the shapes kind of settled in the first place so when I start adding those shadows I kind of have an idea where I'm headed. I'm using a really simple palette of blacks and browns on these because they're all going to be in shadow and I wanted just a little pop of some of the oranges so I'm keeping all the others really muted tones and as I'm adding each one of these parts I'm just kind of filling in the animals themselves and then here's the pop of orange for their pumpkins that they're holding, little pumpkin containers. Decided to change one of the bow ties, make the other one orange, add some orange onto little elements here and there and then the shadows because I want to start with the big shadows on the ground first. Shadows will come out from the feet so wherever the feet are make a line and they're all going to kind of go back to that central point if the lighting is directly behind them casting down on the street and then sort of figure out where you can make the, for lack of a better word, their crotch. Each one of them has their like the bottom of them so you can see I made like a little loop so that there you can see that there's two legs. I know that's kind of weird to think that I'm making all these animal crotch shadows. Yeah I'm dreading the comments that'll be left on this video so please be kind okay. And now I've got just a really simple shadow across the whole thing and that's all I'm really going to do to it. You can make the shadows darker closer to the animals and get lighter as you get out toward the front, toward the bottom of the page, but I'm just going to leave them like that and let that, let the shading on that stand. Now for each of the animals I'm going to add some darker shadows for them and leave some lighting on the back side since it's coming from the back side then they're going to have almost a little halo around them and that means that on the left and right side you might see a little light curling around each of the animals just on the tips of them. Not very much and if there's something that like they're holding a pumpkin in front of them that pumpkin's not going to have light on it because the light is behind say the raccoon so his pumpkin is going to have shadow on it. So you have to kind of in your imagination figure out where that light might actually hit so on the little fox the two edges of his face the two little things that stick out might be sticking out enough that they have some light on them but there's a lot of other parts where you're going to have some some real dark shadows on the inside of everything so even though it feels weird to cover up everything with some C5 and to just block it in it does kind of as as you get the whole piece it starts to make sense even though it feels weird to just cover up all your coloring with gray so put your coloring underneath for whatever it is you're going to do the backlighting for and then add the shadow on top and notice that here I'm darkening some of these browns before I put the gray on top because I want more that contrast but it doesn't really matter that I didn't blend it all I'm just putting that coat of gray over top of the whole thing so that it starts feeling kind of spooky like they are in that that dim light so do the same thing over here with a little skunk and the skunk of course is very dark so he's gonna I'm assuming it's a skunk I guess from the tail that he's got I did have to add a little stripe down his nose to make him a full-on skunk you can decide for yourself when you have this you know set what kind of animal he is but that is what I made the assumption that he was and so now that I've got the the darker black stuff in there I'm just gonna color right over top of all of that and then I can take a white pencil just a regular old Prismacolor any kind of white pencil that you have and reaffirm some of those highlights just around the edges of some of these parts not everything you don't want to make it look like you've just done a white outline around it but think about all the parts that might be sticking out that could have some of that light hit them and if it's something that's standing in front of something else then it's not gonna have highlight on it necessarily there's a few spots that like on the hat on the skunk I probably shouldn't have put that much white on his hat but I wanted his the tip of it to kind of stand out so there you go and I realized I forgot to put any dark shadows on the cape for the little little fox there now the last thing I wanted to add I wanted to give it a little more atmosphere not just leave it completely blank so I'm adding some trees in here there are some really great techniques for fall trees and fall even spooky types of scenes in the autumn scenes class it was lunch last year perfectly good class this year still and I'll be doing a lot of these on Instagram different kinds of fall trees or adaptations on the lessons in the fall trees class and this is one of them just using some really light gray to give a little bit of atmosphere to some trees in the background without getting heavy on color not putting a lot of leaves or anything in just a little touch of a fall tree background so you can check out the Copic mini class over at art-classes.com these are the pictures that you'll get to color in the class there's five lessons in there and it's an inexpensive class so you can just jam on that and learn how to color some scenes for your fall cards alright thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me if you like the video please click the like button share it with your friends and make sure you're subscribed and you click that button beside the subscribe so you get these delivered to your inbox and I will see you guys next time bye bye