 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock and I'll be coloring Snow Angels today. I was invited to be part of the Evelyn T Designs new release, so she sent me some stamps and I'm going to show you how to make this one, but first I want to show you the release itself and the stamps that are available and some cards I made. One is Season's Greetings, just some great greeting card sentiments that you can use on your cards. And then Bee Mary has a whole bunch of little hedgehogs in it and I made a bunch of scene cards because that's what I do when I sit on the sofa. I gave that one some interesting lighting in a house and then these three little guys are in front of a church door doing their caroling and this one is caroling by himself outside with a little mushroom Christmas tree. Next set up is called Baby It's Cold Outside and has really cute little critters that are playing in the snow and I made a soft scene in the background for that one, a little sledding scene for this pup who's more than excited to slide down the hill. Next up we have Puptastic Christmas and that is where the inspiration card came from. A little pup who is laying in the snow making an angel with the tree coming up forward as if you're looking down from above. And Winter Magic has a couple of different critters in it and I'm actually going to use this stamp set but I made another card with them anyway, jumping up and down and being Mary and having some excitement in their little lives and what I decided to do was use the little fox because I love foxes, there's just something about foxes I've always loved and I'm going to make him into a snow angel type of image and you can do this with other stamps that you have as long as they have their little arms out and they're looking like they could be laying in the snow thrashing around so that they are making a snow angel of whatever critter type they are. You can do it with little kids that have arms out and feet out that sort of thing and make this the same kind of an idea but of course the fox is so adorable. I just think he's so cute. I love that the scarf is up over his nose and his mouth because when I go out in the snow I want everything covered. I am such a wuss about the cold weather and the snow. I don't like to get wet. I don't like my nose to get cold. I don't want to be breathing in the cold air. Yes, I am a wuss and there's a reason I live in the Pacific Northwest because we don't get a lot of really cold weather. But yeah, okay, that's enough confessions. I am just coloring along with my little fox and giving some shadows to him. Now the view of this is from up above and if the view is from up above you're not going to get side lighting in general unless you've got a really low sunset or sunrise on the image. That's mostly going to just be in the top center. But given the scene, it doesn't matter a whole lot. It's not something where it's going to look unrealistic if you add shadows in a particular type of lighting because it's such a unique view. Looking at anything from up above is just not very common. So I'm going to add some grays in the little white parts of my box and use a lighter color to do some blending and to soften them up and put a little bit in the ears and then the scarf because he's got to have nice color in the scarf. You could make it really bright color. I opted for blue because if I went for red, which was my initial gut reaction that I almost did, I realized the red was going to look so much like the orange in the box that it wouldn't really stand out. And then I'm using the same kind of lines that are in the other stamp set that had the little circles around the dog and I was using that kind of as a template for this one and making some swirls of different thicknesses. It's going to be darker right around the animal and then it's going to slowly have, it's almost like water ripples going outward and they're also not going to be perfect. So you can make them a little scrubby or a little bit of kind of dots around them and that kind of thing that don't have to be really concentric lines because it's just messy snow and the rest of the scene is going to convey a lot of it anyway. I am going to put in a darker color, which is going to scare most people and be like, that's a crazy color for snow. I actually have done darker than this on some snow things. So yeah, I'm a little brave. I know that. But it's going to add some richness and depth to the snow that you didn't have before that darker color went in. But you can also, if your lines end up looking too distinct, then go in with a B quadruple zero or a zero marker and just knock everything back if that really is bothersome to you. So next up is the tree. We've got the tree that has a view that is an extreme, extreme type of view. Like it gets really big at the top because you're closest to the top and as it gets down to the bottom where the fox is to the ground, it's going to get skinnier. Same thing with all of the texture in the wood. So all of the little gnarly bits on the wood that normally if you were drawing a tree would be relatively even if you're looking at it from the side are going to be thicker at the top and skinnier at the bottom. And I'm just going to use a couple of different browns to create some depth and texture in it so that it looks very much like a tree. Although without branches, it doesn't look a whole lot like a tree right now. That's why we have to add branches in the later stage of this. And then I'm going to go over it with a middle brown just to knock back some of that excess and kind of blend it together. I am going to add some snow to it so there's going to be some snow on the side of the tree trunk. And then I'm adding shadows. I really believe, the more art I do, the more I believe in putting color in snow. So I'm putting a big shadow under the tree and letting a whole bunch of light come through on the main part of the image. But coming out from it, I need to have some branches that are going to have shadows cast. Now shadows from branches aren't always going to be really crisp. So I'm just going to sketch them in loosely and not be real overly detailed and overly stressed out about them. And letting some of them crisscross each other. Some of them are going to go right across the image itself to make some shadows so that it's clear that that is a tree casting shadows on the ground. Next up is going to be adding some other branches. So we need some branches that are going to be close up to where the person looking at this is at. And one of the things you can do is plan out these branches ahead of time and not color the white portions of them. And that's a little bit challenging to do. The reason is because if you put white ink over top of brown, it acts the same as red. You'll get a lot of bleed through. And I didn't want a lot of bleed through so I have just one skinny branch going across the tree trunk and the rest of them going across the white is going to be just fine. But you could, if you wanted, start drawing in those big tree branches with the brown right away. But I recommend going for the white first on top of some of that just so you end up with not having to have so much of the white go over top of the brown so that your snow doesn't go brown. And as I add the dark part on the upper branches, you can see it starts to look like that's above, that's closer, and all the rest down below is shadows. And so I'm just going to use varying pressure on the marker. If you press really hard, you'll get a thicker line. If you press lighter, you get a thinner line. And I'm gonna put branches in a couple different places. If you're looking for kind of how to lay them out, you can look on my blog for the still picture of both of these next time you're gonna try this technique and that's going to help you to kind of have some idea where you might lay these branches out at. Just remember that some of them might come out from the tree trunk and reach outward and some of them might be branches from another tree. So you can put them in different, going in different directions, but don't put them in every square inch of the picture. Put enough there that it translates as these are branches and that's a tree, but don't really worry about covering the whole thing and leaving like a little tiny peeky hole for the little animal to be seen through because that's a little crazy. And next up, I'm gonna put some snow on the tree trunk itself because when the wind blows sideways, it will have some snow and it's going to increase the amount of detail in that tree so it draws some attention to it because if you're way up in the tree, you're gonna see that tree trunk right in front of your face. It's gonna be right there and you'll get that perspective by giving it that extra bit of detail at the top and then as it gets to the bottom, remember you're gonna have thicker lines at the top on the snow as well and thinner down at the bottom. And then of course, you're also going to have snow falling from the sky because every Christmas card in my world has to have snow falling from it. You don't have to add the snow to it, but you can and it certainly makes for covering up any errors that you made if there are branches that look funky, just put a lot of snow in that area and you can put giant snowflakes or tiny snowflakes, whatever and put some snowflakes over top of the critter so it kind of looks like it all belongs there. And these are just really fun to do. You can take any animal to do this but of course if you wanna get this stamp set, you can do that or you can buy the one with the pup in it because it's already got the lines around it that gives you that indication. I went over the lines a little bit with a white pen to minimize them. And I use slightly different colors for each one but they both came out really cute. So check out my blog if you wanna see more from Evelyn T and I will see you guys again soon. Take care, bye-bye.