 Hello there, it's Sandy and today I'm going to talk about graphite shading over top of Copic and this is one of those where I thought I had an idea of what I was going to teach with this new stamp set from Trinity and it went a different way. Sometimes that happens with the artwork and in this particular case it was going to be about mainly shading on Desert Storm card stock but focusing on one gnome facing toward the light and one gnome facing away from the light because a lot of people will get the idea in their head that you always shade a face in a certain way and in this particular case that's not really how it works if they're both in the same scene. Now if you've got two different cards you can certainly apply that kind of theory to it but on one picture the light source is going to be the same for both which is off to the right hand side so the gnome on the left has the shading on the left side of everything and there's going to be highlights on the front. The gnome on the right is going to have shadows on the left even though you would think that whole beard should be really white white but it's going to be in shadow. I'm going to start by putting some Copic marker down for the shadow areas and whenever you're working on paper like this that is a color whether it's Desert Storm or something else you need to adjust the colors that you choose and here I'm using colors that are darker than I probably would if I were using a white piece of paper and all these colors are going to be over on the blog if you need to know what those are. See the shading on this guy on the right all of that dark area is where the shadow is because the light is being blocked by his head whereas the other one the the one on the left has a lot of light hitting that beard. What I decided to do was use a white pencil since I'm using a colored card stock white pencil is going to show up nicely doesn't really do a whole lot on a white paper but here it's going to do a lot and I'm putting the highlights kind of all over the beard so it feels like a white beard but I'm going to be adding more to it as I went overboard with the white pencil so if you do go overboard with it there are things you can do to fix it. The gnome on the right remember he's got the highlights are coming from the right hand side there's going to be a little light that's going to curl around the edges because light does do a little bit of bending but what I'm going to use here is a graphite pencil this is a 9B my favorite 9Bs I love a good strong 9B you'll get less of an effect with like a number two pencil if that's what you've got but you can still do it with that and I'm adding in some very fine details with a very sharp pencil and I can cover over some of those areas where I went overboard with the white and also add in some detail and some darkness and on this gnome on the right hand side notice how the shading is growing and getting deeper around the shadow side the shadow side on both of these on the whole image is on the left hand side that's just what it is because of the direction the light is coming from the theory is the same even though in your brain it doesn't always work that way because a lot of people just think oh well the highlight should be on the face now here I noticed that the color had lightened enough that I wanted to darken the gnome on the right hand side because he really wouldn't have much light bouncing onto that face might be a little tiny bit landing on the top of the nose or the top of that cheek but once it was dry I was able to see that so when you're working on a colored paper make sure you double check the previous shading that you had already done because some of that may change as it dries as the liquid comes out of the paper itself so we use a couple different reds to shade the hats and in this particular card this particular picture the focus is going to be on those wonderful beards as well as the ornaments the hats are not going to be as crucial there's some shading going on there but it's not going to be you know I often will say that you should focus on the most important part like whatever you can convince the viewer of is realistic then do that make sure the viewer can see exactly what you're putting your focus on and don't worry about the other parts the hats are not crucial here they're just in an adjunct accessory the shoes that are facing off to the left are both in shadow and the light is hitting the tops of those shoes but the shoes on the right which is their left foot left feet those are turned a little bit more so the lights going to catch on them just a little bit more so they'll be lighter color I realized I forgot one part of the beard he's he's got a seriously long beard hanging way down behind the ornament so I had a little bit of that and then added some shading onto the shoes the top of the shoes but again those are not a major portion of this so I'm just going to put some color in there just to define what those shapes are as well as the arms and legs I need it just enough to be convincing and then I moved on to working on the ornaments and I didn't really test out my ornament colors on this I wanted a variety of greens to make these kind of vintage looking ornaments because they have that vintage design style so they came out a little on the funky side because a green on top of a brown is going to make a greenish brown that's just what it's going to do coloring on any kind of a colored paper is going to take on the tone of whatever is in that paper if you want pink and yellow ornaments this is not the paper to use for that particular one so you'll want to think about the tones that you want overall but I was trying to figure out how I was going to do the shading my idea in my head and this was where I had a thought of what I was going to teach in this video my idea was to put the base colors down then go through and add a wash of a gray for the shadow because a lot of times that will work and it works a lot on white paper I did not know how it was not going to work on this particular picture because I was doing this on a colored card stock so unfortunately that lesson failed but I learned some other things and hopefully you'll learn some things through this as well so I've got all my different crazy greens in here and if these don't make you think of like grandma's vintage weird green ornaments I don't know what will so there you go here I am adding my gray color and it sort of added a shadow to it but not in a real kind of strong way what I planned on doing anyway though was to add a darker hue of each one of these greens on top of that area the whole lesson in my head and maybe you can try this on white paper was use a light gray to indicate the overall shape of the shadow because if you know how to shade a circle and a sphere then if you're trying to shade all those individual little pieces all those individual colors then it's often going to be a little difficult to figure out how to do that across all those colors and make them all work together so one gray will tie it together in this particular case I went over it with all those colors following that gray that I had done but I realized I needed something stronger and brighter for a highlight so I used a white pencil to add the highlight onto the ornament and that made me realize wait a minute the shadow worked really well using the graphite on the beards so I wonder if it would work here you know this is a risk when you're doing something like this that it's going to fail and it's going to wreck the whole thing I don't think it did wreck the whole thing the ornaments are still very much in that vintage colorway but all of that shape now comes together it looks like a really round ornament because I I did the unified highlight with the white pencil and the unified shadow with the graphite so the ornament on the right I'm doing the same thing again using the darker colors I skipped the gray phase in that one since I realized that didn't really work but I'm using those darker colors to get a little bit of the shadow color on the left but there's not much difference because of the nature of the paper but as soon as I start adding the white highlight with the pencil on one side and then I'll add the same graphite on the left I start getting that roundness and it also just pulls that whole ornament together so all of those different colored shapes end up looking like they're painted onto one ornament as opposed to when you're doing every single section in a different color it can start to feel like it's a not a smooth surface I guess is what I'm trying to say because each part it's really hard to shade them all so they're equally shaded on all sides once I was all finished I added a super white highlight with of course a white gel pen because everything at christmas time needs some white gel pen from me and added some really hard highlights for reflections onto the ornaments themselves for the finishing of the card I added the sentiment onto a panel and popped it and stamped it a little bit off to the side and I wanted something to take that real estate up on the left so that it would be something that looked intentional there so how about a piece of thread this is just some six ply embroidery thread the card is popped up or the panel is popped up onto the card base rounded on the bottom and then there's no extra space at the top just on the bottom and the two sides so there's my finished card hope this was helpful to you to see me walk through some ideas in my own head and I hope you'll try shading with some graphite sometime take care I'll see you soon bye bye