 Hi everybody, it's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to do some maintenance and re-label my clean color pens and also talk about some coloring books and do some coloring. So let's begin. First the maintenance. These markers you may have noticed have super tiny letters. The names and the numbers of the colors are like super super small when printed on the marker and then even when they're on the labels they may be a little bit bigger in some cases but they're in a different location and they're flipped even left and right. All of that between my eyes and my graphic design sensibilities is making me nuts so I had to make my own labels and I also added a color key on the top so it has an accurate color representation as well and I'll show you how I did that. I took an Avery and 3M label sheet and it's just a return address label. There's 60 of them on the first page that have the number and the name of the color and then the other 20 colors are on the top of the second page already done those and then on the bottom here I'm just doing swatches of each color so I can punch a circle out to stick on the end of the marker on the cap because when I talked to the people at ZIG they said you store these either horizontally or vertically with the brush side up. I'd been storing them with the brush side down and I didn't notice any significant difference and I didn't seem to have adverse effects but I'm going to try storing them the other way and see if I notice any change whatsoever. So I'm gluing them on but I'm doing them four at a time and one of the reasons I did four at a time was because I realized when I pulled it up when I had just put the color on it I got marker on my finger so by the time you get the fourth one done the first one is dry enough to touch and to put on the marker and I'm just going to wrap them around. I'm being anal-retentive about putting my label number in the same place with the ZIG logo showing and wrap it around there and then after I'm done I'm going to put a piece of scotch tape on them. One of my Periscope viewers recommended potentially putting some of the Tim Holtz Distress Glaze on them instead and that could also work but it would be a whole sheet of stuff covered with Distress Glaze so it could get expensive so I opted to do it just with some scotch tape and the scotch tape is just barely wider than the label so it worked out just perfectly for me. Here is the coloring book that I want to tell you about I've been showing sneak peeks of these things on Instagram and Facebook and I haven't been able to link you to them because they haven't been available even Amazon ran out of them so it's an artist coloring book a little different than an adult coloring book and especially these because they have high quality drawing paper that they use and you can use different kinds of markers and pencils and watercolors and things on them. This particular book is taken from art from the Netherlands this company is in the Netherlands and they took famous artists that they have who have done paintings you can google the names of these and find the paintings online and then match the coloring I did not do that I just did all kinds of right colors because I was playing with my pens and coloring them in you can see how intricate their designs are and also how big this book is these are huge they take quite a bit of time to do but they're very relaxing and I'll be showing you how to how I color one of them in just a few minutes. This one I was playing a little bit with the water most of the coloring in this book so far has been done with clean color pen blending into pen but on the white white and pink flower I tried to use more water with it and as well on these irises I water colored the purple using the clean color pen and then layered other colors over top of it and I think it came out really really beautiful and also on the pink flower I did a little bit of water so this is drawing paper not water color paper just so you know don't do any like splashy watercolor paper with tons of water and here is my collection of pens I have them in a dollar store bin that I turn on its side and I use the handle as a little stand so my markers are at an angle and easy to grab not rocket science storage but they work you know if it works do it right so here are the colors that I chose to use for my tulip and I for the flower I decided to use all monochromatic colors I find that the I find that the blending works best with monochromatic so you're going to have your best success if you stay with things that are next to each other on the color wheel because that is the way blending goes same thing with a lot of other mediums so if you're having trouble with blending try making sure you stay close on the color wheel and you'll have a little better chance at success but here's the other feature of these coloring books in addition to having that beautiful drawing paper to color on they have printed these in half and half tone means the lines are more of a gray than they are a black so you can see they disappear as you start to color because they're so faint you can see them I mean the light is a little bit bad in here I am not sure how much detail you can see but you can definitely see the images but they do disappear so it looks like no line art by the time you're done this particular book is not for the faint of heart because it does involve actual coloring of flowers there are others in this line that I'm going to show you at the end of the video that are more graphical in nature and those who are drawn to that kind of coloring may find those a little easier to do than something like this but I wanted to show you this because they're just so beautiful I'm filling in the areas with all the different pinks and purple colors and just randomly blending them I'm not really worried about light source or anything on this I just want to add enough contrast so the flower starts to take some shape and I'm even going outside of the line so when I do this kind of coloring I'm just really relaxed about it I'm not going to stress out if I go over the lines because since they disappear I can just blend even further I can drag the color like I'm doing here past where the printed lines had been no one's ever going to see that so they're not going to know and it gives you a lot of freedom to play around with color play around with how the blending works if your pen goes outside the line outside of the image then you just extend the petal and make it a little bit wider to cover wherever your pen may a little mistake like super nice right I first picked up this coloring book by the way in Skagit County when I went up to the tulip festival this summer they had a number of coloring books by the same company and I debated getting a couple of them because I loved the other ones as well the more graphical ones but unfortunately I didn't think ahead I didn't think I was going to be excited about coloring in coloring books or have time to do so and I didn't buy them all and I have been begging everybody since then please somebody bring them into the stores I want more people to have access to them because I looked on Amazon and even Amazon had run out of them so fortunately for all of us and I'm so excited mine are on the way to me they are now available at Ellen Hudson so links are in the doobly-doo to this one and all the others that I'm going to show you in a few minutes but for now I'm going to turn on some music and let you enjoy some coloring because I don't have much else to say about this flower except to just color it want to do more of these kind of coloring book videos I just really enjoyed the process of just simply coloring for no reason no card to be made no painting to frame on the wall no thinking about a layout just color what's there I really really really enjoy this process however I don't want to be the crazy person whose channel suddenly gets transformed into coloring book lady so what I want to do instead is do a bunch of periscopes periscope is a an app that you can get for your phone or for your smart device and you can watch people who are who you're following do things now I watched Tim Holtz give a tour of ranger I watched Christina Werner open her mail there's all different sorts of people doing different sorts of things that are very interesting they're very short videos and they're not up for very long they disappear quickly so you want to have the app and turn the notifications on so it'll let you know when someone who's of interest to you is posting live and broadcasting so get the app links in the doobly-doo and I want you to let me know which of the following coloring books you would like to see some periscopes on because I bought them all I bought the entire line of them I don't usually wax on like like a little school girl about something in particular but I love this paper and I love the half-tone lines so much that I want to color like crazy now this is the Japanese designs book and I remember seeing this one in the store when I saw the flowers and I almost got it and didn't this one scared me when I saw it in the store because the patterns are really intricate but now that I've colored these flowers I think I could handle that and the Art Nouveau I think is just intriguing the shapes and the shading that can be done with them I think is going to be a lot of fun to practice my shading and I want to try some of that with watercolor and I also want to watercolor these Turkish designs because the cover the cover art on there just inspires me that watercolor can look really good in graphical designs that way now here are some postcard books that they have too so you can get a small format that you can actually put in the mail if you trust yourself to mail it and I'm buying them all I'm going to have them all so let me know in the comments down below what I should periscope and don't forget to subscribe here so you get more crazy videos from me be sure to pick up the template for the zig pens on my blog the link is in the doobly-doo down below and have an awesome day bye guys