 Well, hi there. My name is Sandy Almak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to do another in my series of holiday backgrounds with Santa is Stuck. It's a stamping Bella stamp brand new this year and I'm going to start off by giving Santa a place for his chimney to sit and I'm just going to do kind of a wiggly line with my black pen. This is a Copic Multiliner. If you're coloring right up to that line, it's helpful to do that in Multiliner so your pen doesn't bleed. But if you do what I end up doing at the end of the video, you won't actually need to do that in anything more than pencil because it turns out by the time I did this, I changed my mind on what I was doing and yeah, that's a thing that happens to me when I'm doing my coloring. I wanted to have a moon where that sentiment is, so I wanted to have the light shining from there. That's where my light source is and a lot of the coloring on Santa and on the chimney is going to be based on that strong lighting source since the moon is going to be right up there. So you want to have just a little bit of the super highlight facing the moon like up in that upper left-hand side. I even left a little tiny highlight on that poof in his beard. So those are the spots that are going to give you that dimension that looks like that lighting is coming from the moon itself. And even though most people would just leave the beard white, I don't do that. Most white objects have a little bit of color in them and since this is a nighttime scene, I'm going to add a whole bunch of this B6 color. This B6-0 is very light. I'm also going to combine it with the next one in the series, which is a B6-3. And now he's going to look like Santa with a purple beard and hat. And I know hang tight, stay with me, don't panic. I'm going to add more shadows so that I can emphasize where those highlights are going to be. Now, sometimes for some people it's going to be easier to do your background first because then you can tell how dark to get with your image. And I want you to compare at the end of the image and at the end of the whole card, whether or not he looks like he has a white beard on or not. And I believe you will agree with me that it will look like a white beard when it's all done. But sometimes the background, if you do the background first, that can help you to determine how dark to make the colors on your image itself because everything looks different based on what's near it. So you can see I'm creating some real dimension on there, so getting some shading, even though right now, since he's only against white, it looks like he's got a bluish purple beard. So now I'm going to add all the colors into the suit that he's wearing. So his little gloves and his pants and his hat. And when you're coloring with reds, I've done a lot of videos on reds because reds are what scare people the most. And every time I do classes, I always find that people freak out with the reds. But one of the things that will help you is if you find a red that is actually a red to use as your lightest color, I'm using R24. A lot of the reds that are in this kind of general light red before you get to pink are going to work about the same. And if you have the hex chart, which is available on my blog, the hex chart shows you comparison of all the reds. And you can see on there how similar lots of the different reds are. There are some that are a little more on the purplish side, little more some a little more on the tomato red, orangey side. But for the most part, they all work really well as light reds and you don't actually have to own them all. And the hex chart will show you that difference. The darkest red that I like and I've promoted this this happy little marker. I love this R89 with pretty much any of the reds works really well as a really dark red color. And then R37 is very typically most of the time used as my mid tone color, no matter what that light red is. I'm not worried about natural blending groups or anything because this color combination just works very, very well to to give you some roundness in your reds. Now, with this little guy, I was thinking it would be fun to make him look like he's a little on the poofy side in terms of his his suit because he's got so much of that fun little swirly lines in his his beard and stuff. So I was thinking, how am I going to add a little bit of texture to his gloves and his hat to make it look like he's got a fuzzy outfit on. And to do that, you can go a couple of different ways. You can either go with a light color in your race out some little texture or what I did was take my darker color and add in some dots of a darker color. And sometimes another coat of the same color is enough so that you have a difference in the color without having to switch to another shade entirely. Next up, I'm going to color his little boot. And I considered leaving a highlight on it. I decided not to. But since it is pointing toward the light, you could actually leave much more highlight on there than that I'm doing. But I didn't want his foot to be a big focus in this. Next up is the chimney. And I colored the grout first with an E4 to any kind of a light creamish light brown kind of color would work for the grout. I just wanted some kind of color in there. If you wait until afterward to do that, after you have all kinds of red in there, you may bleed your red into that by just touching the marker to it. And so I find that it helps to do the grout first. And then I picked an E07. E07 is a brownish red color, and it gives me a good color for the bricks. But I wanted these to look really realistic. And I also needed them to be darker than his gloves, because now they're starting to look about the same. The color is different, but the value of the red in the bricks and the red in his gloves is pretty much the same. And they if you squint, you can't really tell the difference between them. So I started by going in with a dark shadow color and adding some shadow underneath of the gloves first, because I knew that would be the darkest color. So I'm adding it right over top of all the area. I'm giving a little extra shadow underneath where his foot would stick out. And then from the right hand side, I'm adding some shading across the whole thing just to give my even my grout a little bit of shading. And I start to develop a little roundness in the whole chimney with the highlight on the chimney being off to that right hand side. And of course, went out of the lines, had to go get the zero marker to fix that. Next up, I did some shadows directly on the bricks themselves. And I went for a number 10. And yes, I know that's a really strong color for a lot of people. You can go lighter than I'm going, of course. But you'll notice that some of that E07 when I put the gray over top of it started to kind of fuzz out and it looks a little grayish and and modeled. But don't worry, I'm going to be adding things to fix that. So I'll add a second color of gray to add a little more depth to those bricks. And I'm going to get my shading done first before I fix that that modeling on the the bricks and then color over them one more time just with a quick coat of the E07. And again, you don't want to scribble over top of it. You don't want to pour a lot of color in it. Just want to go and pull that brick back together where it started to fall apart. And you could go in and add some detail with a white pen to add, I don't know, some of that little granular brick texture if you really wanted to. But maybe I'll do that on something else someday. But I decided for this one, it was looking pretty darn good. So far. Next up with some mad fussy cutting, I have a duplicate image so I can use that for the background. But the fussy cutting, I've cut out my little hillside and my Santa so that I'll be able to pop those on top of my image. So I've cut out a little circle from a piece of eclipse tape, some masking tape and then put my marker into my airbrush. And I'm just going to start spraying my background. I'm using the B63, which is the same darker color that I used on Santa's beard. And you can see when you airbrush, it comes out really light. And I was like, OK, well, I guess that color is not going to be enough. Airbrush puts out color in a very light fashion. It's very soft. So you can use really dark colors and get really pale shades, even though the marker you're using is extremely dark. But I'm going to add a little bit of purple to this because I wanted it to be sort of a, you know, those skies that you see that have a little bit of glow coming up from the ground and then it gets darker up in the sky portion. I wanted this to be a really soft kind of pastel color. So I'm using the B69 color, which is, of course, related to the B6 as I've already used on the card for this darker bluish purple at the top section. And then I'm going to add a little bit more of the V04. I wanted a little more of that purple color in there so that I would have a little little difference between that and the next color because I wanted to have that glow from the city down below. But I needed to have a good transition into the sky. And I thought this purple would do it. Almost is going to feel a little bit like doing some northern lights. And here we go with the yellow. And I'm just my hand is actually there. It's just off camera so I can get it down just at the bottom section. And you can see how easy it is to do the background when you don't have to mask out the entire image. I could have stamped and cut that out of the masking paper as well. But it was a lot more fun to just pop that on top. Before I do, though, I like to put a little bit of the color underneath, especially when I have the image stamped underneath, just in case somebody peeks underneath of there, that they do see a little bit of color along that edge. You don't have to color the whole image just a little bit around the edge of the darkest areas will help to make it look a little bit more, I don't know, more finished as a completed card. So next I'm going to add some stars or snow. You can think of it in either way. I'm going to think of it as stars because when I do stars, I do them just in the sky. When I do it as snow, I actually do it over the image as well. So I would put snow over top of Santa and the chimney if I were going to make this look like snow. Next, I'm going to add a little shadow underneath of the chimney so that the angle of it you can see is off to the right because the moon is off to the left. And just doing a very light coating, you could make it a lot stronger, that sort of thing, but it's going to add just a little bit of reality. So it looks like this is the roof of the house. And over top of it, I'm adding a little coat of clear wink of Stella to make my snow sparkle. I know you can't see the sparkle there. Trust me, it does. And then a little B60 and colorless blender to add a little texture to my moon by going over it about three quarters of each one of those dots with the colorless blender, makes them look like craters. So here's the finished card and I challenge you to think of that as anything but a white beard and hat on Santa. Even though we know it has all that bluish purple color in it, when it's surrounded by other colors, it still pops and you still get some dimension in those white areas. If you'd like to see more videos, you can click on any of these that are already live. I've got one more, I believe, to go on this month. And then throughout the fall, I'm going to continue doing my series on holiday backgrounds for card makers. So please feel free to hit the subscribe button and make sure you click the little round button next to that so that you have all of those delivered to your inbox and you don't miss any for your holiday card making inspiration. And again, I apologize for starting holiday cards so early, but I wanted to get these backgrounds out to you. So you have plenty of time to practice them. All right. See you next time. Bye bye.