 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm challenging myself to pick my colors by name and not by color. It's World Watercolor Month and I am going to be coloring water in colored pencil with a stamp set from A Real and I've chosen my colors, Sandbar Brown and Sand, Marine Green and Kelp Green, Mediterranean Blue and Caribbean Sea, are you noticing a theme here? I did find that I have a seashell pink and even though I don't have anything pink in here, I chose it anyway and French Gray, there's no elephant gray so I chose this whole series of French Grays so I could try out what these French Grays are. I've only used them kind of as browns because the pencil casing is a brown and I wanted to see what they're like when you just color them by themselves, what do they do? And as with Copic Markers, they have the T's and the N's and the W's and the C's, all different kinds of grays. This is just another kind of gray for colored pencil and it is a little bit warm but it also has some almost sepia tone types of properties to it as well and I was using a couple different colors of it seeing what happens when I layer over the 10% the really light one which has more opacity to it so it starts to lighten and smooth out the color underneath and then I can go back in with the dark color and add shadows back in and it was just an interesting experiment because I haven't used these individually and all the other colors that I'm using that I chose because of their names, I deliberately made myself not look at the color itself if it had an island type of name I was just gonna pull it out and put it in my pile to use. It was interesting to see how this played out. Why did I bother doing this instead of just picking my colors because I know what colors I should color with? Well, sometimes we need to shake ourselves out of our normal thinking. Do something different and this got me to use some colors together I never would have used together. It got me to experiment with these French grays. I'd like to take these French grays to a sketchbook and see what they do on a toned sketchbook paper. I kind of just have this old time sketch class sense about them. I'm not sure what that means if I explained that even correctly but I just think about doing sketches in that and I think that would be really interesting to try. So the sand colors, sand and sand bar brown, the sand color is so light and yellow it's not something I ever would have chosen. It's just a little too yellow but with the sand bar color it kind of works. Just layering the two of those over top of each other and then I went in with another layer of the sand just to intensify it a little bit because I was worried with these colors that I had that I was gonna end up with nothing bright and I needed to have something bright so it's not all a dim kind of color way on this card. So elephant is done, the sand is done and now I'm gonna move to the water and put some transparency into the edge of the water because when water is lapping up on the shore you'll see some of the sand color coming through and added a little bit of the sand bar as well and then would add in the two blues. The two blues are interesting. I don't know why they name them the way they do maybe it's like the way Crayola names things they just pick random like happy names. The art supplies that that are based on old-time pigments like pigments that have been around forever the cobalts and that sort of thing with art names to them as opposed to descriptive names those are I consider to be real names these other ones are more marketing names you know peacock green is such as like a happy name for a color that sort of thing and even these ocean colors I have no idea if they relate in some way to the Mediterranean or the Caribbean one is darker ones lighter and there are of course lots of other colors in the Prismacolor collection but I limited myself to these so I was stuck with trying to figure out how to make this work for the water and I wasn't really pleased with my coloring here but we have tools at our disposal when we are artists and I got out the Gamsol I have some Gamsol in there that little container with some cotton balls touched a cotton ball to it so I could just pick up a little bit of the Gamsol and not soak the paper and then start to blend that color and you can blend layers on top of Gamsol etc in order to try to blend all that and make it look really beautiful so just keep mushing that color around until I'm happy with it the stem or the tree trunk I guess not stem of the tree I use the sandbar brown and the sand but in a different proportion than I used on the sand itself just flip them so there's more of the darker color and then worked my way up into the coconut that's hanging from the tree the sign I was trying to figure out what to do I didn't have a regular brown but I had the seashell pink so the seashell pink is there on the sign as well as a little bit in the ear of the elephant I hadn't mentioned that there's a little bit of that color it's a little bit pinkish but I wouldn't really call that seashell pink so there you go it's another cosmetic type of marketing name the two colors that I used for the greens on the palm was just kind of interesting to see them together I never would really probably try to use them together since kelp green and marine green are the same level of darkness so they're very deep dark colors they're also both pretty desaturated and I tried both of them and one ended up being a little more brown than the other so I went for the one that was not as brown and that's just a personal choice I don't think anybody would notice the difference between the two colors because you probably can't see it here even as I'm trying to do the speed coloring to see you can see the changes that get made quickly I did some sort of light ish not light ish entirely pressure so that I could allow myself darker pressure in putting a shadow in so I took one of the French gray colors and added that into the green to try to create some kind of depth on this tree since I didn't have a light type of green I really wished I had had something because it's got sun on it it should be bright so I took some sand and threw some sand over top of it and that added some nice lightness on top so even with the muted color selection it's possible to come up with all different kinds of combinations of things so I went over both the trunk of the tree and the sign with another layer of the lighter color and then I added some detail into the tree just so I could have some other something in it because it was looking rather boring a big old stick and just I'm a fusser so I could fuss with this forever and that is kind of what I'm doing just adding some nice rich darks in a few places in order to finish it off added some birds to the sky and a stamp sentiment a little twine on top and my good vibes card is done so it's kind of an interesting experiment I challenge you to try it come up with whatever theme you're working on for your project and pick colors by that name and see if it gets you to use different color combinations on your art piece if you would like to see something a little more deliberately colored I have a watercolor video over on Ellen Hudson's channel today with a unicorn floaty yes a unicorn floaty go check that out link is in the doobly-doo I will see you again very soon take care have a wonderful day stay cool I'll see you soon