 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I hope to inspire you to do some brave coloring. I was watching Sarah Bareilles's video called Brave and she has a bunch of average Joe wonderful people out there dancing like mad in public and I love it. I absolutely am so inspired by the fact that these people are willing to put themselves out there and I want to see us as artists and paper crafters do the same with our coloring. We can do this. Whether you're a new colorist, whether you're somebody who's done this a long time, whatever medium you use, I want to encourage you to try. Try something new and crazy and get really bold with your coloring. Now I'm going to be making some gift cards for Christmas out of this die and I'm going to be doing some stamping and coloring but I wanted to show you the die set. It's from Avery Elle and it's called Envy. That's like E-N-V-I-E not E-N-V-Y and all of the pieces fit onto a half sheet of cardstock. So I'm using some Nina cream colored cardstock. These have, in addition to all the score lines, they also have some little pierced lines around them. It gives you the rectangle for the insert, the little seals, and the word happy mail. And on one of mine, I'm going to actually die cut the happy mail out of the envelope itself and you'll see in the end how that comes out on the envelope. But let's get on to the coloring, which is what I really want to focus on today. And I'm going to show you this with Copic markers. If you're using other mediums, I just encourage you to get crazy and brave and try whatever medium you're using. But with Copic markers, it's really easy to get wussy about our colors because bold colors can scare us. And I know I scare a lot of people because I'm pretty bold already but I decided to amp it up a little bit more and I'm using a B2-8 for the background color on my penguins. And this is another Avery Elle set as well. Both of these stamp sets are from Avery Elle. This is from a previous release and the little viking that we'll be coloring is from the new release. All the links to all the supplies will be in the description down below. But I thought since I was using B2-8 for one, I'm going to use B2-9 for the other just so you can see the difference between the colors. Very, very little difference. So if you're trying to figure out what markers to buy, this is one of them that you really don't need both. I think you could use either and be just fine. I don't know that one is superior to the other. When you're making an entire background panel like this or you're coloring one area very large and you want it to be fairly solid, just color over and over a couple different directions and eventually it will smooth out if your marker's juicy enough. If you're still getting a lot of streaking, it's usually because your marker needs to be re-inked. For the white parts of my penguins, I decided to go with a B5-2, which is way stronger than I normally would use, but I figured since I'm doing this, I'm just going to dive in just like I'm asking you to do and do things that are stronger color than I would use. I did satisfy myself by using some B-Quadruple-0 to do the blending and softening because that made it feel a little bit less crazy for me. So give yourself some comfort by doing some soft blending, but I just I really want to encourage you to pick some colors that are beyond your normal comfort zone. If it takes just stamping a lot of penguins on one piece of paper and coloring them a whole bunch of different ways and seeing how bold does it get before you get really uncomfortable or how light does it get. If you're one who always does bold, go the opposite direction and see if you can do something pastel. Just try something that's far outside your comfort zone and see what happens because you're going to learn something from it no matter what happens. You're going to discover something about you as a colorist and that's what I want to encourage you to do. This is R46, which is a red that I don't normally use. I use it usually when I'm trying to come up with a light red to go with the R89 and the R37, my normal mid-tone and dark reds. Usually I don't go for an R46. It's really a beefy color and I thought, you know, like I said, I'm asking you to do it. I'm going to do the same. And I really liked how it came out. I like this color combination. Worked really great for reds. The G29 is the darkest of the greens. And if you don't have a really dark color in any shade that you're trying to use, use a dark gray with it. And if you go over it with your mid-tone, then dark grays can work for a lot of different colors for your shadows. So again, stamp a whole bunch on a piece of scratch paper and practice a bunch of different colors and see which ones work well for you. The B14 that I just used underneath them was way stronger than I was going to use. And I was going to try for a B12 and I thought that was going to be strong enough and I went, you know, I'm going to go for it. And I did. And I liked it. The B quadruple zero that I was blending out, it ended up going down further than I was planning, but I'm still loving it. I still like how it came out. I think with the contrast with all the other color, it still worked great. Now the little Viking. Oh my gosh, this guy is the cutest thing going. Isn't he? I'm going to give him a beard and mustache and hair and everything that's going to be a really rich reddish brown with some yellow as the highlight in the center of the beard because I want that sentiment to really pop. You could end up accidentally putting way too much color on there and then the sentiment doesn't read. So I wanted to make sure that that actually stays readable. You could go in with a knife and cut that sentiment out of the stamp. It's a clear stamp and you could take that out and then stamp it back in later on top or emboss it or something. But I am one of those that's too scared to cut my stamps up. So I'm just leaving it as is and letting my coloring highlight the sentiment. So the this E19 that I'm using around the edges is lighter than the E29 that I used for that dark shadow and leaving that highlight area around the edge means that I have that reddish color around the edge rather than having a dark brown go all the way to the edge. Just looks like a little reflected or bounce light and I think it worked really well. And then I'm just reversing the order of my colors to get back toward that yellow color in the center and blend everything out. Now I realized I hadn't put any of the yellow in the mustache and I thought it would be nice to do that but you could see the yellow is pushing the color away and that's just what light colors do. They'll push color away from the darks and I decided to leave it because it created some really interesting texture in there. And sometimes don't stress out about some of those textures that you might get out of your markers because maybe it's just what you needed to add some interest to the picture itself. So I've got my skin tones all colored in and as you know I always use my purples for shading and this time I went from VV02 rather than something lighter and now I'm doing his boots in the same colors that I did for his hair and his mustache except for I'm not including the yellow but this way the carpet matches the drapes. I take another one of those colors the brown color and just carry it through another part of the image just unifying the whole thing a lot more. The outfit that he's wearing I decided to just use some some dark brown and I didn't worry about even any blending because when you rock all the rest of the coloring on something no one's going to even notice his little arms they're so busy looking at that that beard that I think nobody's going to care about the rest. So it's really important when you when you want to really rock one thing you can give yourself all kinds of permission with everything else and with my helmet here I even went with a C2 as the light color. A lot of times we'd go with a C0 or or leaving it white and I think sometimes being bold is just going to show you that you can still have a really great image and not have to do things in the same way you've always done them. I'm adding of course well just after I say the same way we've always done them I add a lot of snow and details with my white Signo pen and that's what I'm doing here nice big bold snowflakes on these and I'm putting the snowflakes in front of the images so it looks like it's snowing. If you just did it in the background then it looks like a starry sky. These gift cards are going to be given during the holidays but you can use this die set anytime of year just change up the image and the coloring of course. The envelope you can either use the scallop side as the flap or the flat side. I've put a navy blue liner on the inside of the envelope so the happy mail shows through did a little more stamping and coloring and then I added a panel to the back of my colored panel since the coloring goes through the Nina card stock. I wanted to make sure I put this on here so I could write my message on there and then tuck in my gift card. This little guy uses the flat side of the envelope since it's going to be for a guy figured something a little less fancy on the outside would be great and I've glued on those little seals to close up my envelopes. I wanted to share another project that I worked a little bit on on Periscope recently and that is this little guy I stamped on black paper with VersaMark ink and then I heat embossed the purple onion design's image and that heat embossing resists ink so I took some white pigment ink from Hero Arts and I applied it with a Fantastix and I just kind of squished all of that ink in there and then I buffed it. When I buffed it the resist of that embossed ink pushed off all that ink so that the ink was only left in between that area and then I added more layers of the ink by just applying more with the Fantastix so it's basically painting into an image with pigment ink. I even decorated the envelope by just smushing on more of that ink on the flap and buffing it with that Kleenex to give it that soft look. Alright so here are some more videos the Sarah Varela's video you've got to go see that it's so inspiring to see people just go out and do something crazy and not worry about being embarrassed by it just go out and do it and I want you to do that with your coloring. So here's a couple other coloring videos as well and I would love it if you'd subscribe because you'll get more videos from me I put out about three a week sometimes more when I get crazy but I will see you guys next time have a really great day and go out and be brave.