 Well, hello there friends! This is Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I am delighted to bring you the 24 Tags of Christmas 2015. This is day three, that means with four tags done every single day, we are halfway through after the end of this video. Yay! I'm very excited. I'm doing a giveaway on my blog, so make sure you click through in the link in the description down below to check that out and get more information on entering that giveaway. Today I'm going to work on some elves and I'm going to be using Copic markers. It's going to be a little longer video than the others, so I want to warn you of that. There are these darling elves from my favorite things and I've stamped each one of them onto a piece of Nina card stock and some of them I paired with other elements from the stamp set and I'm going to use different kinds of lighting throughout this. This first one is going to have upper right lighting. That means the lighting is coming from the upper right. There's also in this one, there's going to be a little goober that you're going to get to see here in a few minutes that I decided to leave in because it's educational right, so you'll get to see me screw this up but I'm using a couple colors to create some shading and the light is coming from the right, so there's a shadow underneath his hat and the light, the shadows are all on the left. Now here's where I went a little crazy with my RV10 and instead of trying to fix it right now I decided I would let it dry first and that's one of the things that you can do before you start deciding that something is a total fail. Let it dry and see what happens and when you see it in contrast with the rest of the colors on the image you might find it looks okay after all. So I'm filling in all of the little areas in my lightest red which is an R17. Now when you're coloring red this is just a tip that I give a lot here on YouTube and I want to make sure everybody gets it since we're coloring a lot of red objects during this holiday season. You want to start out with a red for your light red, not a pink. If you start out with a pink you're going to have some issues but if you start out with a red then it's going to give you the look of an actual red object. R89 is my favorite favorite dark red shadow color no matter what the light color is. You could use an R17, R14, R24, R35. There's a whole lot of reds that you can use for your base red but this R89 works with all of them as does this mid-tone R37. R37 blends pretty nicely with just about all of them unless you get into the pinks. As soon as you get into the pinks then you have to have another transition color so if I use something that has a pink for a highlight I usually have to have a four color blend because three colors just doesn't quite cut it. And then I'm going back over with the light color again to add another layer of it and look how beautiful and rich it gets. Now I did forget that one part in the hat up there but apparently it fell out of the filming because it suddenly looks like it's blended so I'm pretty sure I did that. Here I'm going over the colors again on the face and you can see that pink came out of it because it dried and all I had to do is put my skin tone over it again and boom it was just fine. So let things dry and then add another layer of skin tone colors over it and you're probably okay. You can pull that color right back to being a flesh tone instead of being like a weird bright pink little guy. I'm gonna be using the same colors throughout all of these to color so I'm using a G29 for my dark shadow. There's also a G28. They are nearly indistinguishable so if you have one you don't need both for sure and if you look at the hex chart you'll notice on there that they really do look pretty identical. If you're not familiar with the hex chart you can go to my blog and the hex chart link is right there and you want to see if you want to see that. It's a chart that I made for choosing your Copic colors and it's helpful to see how colors compare to each other so it's a visual comparison rather than numerical and a lot of people keep telling me which I'm so excited about that it's changed how they color, changed how they select their colors and I'm so so glad that that has helped people so very much because that is why I've shared it and it's you know just a few bucks but it seems to be a very well worthwhile investment for most of the people who have been enjoying it. So you can go to my blog to pick that up and there's also a link directly in the description down below to get straight to the hex chart. So I'll explain more of some of the same coloring things now using central lighting. Central lighting is meaning from the very middle and this is one of the common ones that a lot of people will do because they'll put a shadow on both sides of an object basically and that's what I'll be doing here and there's a shadow underneath the hat on all of them because that'll make the hat look like it's kind of poofing out from above his face and then at the bottom of the face so I'm just trying to to add some dimension to it and this time I'm going to give him a green hat and layer those colors on. My green marker is dying on me here you can see that I'm struggling with it so sometimes when your markers start to give you fits it's worth it just to go and re-ink them and here I've got a spot where I had some green marker that went out of the line so I just went over it with some zero marker and did it a second time I'll let it dry and if it still isn't pushing back into the hat I can go back and do it again it's best to do it in little bits a little bit at a time so that you don't end up with you know a big blob of the colorless blender pushing in so you want to let it dry so it's only pushing that ink back into it and you want to color from the outside letting that letting it push it rather than trying to just color on top of it because it'll just pull out all different directions so now let's go back and do some shading here we'll go in with our G29 and add some real depth to this and I'll put some shading on both sides of the hat so you'll see this is a very common way that people shade things I usually recommend that when you start doing any shading if you're going to try to do any directional lighting whether it's center left or right that you just pick one choose one and stay with it all the time until it becomes so natural that you don't think of anything else like you just start coloring and your mind knows exactly where to put those shadows it will come eventually I know it's hard at first but after you do it for a while it just becomes second nature but you need to focus on it for a while and what I often will do is take a stamp stamp it on a piece of paper and then start figuring out where those shadows are and I draw an arrow from where the lights going to be sketch out those shadows and then I leave that in the stamp pocket or whatever container you keep your stamps in so that I can just follow that every time it's a great way to do that work once and not have to really do anything more with it and think it's so hard every time you do your coloring if you were to do a bunch of tags like this this would be a great practice to just get one set of lighting down just light all of them the same way and just make sure you're doing the whole thing that way and my green marker is again still on the dry side I still haven't gone through and fixed it but I decided I wanted to add some darker color so I did go in with the G07 and then the G05 worked a little bit better but before I get to the next one I actually did get around to re-inking my marker if you've never re-aint your markers before I also have a video that I will link in the description on how to how to replace nibs how to refill the markers and all that sort of thing so I did a little marker maintenance so you know how to take care of your pens because these Copic markers will last your lifetime if you take good care of them you can replace nibs and keep re-inking until the cows come home so they're a great investment that way so for the hat I'm just flicking some color along the bottom and then on either side and that's just you know the same thing as as on the the green part of the hat put extra shading on both sides but then a little bit at the bottom and then I'll go in with a lighter gray and soften out all those areas where I've put that that color and just lightly flicking so that I get that soft edge you could also go in with a colorless blender and soften it if you have hard edges still but I'm trying to do a really quickly the quicker you make your little strokes the better off you'll be now upper left lighting what one of the ways that I decide which way I'm gonna do my lighting because I can clearly as you can see I can do any direction that I want I make whatever direction the stamp is facing be the direction light is coming from because then the light falls on their face there are sometimes when I deliberately do it like a whole crazy way if I made the lighting come from the upper right on this one it would be from behind him and it would be really dramatic it would be a very interesting thing and it would tell a different story if I did that and maybe I'll do that sometime maybe I'll do that over on Periscope at some point just to show you what it looks like to do lighting that's completely outside the realm of normal and maybe the day that this goes up on the web would be a great day to do a Periscope video on that but it's a lot of fun to play with really different lighting I really enjoy that exercise it's educational for my art brain and a little bit of a challenge too so if you're coloring ever becomes easy on a stamp challenge yourself to do something nut nutsy so I'm using the same colors again to just blend out the hat and I've been alternating reds and greens and stuff on their different outfits some people like to put a red hat with a green rim but I did white rims on all of them and then just alternated their little outfits to decide whether or not their outfit match their hat or not and this one is going to be one where his little his little suit and his boots will match but his pants will match his hat and you can set these kind of things up in any old different way but again as we've been exploring during this tag series it's always fun to do a couple of something and then experiment to each one slightly differently so you can see what you like because if you try each one of these you might decide well you know I really like the look of this and then you can do 10 tags in the same way and just get lots of good coloring practice in by following one tag that you've already achieved so next I'm just going to be smoothing out that color using my mint tone to just spread more color out and next I'm gonna go for this little it you know you can do some really simple things with ornaments all I did was leave a highlight put a C shape of a shadow and then blend it and left it really simple and it still looks special if you put some glossy accents on that it would look even more amazing and I didn't have to go through major contortions to make it look like a shiny globe so you don't have to put yourself through craziness in order to do that next I'll just soften out the the graze the light graze and here I'm adding just a little bit of shadow to his legs I added it right over top of the red and the the white stripes the shadow on the bottom his shadow goes behind him off to the right and then there's a little circle shadow right underneath where that ornament would be next we're gonna go for middle lighting calling it middle lighting but it means light coming out from the middle so they're around the tree which means that the guy on the left is going to have his shading on the left and the guy on the right is gonna have his shading on the right because the light is coming from the tree itself and this is something that I didn't get really elegant with but you could totally make this a night scene and just barely have their faces coming out of the background I mean that would be really striking of an image on either a card or on a tag and it would be a lot of fun to try to make it look like this tree is actually lit up there are those triangular ish shapes on the tree and you could leave those blank and color them as if they were sort of some garland running around the tree but I have a different plan for them so hang tight on that just gonna go over these and add some shading on both sides of the tree I'm not trying to make it look realistic I just wanted to make it I don't know look somewhat dimensional in a way almost like it's a metal tree is what I was sort of going for and then fill in all of the colors around it to try to soften out all that color I'm leaving that highlight edge around the entire left and right side because that's what's gonna make it look on the shiny side and then just finish that off and sometimes I'll let it dry and then I'll go back into it if it starts looking weird because there's a little mottling there but I think I kind of like it on the tree to add a little different contrast to it here again I've got another little spot where I had a little leakage over the edge and if you just color outside of that spot and let it slowly work on pushing the color back in then you know it's a lot easier than trying to scrub at it scrub at it and fuss at it and then end up with a lot more pink bleeding all over the place red is one of the most difficult colors to do that with it's really really tough I decided to make both of these guys very heavily red in their outfits because that will pull them away from the tree and make them look very different from the tree if I had parts of them in green they would kind of look like they were on the same plane as it but adding the second color and focusing on that really allows that the colors to separate from each other very well filling all of my base color and next I'm going to go in with my shadows with the R89 and as I said this is like my favorite shadow color you can get away with an R59 it's not as juicy it's not as beefy and if this scares you and if you have trouble blending with it an R59 would be an adequate substitute of course but you can see the lighting on these guys that the one on the left has all his lighting on the left the one on the right has all his lighting on the right so you can almost see that that light is starting to look like it's coming from the tree as it shines out on both of them to stamp this by the way all I had to do is mask that triangle and stamp both of them behind the guy on the left still has stuff that sticks out it would stick out on the right-hand side so I just had to use a post-it note basically to cover that up so I could stamp the two of them behind the tree so now I'm just going to blend out some of these colors this is my mid-tone this R37 is just the nicest red really really like it and now go in with some of the lighter red just soften all that color out and it's time for the white fuzz on their hats and keep the lighting consistent with what you've already done elsewhere on the piece because that's what's going to make it look like you've thought it through a little bit and now add just a little tiny bit of shading and stuff to the star and the jingle bell the jingle bell is a separate stamp had to be stamped onto the tree so I stamped it so that the little tie on it would meet up with one of the lines blend out all of my grays so they soften out you can do that also with a colorless blender lots of people who are newer to coloring than me will end up using a colorless blender for that kind of thing or much lighter colors in general because I like contrast I just roll that way now the silver pen there's also a gold pen from the Uniball Signo line and you've seen me use the white pen a lot but I decided on this one I was going to give them silver hair that's why I didn't color the hair the whole time I know there's probably somebody out there that was either getting ready to or has already typed into the YouTube comments that I missed all the hair but no that was planned haha gotcha and I'm just adding little details to them using the silver pen it's a real simple way to add a little bit of shine and if your blending didn't work really great it's a great way like those stripes would totally cover bad blending on the tree I just put dots all along each one of those lines so it made it look like each one of them was a very delicate garland and I went over the little string for the jingle bell so it looks like it's all shiny as well so there's lots of little details that you can add with a gold or a silver pen to make some of your tags look extra special so what a fun set of tags aren't these absolutely adorable if you want a chance to win one of these from me then make sure you stop by over at my blog because there's a big giveaway going on all week long and we are now halfway through the tag series for this year if you'd like to see the other ones that have already posted you can go to the link at the top and the one at the bottom has last year's tag series both of those are playlist you can check all the goodness out over there links are in the description for all the supplies as well as over on my blog so I would recommend you check those out if you're interested in these darling little stamps already I will see you guys tomorrow have an awesome day and be sure to subscribe to get more videos from me bye bye