 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnock and it is Shark Week and I have a new sketchbook in the house, so I thought I would combine them by doing five different sketches of sharks in five different mediums and five different styles. And see what this sketchbook does, put it through its paces. Let's do this. I've seen a number of artists start to use this sketchbook and try it out. And I realize now that they are doing a very good job at sending out the sketchbook to people so that they can get the word out, which is wonderful. But I've seen people use mediums that I don't really use, so I thought I would try it since they offered me a sketchbook. They have not paid me to do this and haven't required that I do a positive video or anything. But the sketchbook came personalized, both with the name on the outside and the letter on the inside, which was very nice. The paper on first touch was very, very soft. It reminds me a little bit of Yupo, but not really. Yupo is a little slipperier than this, but it's definitely slippery paper. It reminds me a little more of the mineral paper I've used recently and given mineral paper and stone, probably maybe similar stuff that it's made of. I have no idea how you make paper out of rocks. I have no clue. I don't need to know, but there you go. My first test was going to be with graphite. There was an artist in Germany who I saw using charcoal on this paper and he loved it. I thought, oh, let me try. I was just trying to do different mediums that I'd seen people already successfully use. He liked the charcoal on it, so I figured graphite would be a nice test. So I used a 9B. I was able to get a real good variety of values so I could get very light and very dark. I was able to use a number of different blending tools on it, cotton balls, Q-tips, all that sort of thing. And it was pretty easy to work with. The pencil just kind of slipped across the surface nicely. It erased well, so I can use my big eraser. I can use the teeth were done with an electric eraser. So there's lots of different techniques that work on this paper and it felt like the more layers I put on it, the darker and richer the blacks would get, which was fabulous because I like me some good contrast. The success with graphite led me to try colored pencil. So I started drawing a Mako shark and decided I was going to test it to see how well it blended when I just did some messy coloring. And I used some Gamsol on a cotton ball and just spread it around on here and it lifted off so much of the color. It's unlike with regular paper when you're kind of pressing it into the paper, it just didn't do much. I did try to see if I could make a flowy background and that sort of worked but it made the paper a little bit warpy so that was not super fantastic. Any time I used the blending solution on pencil, when I was using it on an area that had heavy colored pencil, it just lifted pencil off. So I would not necessarily say that that's a great thing. I did better when I just focused on my own blending, just me and the pencil, and then relied a little tiny bit on using a blending stump, but not very much of the Gamsol. This guy had such wonky teeth, I gave him glasses. So he became grandpa Mako shark instead of just a regular shark. So he turned into a little silly guy, but it was fun to draw him anyway. And I would not necessarily say that color pencil is the medium for this paper. Next up, alcohol markers, and I'll be specifically testing Copics, but this goes for any alcohol pen. Alcohol markers like to blend in the fibers of the paper. That's where all the inks get together and mix and make those beautiful juicy smooth blends. This is non-absorbent paper. So I did not have a lot of confidence this was going to work when I set off doing it, but far be it from me to just make that assumption, I thought I'll try it and see. And it was pretty much as expected. I could get a transition going from dark to lights, but I was not going to get any kind of a smooth blend at all. So this is one of those issues with it. There are some techniques, some specific drawing styles that may well work with this, but not ones that most Copic users use the medium for. Which is for those smooth blends, but far be it from me to stop the test. I wasn't going to ruin a piece of paper, I always tell you, just keep going. When you have some issues going on, don't tear it out and start on a new page. Just see what you can come up with. And one of the things that that helped me to discover is that the colorless blender works really great on this. So there could be some fun things that you could do using a colorless blender to lift, because those teeth just popped right out using the colorless blender. And I decided to try to clean it up by rescuing it with a pen and just outlining the image itself. And then I wanted to fix the kind of weird, blendy thing that didn't really happen on the top of the shark. So I put those reflection lines that fall on something when a shark is close to the surface of the water. And then I wanted to see just how much could I lift off with the colorless blender. So I threw a bunch of color underneath of them, tried to see if I could get a smooth blend and that didn't really do much for me. But there you go. It didn't bleed through, but it also did not come out very smooth. But the fact that it didn't bleed through did lead me to test some alcohol inks. And I apologize, my camera was not on. My finger apparently did not hit the button for that first green section. So I thought, well, I'll just add some more to it because this paper worked wonderfully for alcohol inks. And just moving all of these colors around was fabulous. You could do this over and over and over again. And it goes completely back to white. You could wipe this paper all the way down to white. And that was pretty spectacular. Trying to figure out how to turn a blob into a shark drawing, though, was not exactly an easy thing. Usually with my doodles, I try to find a shape of a shark or something or whatever the object is that I might be trying to draw. And I did not find anything in this blob. So I just drew a shark on top of it. And then all the rest is just the water and the seaweed around the shark. And this paper was really nice, though, for my fountain pen, very smooth. And I think I'm going to be using a good bit of fountain pen in the future in this sketchbook because it was a very nice experience. I like when the pen just glides nicely over the surface of the paper. But the ink does stay wet a little bit longer, just like it would on Yupo. So it's not absorbent paper. So remember, everything sits on top till it dries. And again, that did not bleed through at all. Sorry for the weird zoomies I got going there. Something strange going on. It's World Watercolor Month. So, of course, I had to try some watercolor. And I found out quickly why no one else has used watercolor that I could find in this stone sketchbook. I did find somebody, though, who had done some gesso on the paper and painted on it with acrylic paint. So I thought I'll try that. A quick zap with the heat gun kind of seemed to work. OK, I didn't see any major warping like I normally do with papers that are not traditional cotton papers. So I painted the background again. And yeah, I got more color on the paper, but I got a weird texture because, yeah, grounds just give you a weird texture because whatever texture you paint them on with is what happens. And if you get the gun too close, the heat will melt the paper. So apparently earlier, I did successfully keep the heat gun far away from the surface. And it did not make a mess, but it did thereafter. But nonetheless, I shall not be daunted. I shall continue my painting and just layered color on until it got dark enough to achieve what I was looking for, which is a view of a shark from underneath the surface of the water, looking upward and kind of seeing the sun up there. I have never seen that view. I have not swum with sharks. I never plan on swimming with sharks. As much as I do shark videos every year like this, I would not want to swim underneath a shark that would scare me to death. But nonetheless, there's a whole shark family up here swimming around having a lovely time. I don't know what they're swimming around. Maybe it's the person taking the photograph that I was working from. I don't know. I dabbed off some color because this stays wet for a good long time and added a few darker details like the mouth and the dark fin tips, et cetera. So we'd have the feel of being a shark. The other sharks swimming with them are just shark shapes up in the distance so they're much paler. I did let this air dry because I was not going to risk that heat gun again. The tape peels off well, but I didn't get it sealed down there in the corner very well. But masking it off with a little scrap of tape and wiping off the color takes it all the way back to white. So I could actually wipe this page down completely and do something else on it if I wished. But I might leave it here to remind myself not to try watercolor in here again because, yeah, it makes kind of a mess. My overall assessment of this etched stone sketchbook is first that etched is on their game. They sent me a sketchbook that had my name on it. Like, who does that? That was kind of nice. But that did not affect my assessment of the paper, which works really great with graphite. Works really great with alcohol ink and pen and ink. I'm going to use it for those a lot. And I'm going to try others in here. Copic marker and watercolor did not pass the test. Those like absorbent papers. This is not an absorbent paper. This paper is so non-absorbent that they advertise that you could draw out in the rain. And like water can hit it. You could spill your coffee on it. And it won't hurt anything. I'm going to be trying the spilling of the drink on a drawing. They draw on this week on social media. So maybe tell me which drawing you think I should pour something onto. And we'll see if I choose yours for that little social media test. So I will see you run Instagram, as well as back here on Friday. I'm going to do an actual watercolor, not on this paper, of a shark. Because it's Shark Week. I'll see you guys later. Bye.