 Hi there, I'm Sandy, I'm an artist and paper crafter and today I'm going to color an active volcano. I'm going to be using the Heppy Doodle brand new stamp set that is called Geology Rocks. So it has not only the volcano that I'm going to color but it has lots of gems and that sort of thing. Fun sentiments, they do tend to put some fun ones together. But I wanted to color the volcano because, well, long story but I stamped it and I wiped off the ink from the bottom line because I didn't want it to have a hard line at the bottom. I'm going to extend it and make it a whole scene on my card and if you saw the thumbnail and that's why you clicked then we are going to proceed and make this crazy volcano. I wanted to color one as soon as I saw it in their new release catalog because I live under a volcano. I live in the shadow of Mount Rainier and I don't mind living under the shadow of volcano because volcanoes are going to give you lots of notice. It's not like a storm that's going to come up and sneak up on you and not give you notice and time to get out. It's not like a tornado that's going to pop up out of nowhere. So I don't really feel too afraid of living under the shadow of the volcano because even though I live in the line of Lahar, I think that's what it's called when the paths of the rivers of lava that are going to come down the mountain. I'm not too stressed out about it because I can get out. You can see I'm extending my lava down so it's going to go kind of take over the trees and things that are down below it. I've put down a base color and then I'm just doing some short flicks to make it look like it's trees and the rest of the volcano, all that lava, I just threw colors on. I didn't get real stressed out about trying to make real shapes or anything. I'm going to add some more colors to it. But the way that a volcano pours out the lava is not going to be real regular. So I wanted kind of lumpy shapes and that sort of thing and yeah. So I'm going to throw in some darker colors now, some E19 to add some dark, rich colors to the lava and add some depth to it. And just merge that in with the reds and the oranges and the yellows and things. I'll put a little bit of darkness right underneath that top edge so that it sort of emphasizes that little bit at the very, very top. And as I was doing this, I was realizing I was going to have to put some glossy accents over this so I can have some lumpy stuff coming down. All of this beautiful, delicious lava, which I would like to imagine it being something sweet to eat. So let's picture it that way rather than picturing it to be something dangerous, it's going to take over the land underneath and destroy things. So there you go. I'll make up a story in my head to make it less of a bad thing to be coloring a volcano today. So add some some more reds to it. And I think when lava is really hot, it's more yellow. So maybe my volcano is cooling off just a little bit because it's got lots of reds and oranges in it as well. But one of the things I really wanted to color is the sky because I like really interesting skies. If you see my Instagram periodically, you'll notice I throw skies in there quite a bit. And one of my classes, the winter, winter wonderland class has a lot of not necessarily skies, but it has some of this really soft blending of light colors. And I've been really into that lately just to play around with what happens when I start layering light colors over top of each other. And I knew I wanted some of the clouds to look like they had some reflection from this orangey yellow going up into them. But it was going to be a murky sky. But I started with this B60 and it was too bright, but I figured I was going to go over it with some other colors. So throw a little bit of it in there just to get that color started. And then grabbed a YR to add a little bit more warmth to those kind of big clouds that are right where the words are. More lovely. And then add some more clouds here and there. And this is one of those when I do these skies, just so you know, a lot of people ask me how I do them when I just post them on Instagram. There's not really any way to tell you to do a sky other than just keep coloring until it works. This this is a hot mess until it's not because even I was thinking, I'm going to have to start this over. I'm going to have to have a better plan for this sky. By the time I was done, I was really happy with it. But it took a long time to get there. This was a moment when I grabbed a T4 instead of the C2 that was right next to it and didn't look. And I just started coloring. I'm like, OK, well, I guess I'm going to have nice dark clouds then. There you go. But look at those hard edges. How am I going to make those soft clouds? Well, I'm going to start lightening up the colors around them and just put lots and lots of color down. This is not for the Copic faint of heart because a lot of folks don't want to use up their marker or they don't want to re-ink things. Well, I'm at the point where I do what it takes to get the art done. I don't really stress out about the color other than I don't like to re-ink my markers. So since I have them all, I just keep changing markers. If I need to move back and forth between T's and N's and C's in order to get it done without having to get up off the sofa and re-ink, then I do. This was, of course, not shot at the sofa. But normally I try to avoid re-inking. And I just collect a whole box of markers until I have to do one big re-inking day and do the penance of that whole effort all at once. But as I was doing this, look, I'm just still struggling with trying to get the color to start working. It's just not softening. But then I started really working in this T1 a little bit more. And the further I went with it, I started seeing a few areas that were starting to work. They were starting to finally break down those edges. And I still got this light color underneath. I got this cascade of yellow and yellow orange. You can still see a little bit of it under there. You can see a little bit of that bluish-purple underneath. I can see it. But I have this really gray cast over top, which is what I picture a stormy kind of day would be when you'd have this big volcano exploding and casting a pall over the world and everything. My final touch was I wanted to add some roughness to it after I finally got it to start smoothing out. So I took some of the colorless blender on a tissue and just started tapping a little bit of it on to add just a little bit of texture to a few areas. And if you end up with spots that didn't blend well, just do this on top of them and you could often soften that out. But look how dynamic that looks. I was so excited by it. I used a dye set from MFT, which I have been using a lot. It's just a stitched rectangle and I'm using it on everything. But look at that delicious glossy accents on there. Wish you could touch that thing in real life because I made just a couple of streaks so it feels like it's a really lumpy embossed kind of thing. Anyway, thanks for joining me. Go check out the blog hop over on my blog and I will see you guys later. Have a really awesome day. Bye bye.