 Hi there! I'm Sandy Olnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to color a ballerina from Stamp Anything today with my Zig Clean color markers. These are brush markers that are water-based and I've used these a bunch of times before. You can find lots more of them on my YouTube channel and over on my blog, but I'm going to be using them to color a person, which we don't tend to color people very much because it's hard to get skin tones right. So what I did was just scribble on a piece of paper to find a couple of colors that worked for the skin tone shade that I was interested doing on this little ballerina. I first put down the darkest color and you can see here I'm coloring the lighter color in between first and trying not to touch that dark color. As soon as you touch the dark with that nib, since it is a brush, it's going to pick up that color and start blending in with everything and I want a little more control over it. So I'm waiting until I get a little closer to that so that I retain some of that lightness. I know I'm going to need to do a second layer of color in there and do a little bit of blending, but I didn't want all that darker brown to be pulled into the lighter brown and then lose all of that entirely. And you'll notice in the upper left hand corner are some numbers. Those are marker numbers for the Zig Clean color pens. I don't tend to go by the names of these pens or any of my markers because, I don't know, the names are confusing because one company will put out a color called Cobalt and it'll look like one thing, another color, another company will use the same name and it'll be a totally different color. So it's easier for me to maintain my focus on what the color is by looking at the number rather than a color name. If you're interested in having some labels for your Zig markers that are a little bit bigger than the ones that they come up come with, they print them really tiny on super tiny labels on these markers. There is a free download on my website and you can get that in my store and pick up that and print it on some sticky back paper and stick them onto your marker so you can see the numbers a little bit bigger. They do have the names on them as well but I go by the numbers that's why you have the numbers in the upper left hand corner. If you've never seen these markers before I would recommend buying like two or three of them first and Ellen Hudson sells them individually and I like that because you can purchase just a few and try them and see if you like them. There are a number of people who will email me after they try a new medium because they see me using something and they're like, oh I've got to have that. They buy the whole set and then they figure out they didn't like them. So I tend to buy a few of something first see if I like it and then go full set and I may end up with a few duplicates but to me it's worth it to save myself potentially buying a medium that I didn't really like. So I know that these zigs for some people are very easy for some people they're very difficult to use but you may want to try a few first so there are some color numbers there if you want to find some of the colors that I've used here and decide if you might like to pick up a few of them. I wanted to do some dark hair on this little girl so I'm using the flick technique that I use with my Copics. So don't don't think that you're getting away with not doing any flicking just because you're not using Copic markers because the flicking will still give you that look of hair. I'm starting with the darkest color and I tend to do that when I'm trying to do some blending because of the way that the zig markers work but you can see how much dry brush look that I get on this I'm using some Kansan XL paper this is a student grade watercolor paper and it tends to be one of my I guess more favorites of the papers to use with these. If you use anything that's really rough you'll get much more of a dry brush look if you use anything too smooth sometimes the color won't blend so try them out on a bunch of different papers if you're struggling with what you've got. There's a little place where I went out of the lines and I apparently did not film this part but I took a little brush with some water on it and added some water to that little spot and lifted that back off with a little piece of tissue. This stuff does lift pretty well. One of the things that I do say often about these zinc color pens is that they see water and they get all excited and they want to run and play so I don't tend to use them with water very much except for what I'm going to show you for the background so normally I like to do what I'm doing now which is blending them just with the markers and without any water. You can see how nicely they do blend so I'm going over some of that brown and black color with a grayish color which is going to give me a real soft transition between the different colors that I've got going on in her hair and as I was doing this I was trying to figure out what I was going to do in the background and I do this little weird thing where I kind of talk to the stamp. I try to see what the stamp wants to do and for this particular one I started feeling like she was on stage in a big performance. This is going to be her big night of dancing on stage in a ballerina recital so that's what we're going to do in just a little bit but I wanted her hair to be really rich and dark because I was going to have a nighttime dark scene so she was going to have a spotlight on top of her and I wanted to have lots of really good rich dark colors so I went in again with the black at the end and this time I'm going to try to leave more specific lines because it's going to give her hair a lot more texture. The part underneath was a little more for blending and now as it's a little bit drier because I was working on those little fussy areas a lot more of the lines that I'm producing in her hair are going to remain as lines rather than blending in completely. So that gives me the look that I want for her and now I'm going to color her little dress and I can do that in a couple of different colors of the Ziggling color markers and you'll see here I took a red and I'm just going to blend it with an orange and then pull the color out a little bit further and then I'll grab another lighter color and you can you can do this with almost any colors you can make almost any color blend but if you go around the color wheel I'm going red orange yellow you'll find it a little bit easier but you can blend pretty much any crazy colors together with these Zigg markers which is kind of a fun thing to experiment with. With her shoes since there's just not much there there's not much space for blending they're just going to remain a very simple orange and the focus is going to be on everything else so her shoes don't really need a whole lot more and I realized I hadn't put any color in her ponytails. I'm leaving a little white highlight because that is going to be the one shiny thing in in her and I'll add a little bit of an orange shadow down below being careful not to touch the brown in the hair because that would totally pull that color into the ponytails. So next I wanted to give her some ground to stand on so I'm going to color with one of my blue colors and give her a darker shadow right underneath of her stretch it out a little bit with a lighter color and I was debating now if I was going to do this stage in the background what was that going to look like and I wanted to give her a little more room a little more room to run here so I'm using my water brush to pull the color out and again being very careful not to touch that that brown in her legs because as soon as I touch that with water everything's going to go crazy but you see how quickly these melt into watercolor and now I'm going to zoom through the background a little bit because you'll be able to see it even though it's not real time but I'm putting the light blue color down first and I'm spreading that out toward her with the water brush so that I have a softer edge to that and the darker blue color the mid-tone blue color is going to bleed into that a little bit and then the next blue I'm just going to keep going until I get a dark color on the outside which I decided to go for black and I am going to have a little trouble getting it to work quite right as you'll be able to see and it's kind of interesting that this actually shows you when you do it quicker the differences that I was trying to make in this because not all of that watercolor right along that edge blended so I did a little work with some of the other blues to try to get that color to blend I wanted something a little bit smoother than this I kept going with my lighter ones toward the light area and kind of working that in a little bit adding a little bit more of the light blue and then going in with the water and trying to make soft edges out of it it's a little hard to control as I said when you've got a water brush that you're using and you're trying to do something very specific the floor was really easy it was much harder to get the consistent blend that I wanted to do down the side of this but eventually I did get it to work enough but what I did discover was that when I went over the black with the water brush it suddenly became a nice rich dark black and stayed that way which was interesting because I was having trouble just getting the color itself from the marker to go on and be black or at least be black enough and feel solid enough that you weren't distracted by it your eye wasn't carried away by it so when a spotlight comes down it makes it a circle around the person but from the side it looks more like an oval so I'm just trying to create an oval shape around her and adjusting the shape of it as I go to kind of make it look a little bit better and make it look right what I'm planning on it being and you know just kind of chopping off more of it with my black marker and that sort of thing to try to get it to appear the way that I want it to be I die cut out the panel so you see some of that edge got cut off and then I wanted to add some sparkle so I took my white gel pen and just added sparkle around the whole thing including over top of her it does blend in and soften against the marker kind of melts into that that wet color it wasn't super wet but it was damp and it gave it this really soft looking sparkle which was kind of cool so I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you check out stamp anything if you like to color people because they've got lots and lots of people stamps and all sorts of things over there so the links in the description down below and thank you to stamp anything for sending me these stamps to play with today because it was a whole lot of fun and you can hit the subscribe button if you have not yet to get lots more videos from me I put out about three a week and I will see you again next time I hope you get out there and create something beautiful in the meantime and I'll talk to you later bye bye