 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to color some flowers with my Copic markers, and you're going to see why I tape my work down when I'm coloring here on videos. I use it at Concord & 9th Stamp sets called You Are Here, and it's got this gorgeous heart made of flowers, lots of sentiment options that you can use along with it. And I've stamped mine with some Lawn Fawn Jet Black ink, which is Copic friendly, and I'm going to trim it out in a fussy cut it, so it doesn't matter if I go out of the lines, but you can do whatever you like with it. And I'm using three colors, the RV 6 family, that I don't usually use. They stay in my bag and they don't get pulled out very often because, I don't know, when I pull out my RVs, I tend to go for the Zero family, the One family, the really bright ones, and these are more on the purple side than they are the pink, but there's definitely a pink flavor to them. Each one of these petals, I wanted to have a tip of white on them, so I'm stopping short of that, and sometimes on some petals, I color my lightest color first, other times I color my darkest first. And it really doesn't matter technique-wise if it works for you. Some people love to just do the dark color first, that's just what they always do, and it really depends on how your hand works. On an image like this, I'd recommend just trying out both, do both on a rotating basis around the card and see what works better for you because there's going to be some times when, I don't know, you're just going to do it differently. Don't feel like there's a rule or a law, but generally I find, for most things, I put down my lightest color first and then zoom to my darkest and work my way up that way. With these flowers, I'm also putting my shading on the inside, deep down into the flower, so that they're going to look like they're really deep, really rich in their curves, and that's what contrast does for you, it gives you a really strong sense of dimension. And you're starting to see why I take my work down because I was just coloring away and not looking at the monitor and realizing I'm like way out of the center here. I've slid over to the other side of the paper, yeah, we're almost off-screen, but fortunately I did catch myself each time I started going off-screen, but the reason that I'm turning the paper is because I'm flicking all kinds of different directions, and sometimes I flick toward myself, sometimes I flick away, you may want to try flicking both directions and see which works better, because sometimes there's some people that they cannot flick away from themselves for beans, but boy, they can do it toward themselves, or they can do it left or right. So, try a lot of different ways, and on flowers like this, there's a lot of petals here, lots of room to practice, both the order of which color you're going to do first and the technique for doing it. And on my blog, there's going to be a still image of this, of course, as there always are, if you want to go pin it so that you can get the stamp set and then follow my shading to know exactly where I did it on each one of these flowers. I'm doing the shading in the direction of the curve of the petal, at least what I picture the curve being, the artist who drew it may have drawn it differently than that, but that's what I'm seeing and I'm trying to communicate, so there's some places where it looks to me as though there's a curve coming up and toward you and back around the other direction, so I put an extra shadow underneath of a lip of a flower, like that little one right there, looked to me like it had a little curve flipping toward you. So now I'm going to start on the second flower and hopefully stay in the middle, wouldn't that be nice if I could actually function that way? But on something like this, I could, I've experienced stuff, I could have taped it down and just made myself flick different directions, but I decided not to because I thought I could keep my paper in the middle. Oh yeah, yeah, I tell you the things we think we can do, we think we're Superman and we're not. I also wanted to mention, because I haven't mentioned it in too many of my short videos other than the promo videos for the class, is that I have some classes that are now on art-classes, don't forget the dash, dot com. It's a new site and if you saw the promo videos for it, they all came out on one day and a bunch of people unsubscribed, sorry that I irritated people enough by making them all go live, but I wanted all of them available to you so you could get a little preview of what's in each one of the classes. And the Copic Jumpstart class is the beginner level class and it's gotten right of reviews from so many people, you can go read the reviews on the site. People who said they've just learned so much about how to color with their markers, how to flick, how to pick colors, different types of ways to transform one color into another so that you could do some glazing over top of things and make colors that you don't have, you don't have to own all the colors that way. And there are even people who have used it with the spectrum noir markers and said that that's worked and there's also people who have taken the class before they even owned a marker because they wanted to know what colors to buy before they did and the class really does help to show you exactly what you need in order to create what you want. If you're somebody who only does flowers, you're going to want to pay attention to the parts where I work on things with flowers and the kinds of colors that I use for those. So that is one recommendation. If you've taken that one already, there's another class called the Copic Hex Art class. And no, it's not the Hex Chart class. It's a Hex Art class because it's a little piece of art. It's just a whole bunch of hexagons on a page. And in the class, you'll learn 42 techniques and each one you'll fill in one of those hexagons in this gorgeous rainbow pattern across it. And it's suitable for framing in your house, your studio to remind yourself of all those wonderful techniques you used and don't forget to use them. You take that class, just take the class and go, oh, I did it. And it's done. Go and use those things. Find some stamped images and some cards that you want to use those on. And then make sure you use the class hashtag Copic Hex Art to share them. Because I would love to see what you learn from the class and what you do with it, same with the jumpstart. And then there's watercolor classes. There's a drawing class on there that I've been surprised has gotten new life because it sort of died on the old site. But lots of people have discovered it now and are starting to take it. I'm like so excited that they're having fun with it because it was a fun class to put together as it's whimsical doodling and having fun just drawing fun little things. All right, so our flower is just about done. Just got a few more little petals on it. And look how rich those are, both in the color and the depth and dimension that I got out of them. And that's all with three markers. So please don't feel like you have to use a million markers any time when you're coloring something because you don't. You can actually get a lot out of three colors if you pick that right kind of combination where you're going to get a dark, a medium and a light. Now, you could do these flowers in all different kind of colors too. So pick your color combination and follow along with the way that I've done my flicking and everything where my shading is on these after you pin it on your Pinterest board. And you can also use this when you're coloring other flowers. So keep it handy if you're coloring another flower and you just want to figure out where would you put the highlights in the shadows because this would really be helpful for a lot of different kinds of flowers and just knowing which flower which flower pedal is facing which direction and then be able to figure out where the highlights and shadows would be. Now, I discovered just as I was getting ready to put away my RV markers that there's a bud down here. I didn't notice that until that point in my coloring. So I decided to turn around so my shading could go from the inside of that flower again right by the stem out toward the tips. So the tips would be lighter. And then that is just about done. And I'm going to check over the flowers to see if there's any petals that need a little extra something, a little extra of the mid tone, just a little something to make them fit with all the others. One thing that helps is if you squint at things. And this one I noticed that that pedal has that little lip that curls and it doesn't stick out much. So when I covered it entirely, that little curl popped out significantly, which was kind of a nice thing to see. And I grabbed some greens and I'm using the YG9s, which are my favorite of the greens. They are definitely on the desaturated side, but these RVs are also somewhat desaturated. And if you have taken the Jumpstart class, you'll know that desaturated means it has a higher first digit in the numbers. The lower first digits are the, excuse me, the more saturated, more intense colors. And I wanted to kind of keep these in the same sort of desaturated family with the flowers being much more bright since they are a six and these are a nine. But it really does help to create that unified feel across it rather than having super bright in one area and super dim in another, using a couple of the YG9s to build up a little bit of dimension, but I'm not worried about it too much because I've got so much going on in the flowers that as long as my greens have a little bit of difference from dark to light, that's really all they need. They don't need a ton and I'm just going to try to smooth out some of that so that the leaves don't become distracting. The last touches that I did were to fussy cut out the heart and flowers, and then I took a little slice around the edge of that one flower and leaf to slip in one of the sentiments. I popped it all onto a green circle and then pop that onto a card base that's also round so that I could make a nice round card and look at the back of that. I made a little horizontal slit along the bottom, which means it'll stand up and my card won't roll away. So a little bonus tip for you on making round cards. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please hit the like button. You can click on my face to subscribe to my channel and see one of my three videos ish a week that I put out. And there's also some more videos here and a link over to the art classes website. If you want to go take some classes and I will talk to you guys later. Bye bye.