 Hi there, I'm Sandi Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I want to show you today how I adapt bird stamps and turn them into a different type of image. This is a part of my inspired by series. I was inspired by this card. I had asked for some bird cards to come in for this particular round, and this one by Denise was an adorable card. I made pattern papers in my last video that I'm going to be stamping on in this video. So I'll link you at the end to that one if you want to go see how the pattern papers were made and colored with Copic markers. And this bird I wanted to stamp on here. I'm going to stamp two birds on here, but I'm using second generation stamping with some Hero Arts Wet Cement ink. Wet Cement is a grayish color, but it's a little too strong I thought maybe for the stamping. So I wanted to stamp it a little bit lighter. So I stamped once first and then stamping lightly onto the pattern paper that I've colored. Now this little birdie doesn't look much like a chickadee at this point. So I'm going to make him into a chickadee. And to start off with I'm just going to sketch in my shapes with a light gray marker. I'm sketching in a little bit on the wing, but the head and the little part, I'm going to call it the beard. I'm not sure what the official bird name is, any of you are birders you may know. But chickadees have a cap, the little black cap chickadees have a cap on their head and then a little bit below their chin, kind of in almost a diamond or triangle shape. So the eyes, I'm going to sketch in and then the cap and all the parts that are going to be darker, I want to sketch in the gray. And I'm leaving a little bit of a line, you can see a little white line around the eyeball. In reality you're probably not going to see much of a white there, but when we're stamping and drawing it's a little easier if you can see that area around it gives the eye more definition. And I'm putting some blue color underneath it there. I'm using a BG just because it was what I had out on my desk from coloring the patterned papers, but what I found was that leaving just a little bit of the blue-green as I added the really dark gray on top gives that eyeball life. People are always asking me how the eyes have so much life and I think that's it. I think if you can see reflections in them somehow they look more lively. The dark gray now is where I'm just going to start adding in that cap, the black cap on my chickadee, and I did forget to kind of sketch in where I'm going to have my little beard underneath of him and you don't have to sketch it in of course with the lighter gray, but it helps to sort of get it set in place so that if you mess that up you can always go in with your colorless blender and soften things out before you decide exactly how far that little cap is going to be. You could make these into any kind of bird doing the same kind of a technique. Just find a picture of the bird on Google and start figuring out where the areas of color would be if the bird were sitting in that angle. You could probably even find a picture of the bird at that angle and see where do all the spots belong, what color is where, you know, if you wanted to do birds with yellow on them or with red on them or something you could take the same stamp and do that. You don't have to stamp it onto patterned paper, but that's part of the challenge of this one was doing something like what Denise did and I like the idea of having some of that pattern in there to give it a little bit more interest and just see how that worked. And especially with this, the dye inks that I used to stamp with, if you watch the video that I'll link you to at the end, you'll see that I used dye inks for this WPlus9 and Hero Arts inks and those move with Copic markers. So some of the areas that I'm coloring over top of right now, that pattern is disappearing underneath of them. It's only remaining where I'm not coloring over it, which means that you have more flexibility. If you were coloring this on patterned paper, that pattern generally would remain. Now I'm taking a colorless blender and sort of lightening up some of that area in the bellies because they have white bellies. And before I put my shading on there, I want to make sure I lighten up some of that just to get rid of it. There's also a little line there in some of these stamps where some of that area is just, you know, the lines that were in the stamp itself aren't really going to work with the kind of bird I'm doing. So if you're doing one that has specific markings and whatever bird stamp you're using, you may have to do some adaptations. So I'm taking a gray marker now and just adding in a little bit more detail around the bird. And there's not really a science to it. You can look at bird photos and see if you can see where some of the lines would be. Just make sure you follow along the direction of the feathers. If your lines are following along with the way the feathers lay on the bird, it's going to just look a little bit more realistic. And I'm blending out a little bit of that with a lighter gray marker just to soften some of those colors. And then I wanted to add in a little more detail. So I'm going in with a medium gray marker and just starting to flesh out a few spots that needed a little extra attention. Make sure I get the beak in there kind of nicely the way that I want it. And then add part of what's going to make these kind of drawings work is having enough contrast in some areas and little contrast in others because that's what's going to make it look realistic. So even around his little body, I had to put some shading around the bottom to make it really pop. And my final step is to take a black and really add some depth on the actual caps of the chickadees because that's the only part on them that is solid black. Even though I have some black tips on their wings, their heads and their little beards are the things that are really contrasty. So this time I decided to try it on the looped circle background and see how that worked. It didn't work as well. And part of it was the pattern, but a lot of it was the color. So coloring it on green isn't the most optimal thing. So I think the hayride color that was the ink that I used for the other background worked really well because it was a very natural color. This one is a little on the electric side since the Copic marker colors in this were YG colors, which means they're really bright and intense. But it still worked enough that I proceeded with it. So I'm going to add the same process. I'm adding my blue-green underneath in the eyes and then adding in some detail around them. And then I'll add a little bit of detail in their beaks and in the caps on their heads. And same process for the whole thing. And again, you might find some stamps. If you have a set of bird stamps and they simply won't match with the bird that you're trying to make, then you may not be able to do every kind of bird with them. But these, you could even do cardinals with them. Cardinals have that cap on their head. And you could extend where that little head part comes up. You could make that point in a different direction, change the shape of the bird. You could find a bird that has a longer tail or longer points on his wings. And if you're stamping in this very light color, this wet cement color, whether you're stamping on pattern paper or just on regular old Nina, you can change them into something else. Just find a shape of a bird that you like, that you want to adapt, and just start drawing on it. This is a way for you to practice getting some drawing into you and doing more, I guess, straight-up artwork just by using stamps that you have and extending them a little bit and finding a different way to change them up so that they don't look like they're a stamp anymore. Now, this one in particular has that one little line right in his tummy there. And I don't know whether that was because of the type of bird that he was drawn to be or whether that wing was supposed to be tucked all the way up in front. But I did try to remove it a little bit or at least try to diminish it a little bit. It's going to diminish as I add contrast to the rest of the image, which is a good thing. But I wanted to try to see if I could pump up the contrast on the rest of the bird in order to allow that to disappear. And as the colorless blender marker in there starts to dry back, you'll also notice a change in it. And you may go back and do more colorless blender or you might just say, you know, I'm going to use that as part of my bird shape and call it done. Don't sweat over it too much. If your colorless blender is not really juicy, it may not have as much effect on the dye ink as you might hope that it would. So make sure you get it all good and re-inked so that it'll work really well for this and push that ink away and let it sit as well because what I find in general with all of my Copic coloring is if I let it sit and then go back in and add my final details, it really works. So here I'm adding my black very last so that I can really figure out what that contrast is that I want to have on them. Now, stick it is something I wanted to use on these. I'm taking a sheet of stick it where I've peeled off part of the backing, going to add my birds onto it and then I'll peel off the other side and add the other birds that way when I do my fussy cutting and glue them down, these are large birds so it's not going to be a big deal but if you're using tiny birds, it would really be helpful to make them stickers. So then all I have to do is peel off the background. On a black piece of paper, I'm adjusting to make sure that all of those black areas that are supposed to go out to the edge of the image stay good and black. So I'm just kind of filling them in with my marker. You can't really see it as well on white paper so you want to make sure you have something dark underneath of it and you can also do the same thing in the reverse. Take a white piece of paper and make sure your white areas are trimmed out well and that they look normal on a white piece of paper and that's going to help your bird to just look like he's supposed to be there and he hasn't been badly cut out. So here's my four little birdies and it's time to put them onto some cards now using the pattern papers that I made in the last video and I started by stamping with the wet cement ink again because I wanted to also use the same kind of techniques to give a little scene, a little setting to each one of my birds. And this one I was like, well, I can't see through it. There's some of the stamps that don't have an image on the back. I went, wait a minute, let me just lay my bird stamp or my fussy cut bird on top of it when I stamp and then I can see exactly where he's going to be. I can decide on the angle and I may not have his little feet on there but I at least have an idea where he's going to stamp. So that was just a little bonus tip that I threw in there because I discovered that when I was doing this that I couldn't see through my stamp. So I'm taking my, again, Copic markers and coloring right over top of the stamped background since the inks work okay to sort of disappear. These don't seem to ruin your markers but you may want to have some scratch paper around so that you can remove any excess. So if your marker does pick up any of the ink colors you can just scribble that off on a piece of scratch paper. You wouldn't want to leave if there's heavy ink. I would wait till it's good and dry but if there's any heavy ink you want to make sure you get that off fairly quickly. You don't want to ruin your nibs that way but I didn't find any of my nibs were having difficulty with this but I'm also using very like papers that were dry for quite some time as well as they're not really super saturated colors and not really heavy colors. So here's the next bird. This was a little more challenging coloring over top of glossy accents so you can see some of the dots in there but it did work. Just trying to figure out where I want some branches to come down to add a little bit of setting for my birdie and then adding my leaves. The leaves I'm just doing in two simple greens. I'm just making long leaf shapes and I'm not gonna labor over them and make them real fussy. I just wanted something really simple so he looks like he's on a branch without being overly drawn and overly realistic. I did add a little bit of a shadow to him, to the branch and you can either draw the legs in first or draw the legs in afterward if it makes it easier to see where your little birdie's gonna be once he's got his little stamp on there. Now this one had more strong color in the background and remember I said I didn't like it with the darker color in coloring that background and this was why, because I tried it both ways. The other way did not work because it was just too contrasty in the background. So I wanted this one that was a little bit lighter and this worked much better. So again, I'm gonna add my shadows to it and add just a very slight, I mean it doesn't have to be much at all. The simpler that background is, the more your bird is gonna stand out and you can lay your bird right on top of it just to make sure you get a real clear picture of what it's going to look like. And on the darker backgrounds, you have to use a darker color. So I switched to an E59 for these dark ones instead of the E44 that I used for the earlier ones just because you're gonna need more contrast for it to show up. And here I'm using the color that I had originally used for the shadows on the other ones. I'm using for the leaf color itself and you can still see that pattern behind it so I'm not even worrying about getting rid of all that pattern. I just want that suggestion of the leaves so that it just feels like there's a setting for the bird without being a whole lot more. So here's the finished cards. All I did was mount them onto mostly black card stock with a green layer and some of them I added sentiments onto. On that green one you can see and this one as well, the stamping worked fine on top of the busy patterned background. There are some that it won't work as well on and this one has the glossy accents and I wish I could have gotten a picture of how that Wink of Stella looks in the little flowers back there because I think it came out really pretty as well. This little guy I couldn't find either a spot or the stamping wouldn't have worked on that dark background anyway so I put the sentiment on the inside and I love how his little tail peeks out of the square that I cut him out of. And then this one I stamped in VersaMark and did some white heat embossing on top of that pattern to add my sentiment. All right, I have a link here to the pattern paper video so if you wanna watch that one from last time you can catch up on how I made these patterns and there's also a couple other videos if you're interested in seeing some more stuff. You can always subscribe to get more videos from me. I usually put out about three a week and give you lots of creativity. Thank you so much. I will see you guys later. Have a really awesome day and go color something amazing. Bye bye.