 Well, hello there, it's Sandy with a rather funny little video here today. I decided to see what would happen if I tried doing something with a stencil versus doing it by hand. Do we need stencils? I've asked myself that on a number of occasions. This one is from Trinity Stamps and makes a beautiful line of trees and you can use lots of different techniques with this. I decided to attempt it with some pencils and I'm going to be using Polychromos pencils. You could try this with anything, but first job is to separate all of the insides from the outsides and then tape it down to the paper where you want the tree to be. And I'm just going to do mine one tree at a time. You could do the entire thing because all the sheets of the stencil are set up so that they will make a whole scene. You can just line them up, make a mark on the corners and that sort of thing. What I did was use my tea strainer to create some powder and yes, I am wearing a bathroom by the way. For anybody who's wondering, I was doing this late at night. So there you go. And I used a brown pencil and a purple pencil and my Gamsol on a cotton ball. I put it in a little container so I don't spill it on my desk and that blends it. You can see that it makes sort of a liquid on the surface of the stencil. So that makes it move and blend, etc. The sketchbook that I'm working in is Stonehenge paper. So if you normally use Stonehenge for your colored pencil work, then this will be working just the same. If you use something like Nina, you can still get this kind of an effect because Nina will act the same with the Gamsol for the most part. It's when you're doing major coloring with your colored pencils that I find the Stonehenge works better. But for something like this, totally fine. Now I did add a little of the artist into the stencil by creating just a few lines here and there to add a little bit of realism. So it's not just those ghost-like shapes of the trees so they started looking real. And I just started adding more trees to it. Sometimes I added one tree at a time, sometimes I added several, and I kept moving the stencil around. You can flip it upside down and get totally different shapes of trees. I was really loving though how the two colors blended together. So you get a little of that hint of purple with some brown in there. And I wanted to play as well with this with trying to push some to the back by having them be really light and pulling some more to the front by adding the pencil detail. And I just kept working my way through the stencils. There's one of these panels that has just basically straight lines, well not straight lines or wiggly lines. And of course, as I said, if you line them all up together, then they'll be placed in the right spot. But I liked the fact that there were some that are just simple and then others that have big old giant branches coming out of them, all sorts of gnarly details because it gives you a lot of options. And there's, you know, this one that has just a little tiny bit of branches. So if you have a particular need for a certain kind of branch, a certain amount of detail, you can put this on the side of an image and get a tree out of it and be just fine. So here I've used a couple of them at once and move the color. Depending on whether or not you want the colors to blend, you can use a new cotton ball so that you don't end up taking all the color from previous. Like if it gets saturated with the browns, I had to switch so I could pick up more of the purple because the brown would start to take over after a while. Because this, as you can see, is quite a goodly dark brown color. The marks that I'm making are kind of an outline on one side that's broken. Not trying to outline this and make it look like a stamp. I just want a few little details here and there, a few horizontal lines, maybe a spot for a knot, that kind of thing. And here I'm using a Tombow Zero Eraser. I don't know if I've used this in YouTube videos before, have I? Maybe not. Anyway, it's a Zero Eraser. It's got a really teeny, tiny nib. There's also one that has a flatter nib. I'll link you to both of them. I've only used the Big Knock Stick Eraser, which is a much larger one, still comes in a stick. They're all really inexpensive and they're great for little things like branches when you're trying to make a branch look like it's in front of something, or if you want to make it look like it has snow on it, you need to erase a line on the top of a tree branch to make that work. But you can see how quickly and easy this goes, even though this is sped up several times, it also did go really fast. And that was nice to see, because quick is sometimes a good thing when we're talking about trying to make a bunch of cards during holiday seasons. This would be great for a fall card. This would be great for a winter card. It would work excellent for either one. You could just put a panel with a sentiment on top of it and use it as card background, easy peasy. I'm adding a few branches down below, because I didn't want them all up at the top, so you can use portions of the stencil, as you can with any stencil, and just use a piece of it to create particular branches where you want them to be and make the forest look like it's got more going on in it. Right hand side just seemed to need a little lacyness added off at the end, so I added one more tree out there and then started thinking, okay, how would I replicate this if I were trying to do it without the stencil? And in this next section, you'll see me try a couple of different ideas, and I will let you be the judge of whether or not the stencil won this one. But yeah, I'm giving you a warning for a reason. So I started off by putting some of the purple pencil onto the paper, and I'm going to use some dry blending with my blending stump. And a blending stump is just basically rolled up paper, and I was trying to figure out how to get it to draw through this so that I could get that soft line. The texture of the one in the stencil was so nice. I tried to figure out how to get that, so I dug out my brush. I have a dust brush. It's a really big, wide brush that will get dust, pencil dust off the page. But I still had a mess here. Anywhere where you touch that powdered pencil, it starts to press down into the paper. So I had to go back and erase it with one of my Tombow erasers. And yeah, I was able to clean it up a little bit and distract people by putting lines on it. Distraction is a good technique. And it looks like a tree, but it doesn't have the flavor of the stencil trees. So here I was going to try a different way. I put both colors into a pile because one of the things I liked about the other was that I got two different colors in the trees. And I wanted to see if I got two different colors, if I mixed them in a pile and then moved that instead of trying to make such a big pile, which made a mess. The smaller one did work a little bit better. So if you try this, definitely the smaller pile is a little bit more helpful. I tried to see if another color, introducing another color into this, would get me a little of that look of, there's almost a peachiness where the two colors mix, and it helped a little bit, but not enough to really go for it. And then I decided, okay, let me just start making tree trunks myself. Just me and the pencil with a very soft, soft pressure. And here was my mistake. I think this is probably what's going to lose the contest for the artist is that I made my trees really skinny. And the stencil has these nice, big shapes. And I think that's one of the reasons that I end up liking the other one better, because this one just got too fussy with having quite so many trees in it. If you do try this yourself, try different widths. Take a piece of scrap paper or a sketchbook like I'm doing. And try to see what you can come up with and what kind of width and what kind of spacing between the trees makes you happiest and what achieves the goal that you're wanting. Here I'm trying to thicken up some of the tree trunks, but I ran out of space on some of those ones on the left that were just so squished together. And at this point, I was ready to concede the loss to the stencil. Because I just wasn't getting the texture. I mean, the texture just wasn't there. It was pretty pencil texture, and I do normally like pencil texture. But when it was right next to what I did with the stencil, I thought, wait a minute, maybe I do need this stencil. Maybe I do like it. What I need, I'll tell Trinity this right now, maybe next year, you can come out with one that's going to be this kind of tree, but tall. Because it's not satisfying to make all these short trees. I want to make really tall trees, like the whole length of my sketchbook. I want nice big ones. So short ones are fine, and you can make a horizontal card with that. You can make a whole slimline card out of it. But I want to make a really nice tall slimline card, or just make some really big, beautiful trees. Again, I tried to distract with lines. You can decide which one you like better. Because I, yeah, I think I vote for the stencil. I think I have to. Even though I'm the artist, I have to vote for the tool. Because the tool worked really well. Peeling this off was real easy. I'm using artist tape. That's why. If you're using other tape and you find sticks to things, that might help. And the line did erase off the bottom there quite easily, which was really helpful to give me a nice clean sketchbook page. So leave a comment and let me know which one you liked better. Maybe somebody will vote for me out of just pity. Who knows? Because I know you guys are kindly, so you might do that. By the way, this Saturday is World Card Making Day. And I'm going to be live on Ellen Hudson's channel at noon Pacific time. So make sure you go check that out. I will have a reminder video for you Saturday morning. So in case you forget, on World Card Making Day, high noon West Coast time. I'll see you there.