 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnock and today I'll show you how to shape a life preserver or a donut, anything that's that kind of shape of the hole in the middle. And I'm going to be using this stamp set that's a limited release from Ellen Hudson and Pretty Pink Posh. And you can see there is a die set that you can get it with or without the dies. And cut that, cut the circles out, there's also a sunshine shape around the edge. And I originally had an idea to keep a very white front for my card by saving all of this nice space, keeping stray marks away from the rest of the paper by using the die and some masking paper. And that didn't work out, I'll explain why later. But I left it there anyway. I went to pick colors. And you can see my hex chart is colored using blending solution. So those colors are really dense. And my swatch cards that I keep in a book with pockets, little coin pockets, is not. So you can see the type of texture and the type of color that you get when you don't use blending solution. If I were to choose my colors for this, when I'm not going to use blending solution, if I were to choose it looking at colors that use blending solutions, I would have a totally different color choice. But I'm going to be using no blending solution on this. So I went with my little swatch cards instead. You can pick your colors any way you would like. But I am choosing a couple colors for the Life Preserver. These sand colors in the middle, I decided to use browns and grays, because a lot of beaches I've been on have gray sections on them as well. And then I've got the trios of colors that are going to be for the Life Preserver and then some for the water. To begin with, I'm going to put down the lightest of the three reds. And I chose a very warm one and then the mid-tone is not going to be as warm of a red. And I'm just going to fill in these areas. The first layer, you don't have to be super, super hyper careful about trying to make sure you get in every square inch of the coloring in here. But I'm going to fill these sections in, I'll do the others in yellow. And one of the things to notice is that dye that I put around it has a little gap there. It's the gap that you always get when you dye cut anything, any stamped image. They always have it a little bit outside of the image. Well, frankly, I would have a really hard time lining it up if it was any tighter than that. But one of the things I realized is if I go outside the lines at all, I'm going to end up getting myself in trouble. So I was pondering this whole time, what I'm going to do with that outside edge. I want to take advantage of it by taking a pencil and going around that and creating a color band around it. I eventually did and I hated it. So all of this is for naught. I could have just gone outside the lines and not worried about it. But anyway, let's get back to the shading. The shading on this, if the light is coming from the upper right hand side, then I'm going to first imagine this whole left bottom side is a circle like you would normally shade. The top section, imagine that being a whole separate shape as well. Pretend the bottom half doesn't exist. The shadow is going to be on the bottom left side of both of these shapes. It's going to be on the inside as well as the outside. But the inside of the whole place where it goes down in, there's going to be more darks in the center on both sides of the donut shape. There's just going to be more of it, more real estate covered by that shadow on the higher side, the side that goes more toward the sun. And you'll see this appear a little bit better when we get to doing the shading on the reds too. But I wanted to finish all the yellows first before we get to that. The dark shadow color that I used was a purple and it's a warm purple, so it's more of a pinky purple than a bluish purple. And then I can go over it with either a yellow or an orange. I'm using an orange for the mid-tone so that I can go over it and it takes away the sting of some of that purple. I did the same thing on flesh tones, not with as bright of colors of course, but I used purples for my flesh tones because purples are the complement to a lot of the colors that appear in skin. So we're getting some nice roundness here. I wanted to soften the highlight on the top of this. I didn't want it to be super shiny bright. Some people like to leave a white highlight on the whole thing or you could use a white pen to go back and do that, but not necessary, I don't think. Now I'm using a green because it's the complement to red as the shadows here. I'm doing the same thing. I'm carrying the shadow on that top side higher on the side that's toward the sun because that's where the shadow is. And then same thing down here on the bottom left. You want to treat both halves almost as separate, but then have them transition in the middle so that you don't get like a stripe of shadows on one side and the other. But just remember that the principles of shadow and light that fall on the bottom side are going to be the same principles that fall on the top side. It's just a matter of the transition in the middle. If you really need help with that kind of a thing, go look at a picture of a donut and or go get a donut. How about that? Put a donut and put it on the table and shine a really strong flashlight on one side and really examine where the shadows and highlights are. And you'll see that there's shadows on all sides of that donut because it goes in. It has dimension and goes down toward the water, but it also has highlights that are consistent because the sun is still going to shine on that upper right side of both the top half and the bottom half of the life preserver or the donut or whatever other shape you're coloring. So that is the main part of this tutorial. I'm going to zip through the coloring of the rest of this. I had decided, as I said, to use some grays and browns for the sand because that's the kind of colors that you'll see in sand a lot. So I wanted to layer those colors in here. I'm an old time illustrator. I did children's books, that kind of thing. That was a long time ago, a land far, far away. There's not money to be made unless you're lucky and you get really famous. And I was not lucky, so that did not pay. But I do love doing pencil illustration and I just would sit there for hours. I'd spend 40 hours on a drawing and layer in color after color after color because look at the richness you get in the sand here as opposed to just let me color it all brown. It's the difference in the kinds of colors that happen when you start layering things on top of each other. So I'm going to keep the water a little bit on the simple side. I was considering trying to make it look like there was stuff under the water and have some sand show through. And then I decided that was just too complex because it's such a tiny image and it's a card, so I'm not going to worry about it. But I started just layering the colors over top of each other. I didn't start with the lightest in the blues, I started with the mid-tone because I didn't want this to get too pale because it's water and it's not going to be a super bright color. And then just a little tidying up. Now I ended up, instead of leaving that nice white background because I had a few stray marks that went outside my circle, I decided instead to die cut a circle in a black piece of cardstock so I could layer it on top and made it just slightly smaller than the image so then all the places where I went out of the lines didn't actually end up being a problem. Wrapped the sentiment inside the edge of that circle and still had a clean and simple card. It was just very different than what was in my head at first. So if you're interested in this stamp set, you might want to pick it up soon because it's limited availability as soon as summer of stamping is over and all these stamp sets are gone, it will be gone too. There's also a hop on Instagram with these stamp sets so you might want to go see that if you want more ideas on what you could do with it and I will see you again next time. Take care.