 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm gonna show you how to color this bell in Copic Markers and we're gonna do it with three different kinds of metal, even though this is one kind of metal. I decided to see if I could do brushed metal, polished metal and kind of a glittered metal because all three of those work for different kinds of ornaments and you might need those sometime this year. I realize some of you are not ready for the season as of yet but I know some are and I am because I got a lot of Christmas cards I gotta make and I created a printable digi stamp that you can print out at whatever size you want. I printed this so it works on a card and there's two versions of it. One has a lot of detail and the other does not and you can color either one or you can do what I'm gonna do which is use the detailed one as a guide for the other and then I don't have all those dots in there from the stippling but I can do the coloring and there's a few things I'll be pointing out as we go because there's some things I left out. See the openings? There's some places in the detailed one where you can see through to the other side. If you're doing the coloring on the one that doesn't have detail in it you could leave that in there and you know leave those openings or you could just forget about it. If you're doing one that's glass and you can see through it then don't use the one with the black in there because it's gonna look really weird if you're trying to do something that looks like clear glass and you want to do it on the more empty one but what I'm doing is taking my darkest color which is a Y28. This is all the Y2 family as much as I could do started with a Y21 and this is a Y28 and it's really great for gold objects and I'm just filling in all of the areas where the dots are on the other piece on the guide and then I'm going to start doing some blending around the edges of that and just start pulling the color toward the highlight area. The highlight is the center of that big area that's been left open and just kind of coloring that and blending it, scribbling over the edges so it softens. And I'm going to pull most of the color along the bottom because that bottom side is just kind of sitting in the snow. It's not getting much light because the light is coming from kind of over my right shoulder as I'm looking at the paper is what I was picturing. And yes, I realized there are no dots on that far left side. You know, it was just something I wanted to leave more light coming up from the snow. So there you go. But I'm using the whole Y2 family and I started with, you know, Y28 then Y26, Y24, Y23, Y21 in order to get that nice gradation across all of them. And when I got done with it all, I took the Y26 and just did a couple of quick strokes over the top to try to even it all out and bring it to kind of a common gold. And then I used a W7 inside those openings in the belt. I switched to a W6 because the W7 felt a little heavy and the W6 now I'm going to try to create more contrast because this was looking a little bit flat after all the coloring over top of things. That's what happens when you just keep coloring over and over and over again. So I'm just, you know, switching to a nice dark, rich kind of a gray color and then going back in with my golds again, and that's going to turn those grays into more gold colors. And you can see it looks like a really rustic kind of gold. At this point, the lighter golds in this Y2 family are very yellow orangey. So you can go over everything when you're done and bring all of that up to a brighter color. And that is the brush metal one. So now let's do polished metal, which is going to be super shiny, super shiny objects need really strong edges to things. There's some blending, but there's a lot of hard edges. And figuring out where they go is not something that I can just say, Hey, you always put one here. You always put one there because the reflections that hit a very shiny object like this are always different. And if the object is turned just ever so slightly, it's going to pick up different highlights. So here I have just kind of decided I'm going to go around the areas that are shaded on the more detailed version. But I'm making shapes instead of trying to do something that is going to feel like it's going to be blended and colored in. So just trying to do some, some solid shapes and then stepping it down next to those solid shapes with other solid shapes of a lighter color and just keep going through that Y2 family. So this is the Y26 and I'm going to leave some, you know, rough edges, some squared off edges, because that's what's going to make it look like it's shining. The objects that are shining or that are reflecting on it, you're usually going to see in the object itself. So if you've got trees on the other side, you would see kind of shapes of trees in the reflection. I'm not going to worry about that. Even though I know these bells are sitting in the snow and there's going to be trees and things, I was like, I'm not going to get it that complicated. I want to try to stick with putting the darks where they're indicated in the detailed version. So if you want to follow that after you buy the stamp, you can, you know, kind of use that as a guideline. And I'm going to put a picture of this in a JPEG that you're going to be able to download along with the images themselves so that you'll have it on hand. Just put it in the same folder wherever you store your printable images, and then you'll always have it. You can follow it as a guideline, but you can see it's looking really shiny, but that bottom is looking kind of weird. So I just kept darkening it and using darker and darker yellows until it just kind of went away. It kind of sank down to the bottom so that all that shine could sit up on the top section. I did have to go back into the interior of the bells because that, that dark gray was not dark enough. I went in with a black this time. I wasn't sure if it was going to need it at that point, but it did. The third one is going to be glittered metal. And this is probably the easiest one, even though it may look like the hardest. And what I mean by glittered, if you've ever, you know, gone into the store and you've seen all the ornaments, there's some that just look like they're slathered in glitter, almost, but they're not. It's more like a texture. I don't know. I'm sure if I'm explaining that right, but I'm going to call it glittered metal. It might be textured metal. There might be other names for it officially, but you can do this to anything you want to make it look glittered without adding glitter. Now, you know, I'm one of those people that's not going to want to add much glitter to my projects. I I just have an aversion to glitter. I know some of you love it and you could just color it and then put some glue over top of it and just add your glitter on it, have at it. And this would probably be enough coloring. You don't even have to worry about any blending, just like I didn't hear if you're going to add like real glitter on top of it. But I'm not going to add glitter on top of it because of the technique I'm going to use. So that scrap that I had printed that on, that piece of computer paper. I trimmed out the bell, nice round, simple shape so that I could spatter onto it. And I'm using some P.H. Martin's bleed proof white and a toothbrush. Just keep an old toothbrush in the studio. You'll have to play around with how wet it should be and how dry it should be. Mine, you know, it kind of depends on the day whether or not it wants me to get my finger a little bit wet. But you don't want to blob anything on. You want to have just a really nice covering like this. And then take the mask off and dry it because you can't color over it with your markers if the paint is wet. And yes, this is paint. It's kind of like acrylic, I guess, inside that jar. So you don't want to get that on your markers. If you do end up with, you know, a little spot that gets on your marker because you didn't dry it completely, then just scribble it off on a piece of paper right away and your nib should be fine. But it's better to just make sure it's good and dry. So the first thing is to make sure that those really darks get redarkened so that it looks like a bell that has more of an interior shape to it. But once it's dry, you can go over the color, all of these bumps of the white paint with the same markers that you used to color it with. Now, when you do that, the colors aren't going to be as bright. And what I found was I ended up kind of pulling from a lot of other markers. I started using things that were a little bit brighter. I used a bit of a yellow and I thought maybe yellow will brighten it up and then it got too bright. I thought, well, how about an orange? Let's try an orange. Then the orange got too orange. So I added yellow to the orange and I just kept playing around until the color was what I wanted it to be. You could make an absolutely gorgeous pink one. You could make it rainbow colored. You could do all kinds of things on top of this texture. So remember that when you're coloring anything that would normally have glitter in it and you want to make it look like glitter without gluing glitter onto it because your recipients might be averse to glitter like I am. So you might want to save them from that. I'm going to zip through the coloring of the background on this, coloring the greens. And what I usually do, I like a color for my greens as a YG something. Any of the YGs work really nicely, but they're really close to these kind of dark greenish yellows in the gold. So I decided I would go a little bolder with it. And the G07 mixed with the YG95 actually looks really nice. I was kind of surprised by that. I did look at the bell and the more I looked at it, I realized I wanted a few highlights on it. This kind of glittery stuff won't really take a strong highlight like the shiny type of bell will, but it can handle a little bit more. So I just used a brush and after you use this stuff, make sure you rinse that brush out really well because you're not going to be able to use again if you don't. So next up is going to be coloring the snow itself. And that is one of my favorite things to do to scare you because the the dark colors that I use for snow make some people break out in hives. I do realize that. So I started with a B52 for that shadow, a B41 to kind of extend it out, lighten it a little bit and then switch to a B000 for the really lightest areas. And you could stop there. There's a bunch of points in here in which you can stop. I'm just going to let you do what you feel comfortable with. I just started realizing I wanted more in the snow, like more color, more activity in the snow because snow is not just a white blob. And especially if there's shadows, if there's some kind of a tree or a wall or something in front of it. And what I was picturing as I was working on this was Santa dropped some bells off the sleigh when they landed in the snow. Because why else would three bells be sitting in the snow like this? So I started making up stories to entertain myself while I was coloring. I started kind of scrubbing around with the brush of the marker. And this is the B52 still. I just started making kind of some some marks with it. And then I went, you know, I want to darken it more. I just I want to go crazy with it. So I grabbed a B34 and I want to see is that dark enough for me? And it kind of worked, you know, I was enjoying this more. And I, you know, just kept thinking, what else can I do? What else can I do? How much more realistic can I make it? I could put some shadows out there shaped like those pine pine branches. And then I could make another tree on the other side. Maybe there's just a little opening where there's some light between Santa's sleigh and whatever is casting that shadow on the other side. And I'm doing tone on tone texture here. So that's kind of going to disappear. It's just going to melt in as it dries. It's a little B41 to blend that edge. And add a little bit more texture into it, just so it kind of carries down across the snow. But I was realizing when I squinted at it, that there's just some spots from the bells that don't pop out from that snow now. So one of the things with snow is you have to either keep it really light so you get contrast or you have to go dark. And I have a lot of medium tone in here, so I had to go dark. So now is the point at which, you know, if you're breaking out into hives, I apologize. I'm using B99 in those dark corners and a B95 next to it to kind of blend that out. And here is la pièce de résistance B99 for a nice dark shadow from that sled. And it just adds some richness to it that that nothing else will. It's just being bold and being brave. And I know that's just me. I'm weird that way. But I did add some sparkle to the shiny areas of the snow, just the the whitest parts. I didn't add it all over the place, so I could just get it in those sections. Did have to do a little clean up on the bells to get some of that off. But a baby wipe while it's wet gets rid of that quite nicely. Pop on over to the link in the doobly-doo. If you want to color this one up yourself, make your bells red or blue or silver or whatever color you want. Just follow the same dark, medium and lights and you should be good to go. And if you're bold enough to color all that snow as dark as I did, then good on you. I'd love to see what you've made. So share it with me on social media or over in the art venture community. Would love to see you there and I'll talk to you again on Friday. Bye bye.