 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Olnock. I'm an artist. I work in a lot of different mediums and make a lot of different projects today I'll be making cards inspired by the super bloom in California Whenever they have a long drought period like they've had and then they have a whole bunch of rain They're always prepared for a super bloom because all the plants get super excited That the weather is nice and that they have water There's different blooms in different parts of California But I am always fascinated with the poppies the California poppies Just love the color because you know yellow is my favorite color So today I'm going to make some cards inspired by the super bloom And I hope this is something that'll inspire you to get out whatever medium you want and do something similar So let's get started I'm working with photos to create some sketches You might know I've been talking about sketching quite a bit and in my last video I talked about the difference that you can get when you add watercolor first and then add Inked lines to it and I wanted to see if I could create something with a similar kind of loose feel using Copic markers so Using photographs I I'm starting with the general shape of the flower just looking at where the petals are and Colored all of that in a y 08 and then adding just a little bit of y 1 7 Because why 1 7 is the best color that's out there, you know just because that's my favorite color And I did try other brands. I couldn't find any really good colors for poppies in the other brands of alcohol markers that I have sorry about that and Did a little bit of blending with the y 08 but not really worrying about much because this is supposed to be loose I didn't want to get all hung up in trying to make realistic details And then I got out my SP markers and this is the small brush marker in the set These are Copic friendly markers and there's mostly Just regular writing nibs with them But there's a couple of brush nibs and they are just wonderful and I can get multiple sizes of line with it for the smaller lines I'm using a 0.2 and Creating some lines just in the shadow areas Not trying to make them even but I want this whole thing to be flowing in the same way that it flows when I'm using Watercolor and doing really soft sketches when I'm in a garden or when I'm out doing urban sketching or whatever And this was partially so that you would see there's some value in Sketching even if you're making carts you can do your sketches on cards and I'm doing this on Nina card stock Got them cut down to card front size so I can make my flowers fit the card size the leaves underneath of the Poppies are these really kind of funky. They look like little hands But they have different numbers of fingers on them and so you can make just a couple of these down below each of the flowers and Create something that has a little more detail in it rather than just the flower if you'd like or you could just leave your cards with just the flower this one is looking up from underneath and It kind of has some really interesting overlap where it gets darker where the petals crisscross so they're shading each other getting excuse me really dark and You know getting the color put down trying to figure out the shapes of The overall piece is something you can do with the Copic marker without having to commit to a line Because you can just keep adding a little bit more and try to round off a section Etc. And then by the time you get to using the marker itself You're just kind of going with it. You're just following what you've already drawn So here I'm making kind of a disc shape. I was trying to decide how much I was going to do for this There's a small disc type of thing that sits underneath the flower That the stem comes out of Add in a few more of the lines so you get the idea that these petals are crisscrossed just a little bit and Then get out the thin pen and start to make some lines again Same deal as before and I'll do the same for each one of these these Copic SP multi-liners are Just lovely pens to work with they are Copic friendly of course So you can color over them if you decide you want to do the drawing first and then color it in you can But the same reason applies to why I wouldn't necessarily recommend that because you're committing to a line and That is where the line is going to be you're not going to be able to change it Whereas if you start with the color shape underneath of it and refine that fuss around with it Then by the time you get to adding the black lines around the flower You know where you're headed. So it's a little bit easier in my mind to go this direction and Then the the leaves at the bottom are Hit or miss mine are not always perfect because it's a little tough to make those shapes and give them rounded tops on them It's one of those leaves Now this is a bud that's not open yet and they're really interesting when they're not open they're just twisted around and so creating the lines is a little challenging and I thought that would be kind of a fun one to Try and I made just a squiggle there at the bottom instead of trying to draw every single shape and Then just made a cut across it for that pedal that curls around so you can make some things that are really simple and Simplify the shapes that you see you don't have to draw in every single square inch of whatever it is That's in the photograph that you could do the same idea for any flower look for flowers that are I Would say simply shaped to begin with don't try something like a mom that has a thousand petals on it Try something really simple and these only have four petals and in a view like this where you're seeing it from the side You're only seeing like one big full pedal and then half of two pedals on either side But once you get the hang of using a brush marker to make really soft lines like this It's kind of addictive to start doing this sort of thing So I'm just gonna warn you ahead of time you might not need to buy stamps If you learn how to do this because you can try your own flowers and For Mother's Day, I thought this might be a nice idea in case you wanted to send a card to your mom or to someone special in Your life your sister girlfriends, etc as Mother's Day is coming up and Yeah, send them a flower that you have drawn and You know make a card out of it Each one of these is going to be unique because There's no way I can draw the same flower twice. That's just not possible in my world. It might be in yours But you could just like work on all the different flower shapes that I've got going and try to Replicate them a couple of times in order to get better at that flower, but I'm telling you even if you aren't 100% pleased with how yours came out. I guarantee you your recipient is gonna love it Especially when they realize you did it by hand all by yourself You didn't use a stamp. You just did it all by hand and it was gorgeous You can do all kinds of card designs with these you can make them as fancy as you want lots of layers Lots of embellishments. I will be keeping my relatively simple and doing just some more additional doodling On top of it when I get all of the drawing done It is just something that I was able to do All of these cards in one morning And I had 18 cards in my hands ready to go Mine are not going to all be for Mother's Day. My mom will get a very special other card For Mother's Day, but these are all thank you cards to send to patrons Because my patrons are an amazing amazing group of people who support my work And I could not be more grateful for each and every one of them, especially when a bill comes And I realized that I can make my bills because I have the support of this wonderful group And if you want to become part of that group as well each week I send some kind of a post out Sometimes it's the coupon codes that are due to those who are at a particular level of sponsorship Sometimes it's just a behind the scenes thing a story early access to a video or to a class Sometimes just telling stories or asking questions or who knows what it is lots of different things something each week And this week I'm going to share A super bloom painting in gouache with them. So if you'd like to see that one Then please do head over to patreon.com Slash sandy all knock you'll be able to see that one As always a clickable link is in the doobly-doo down below the video Now these cards would be great for springtime cards Not just Mother's Day, but any time during spring during summer and I felt a little bit bad When I was in the premiere of my previous video and chatting with those who came to watch it Along with if you ever want to just sit and chat with us You're welcome to come when I am going to be around at the launch time of a video I set it as a premiere and you can find that on my channel and you can see what's going to be coming up and be able to join in And chit chat with us while the video is going on asking questions along the way But I was bragging about how our weather was getting nicer We were supposed to have 75 degrees by the end of the week and it was going to be great and we have sunshine and someone was there who talked about Having fresh snow on the ground and I felt so bad bragging about my nice weather finally, but Alas, that's what happens, right? Some of us have really nice weather and others Are still suffering with the snow But this would be great to especially send to somebody who's suffering with snow So there you go Make everybody happy by sending them some sunshiny yellow cards Now for a big fail. I know you guys love to see a big fail. Well, this is one I divided this sheet of block of paper into six Sections almost said six quadrants that would not mathematically make sense And I wanted to make some flowers I'm trying to use up this block. It's not my favorite paper by any means and I just wanted to use it So I thought what the heck let me make six quick cards out of it And scribbled some color on from my albrecht or markers. These are good Artist grade markers. They work really well on arches. They move really nicely But nothing moved on this Nothing, I mean, it just didn't want to go anywhere I decided to start painting over it with regular watercolor. I thought maybe I can hide it The fact that this is just a hot mess in here And it was it was just having none of it The reason why this happens if you've ever had some paper that you've tried and like nothing moves and your watercolor doesn't move very well Or especially if you're using Water-based markers this way it shows up drastically in this It's because there's either no sizing or it's terrible sizing And I guess on this it's terrible sizing because the paper itself has never been good I've never liked painting on it And I don't like to throw things away So I thought let me try making some quick flowers out of this I wanted to see if I could at least get the rest of them To turn into flowers So I started painting a flower in each one of the sections And it worked okay. It wasn't great. The color didn't move wonderfully But I'm following the Copic marker cards that I made instead of getting the photo references out again just looking for the general shapes and Painting in with some yellow throwing in a little bit of pyral scarlet with it To darken the color and make it a little more orangey But it just it didn't really sing all that well things didn't move great But they were probably going to be fine for these cards I wasn't too worried about being able to make the watercolor ones work But I just kept looking back at that marker one and thinking that was a total utter yuck mess So once I got all of these painted in I let it all dry completely And then I got out the same brush marker that I'd used on the others I wanted to see well for one if I could recover the crazy Water-based marker one that didn't work very well. Could I turn that into something? And you know so far so good It still needs some more of the small line work So I'll add that in and see if that helps it But each one of these others just gonna real quickly zip around and do the lines on them Looking at what I had done previously as a reference And if you do make a bunch of these then take a picture of it And save that picture for the next time you need a bunch of quick cards because these are really quick I got 18 of these done in just a morning. So That was a good thing to fill up my coffers. I do owe some cards to my patrons And I'm looking forward to getting those written out to everybody And these are going to be perfect for that because I can make lovely thank you cards out of them But this this brush pen is just yummy. I mean it writes So beautifully and I am doing this at twice speed. So that's not the normal speed at which I draw these lines, but nonetheless Yeah, they work really nice Adding the small lines in on this flower made it a little bit better for sure Then it had started out So I thought this one probably qualifies to be sent as a card Especially once I add some leaves to it and then add more cardy things I'm going to leave mine with mostly drawn elements as I've said and um You can do all kinds of crazy wonderful designs with these And the way that I would think about a card made with something like this If you're somebody who embellishes a lot on your cards that sort of thing Feel free to treat it like a stamped image And embellish the heck out of it if that's what you want to do make it you Don't just you know, leave it the way I'm doing it because You're following my tutorial. You can change things up all that you wish So once all of the small lines were in I switched over to the brush pen again And then added in all the leaves and you could send these cards without leaves on them Not required to add those in there But there's something that identifies it very much as a poppy if the person Receiving the card knows what a poppy looks like Now here's another paper fail This brand has adhesive that goes all the way around so you have to shove something under there I had a couple places where I tried sticking a knife under there and exacto So I could cut the glue to pull the thing out And then I got a letter opener to try to gently slide it into The opening and try to break the seal Oh my gosh, what a Absolute disaster this was trying to get this sheet off of here And I've had that issue for every single sheet I've pulled off And I've got all kinds of little dings in the paper now Because of shoving something in there so if you get any Types of blocks that have those issues Just don't buy that one again because it's just not well made if they don't make it so that you can Actually tear the piece of paper off the front So for each one of these I put a layer of black paper behind each of the flowers And then I have some beautiful shimmery yellow cardstock that I put each of them on And then added into each one a little bit of design element And since I've been in sketching mode and in the Palswood sketches class Which will teach you how to make a whole bunch of wonderful flower sketches You can actually turn those into cards too I have been adding borders to them almost little frames to make them feel like the sketches have a little Something lovely to contain them And I've done the same thing here and added Two lines that crisscross each other so they almost look like loose stitching just something very Relaxed and instead of getting out a ruler to try to make it straight. I already have the straight line Of the layer of paper So adding something that feels very hand drawn and almost like a stitching line all the way around it Worked really really well and then I even drew a tiny bow at the top of each one so it looked like a little thread bow on it And then hand wrote my sentiment you could stamp a sentiment on there If you don't like your handwriting and then send them all in the mail in the next week or two To a bunch of my patrons if you want to see some photos hop on over to the blog link in the doobly-doo There's also a link down there. Remember for patreon you can see this lovely Poppy painting that I've done in gouache Along with a peek at these other paintings that I've done little minis that are also in the fine art sale Over on my website if you need to pick up something from others day, it's a great time to do it I will see you guys again next week. Go create something every day And share it with me if you make some poppy cards. I'd love to see yours Take care