 Well, hey everybody, it's Sandy, and I've got the coloring of this amazing image, as well as a whole bunch more information in this video. So sit down with a cup of coffee, let's have a chat. Before we get started, I want to let you know that tomorrow and Friday, on my social platforms, Instagram and Facebook specifically, I am participating in past the brush, hashtag past the brush art, Thursday and Friday, July 16th and 17th, a whole bunch of us artists are sharing our social platforms with a fantabulous black artist, and I am excited to share coconut with you, Pam Tinney, she's got a YouTube channel, she's got all the different social, I will link to all of them in the doodly-doo, go follow her and be ready tomorrow to follow me on social, but she's doing a full-on takeover. Well, this is an image that I colored recently, I'll tell you the story of it, and so many people asked for a tutorial, but guess what, I'm doing a tutorial video here. The image is from the Digi Stamp Atelier, and I found it because Pam and I were looking for things we could both color, that would be Digi Stamps that we could both get and be able to share at the same time. So that's what, where this whole thing came from, but the Afro in this one got me so excited when I saw that big blank space to fill in with hair. I am a hair nut, you may have noticed that I take stamps of white people all the time and I change them, I change their race, I change their hair, I change, I change all kinds of things, but the shape of this, I found a picture of a donut, and please don't take this wrong, she's not wearing a donut on her head, but I'm picturing the shape of this being a donut that goes back into space. So the part that's behind her ribbons is back in the far back distance, and then the highlight part is the part that's up toward the top and the front. So I wanted to put that picture there, not to say she's donut head or anything like that, but that is the way that I'm going to do the shading on this. And I chose yellow and purple, one because I love yellow, but the purple is because it's the complementary color to the yellow. You could do this with a lot of different colors. The two colors together, since they're complements, they're direct opposite each other on the color wheel, those are actually going to make a neutral. Lots of times they just make a brown or they'll make a gray depending on what shades or everything, but I wanted her hair to have some interesting color, not just plain old blacks and browns like a lot of folks do with hair. I wanted it to be exciting hair. And that is what I ended up doing. Now this one is turning out different than the other one. The size is different. This is card size. The other one was a framed size, and I actually sent that one to him as a little surprise gift for her in advance of this. So you will get to see it if you come and follow along on social. And I am coloring it a little bit differently, of course, because it's smaller. I can't get as much detail into the hair. But I'm doing the same basic thing, same kinds of colors. I think it's, I think it's actually the same colors. It might be. Although I was sitting on the sofa the day that I color the first one and at my desk the second time. But I'm creating these really rich dark purple shadows. Not that they're going to stay purple, because we don't want her to have necessarily purple. Well, I suppose you could have her. Yeah, purple hair. But I want to neutralize it a little bit now. And I'm going to start trying to blend some of it as well. So I'm using strokes instead of little flicks in order to create the texture. And I'm just going to kind of spread that color around. Now it's got that purple undertone to it, even though it's going to start feeling like it's going gray. And little by little I'm building toward that highlight. So I'm going to start switching to lighter and lighter gray markers as I start working out toward the highlight. And also going from strokes into little, I guess they're almost commas, little sideways commas, little little C shapes, something like that. Like I described what that little motion is. And then I'm going to go over the whole thing with some W2 to just tone down the yellow. Because it was feeling a little bright. I'll change it a few times throughout this. So stay tuned for that. And if you thought the hair was dark, guess what? It's not dark. Because look at it now with this nice, yummy W10. That's going to give it that really nice, rich darkness. And I'm going to create some area in the deepest darkest shadow that is done with brush strokes. And then start to make the same little marks again to create that texture to see if I can do them a little tinier this time. And all of that texture that I'm leaving is going to allow the purple color to come through from underneath. And I want some of that to show. So I'm not trying to just color right over top of everything. I just want to start building these layers that go out and out and out. If I had done all of the black parts first of her hair, all of these dark colors, instead of doing the purple first, then every time I touched it with purple later, it would start to dull everything back again. And I want those really darks to remain really, really dark. So I'll just slowly work my way toward the highlight and get looser and looser with the... I don't know what you call it, the density. Yes, that's it, the density of the little texture that I'm making. And I'm allowing on the left side for some of that to be that purple to show more. And then on the right side, it's going to be the yellow at the top in the highlight, showing more. And just knowing that I can change the color of this at any time, because I can glaze over top of it in a lot of my coloring. I do just a glaze of a color in order to change the overall tone of something if I didn't like it. I'm also going to start breaking up some of these areas up here, because she's not going to be a uniform, shall we say, doughnut. Going back to that doughnut analogy, she has texture in her hair. And it's going to have shadows in different places. So it's certainly appropriate to have the modulation of those colors happen across, up into the highlights. And one of the other things that I am going to be doing on her skin and everything, I'm going to talk about that now while I finish these details, is that I'm going to give her really strong shadows, strong light coming directly from one side. I've already established the light with that yellow highlight, but I'm going to increase that when I start to color her face and her skin. Now, if you're trying to do this and you don't know where to put the shadows, by all means, Google it, go find a picture, find a description of, you know, woman in Afro strong light or something and see if you can find something like that. And just scroll through and see if you can find a picture of the face in the direction that you wanted to be looking. The shoulder, you know, find something. I'm sure there's somebody with a shoulder like this. I happen to know this just because I've done enough art to have a clue how to how to make this happen. But you can certainly Google for it to get some help in finding that. You can also go to my blog and find the picture of this so that you can then actually follow along with what I've created. And I am going to use purple tones in her skin. I do that with lots of different skin, all ethnicity. Ethnically, I can talk now, but I'm using that really dark BB 08. And I know it's going to like put some people out. Breathe, breathe. It's going to be okay. I promise. And I'm going to put the deepest, darkest shadows in. And then I'm going to start working out with a lighter purple as I get these shadows, these strong shadows built up. The light is going to be hitting her shoulder and it's going to be hitting certain highlights on her face. So her nose, part of her, her, let's see, her left cheek and a little bit of her tiny bit of her right cheek, a little bit of her forehead. So that's some highlights on her lips. And I'll have to deal with the eyes as well. Remember, the eyes also come in and out of shadow. Her right eye, turn around her right eye, what you're looking at on the left side is going to have a shadow because there's a shadow on that side of her face. So we're going to put shadows in there as well. And I want you to notice, as I do this to the changing tone, the changing color for the rest of the image is going to change based on how dark she is. So if I make her really dark, her hair is going to look lighter by comparison. So bear that in mind when you choose your first layers of colors. If you go too light, you're going to have to continually add more and more. So sometimes it's things like this is really dark purples and this medium purple that's going to push me to put stronger colors in there. So it goes with the tones in her hair. I'm also going to be adding a background behind it. And I'm going to be talking about something else when I get to that point, because I have another thing I want to chat about. But the shadows and highlights in a background can also play into the light on the image. I had an art teacher once who told me something that just has worked out genius on her. The highlight side, I'm going to put darker color behind. And the shadow side, I'm going to put lighter color behind it. That's going to help both sides of her to stand out against the background and create a really interesting tension possible thing. So if I forget to mention that later, at least I've mentioned it now. But I'm going over her skin tone with the Browns E37 delicious brown. I love this color. And I'm going over the purple, it's pulling it into the skin tone. But it's leaving that undercoat of purple, which gives it more realism. If you're just using only Browns, you're going to get something that that of course looks like skin because it's a person, but it gets more realistic when you can actually incorporate some realistic colors underneath. If you look at your skin, you have green veins and blue veins and purple veins. There's all different kinds of colors running under your skin. Your blood is is kind of showing through depending on how thin your skin is minus showing through more in my old age than it wants to. But nonetheless, that's one of the reasons I use these purples is to pull in that realism. And I'm just slowly walking the colors back toward the light colors and the highlights. She's got this rich, dark black skin. She's not going to have white highlights on her skin. She's she's very rich and dark in color. And I want to celebrate that. So just kind of going over and smoothing things. Now, you may find that you want to wait and add more layers of color later because as it dries, it's going to lighten as you put other colors in, it's going to look different comparison to those colors. And it's also just going to sit there and work its way into the paper. And as the alcohol dries, and the paper dries, you're just going to have more, more color that you might find it to add. So here's where I'm adding some of the shadow on the eyes. Just adding a little bit of blue in there and look how it makes her look alive by doing something in there rather than just leaving them as big glowing white globes in the middle of her face really makes a big difference. And at the very end, I'm going to go in and add a gray in there and knock that one eye further back into shadow. A little secret about lips is the top lip is always darker than the bottom lip. And then there's a little highlight on the top of the bottom lip, sometimes on the top of the top lip as well. But there is the face. While I finish the coloring of this image, I wanted to share with you my secret plan to take over the universe. My friends know I am always coming up with a secret plan to dig over the universe. I've always got something cooking of some kind in all different sectors and all different things. And this one, I really would like some help in making this happen. And I think we could do it. So I'm going to ask you to join me in trying to diversify our industry from the bottom up. Now we don't have any say in who companies hire. We can't force anybody to hire black people. We can't force them to bring diversity into their design teams. We can't make them do anything because companies are independent companies. They don't have to listen to any of us and they don't care what I have to say. So I'm going to put it out there that I think we can do that as users of the products from the bottom up. And let me explain you what I'm thinking. A lot of companies will not produce a product that they don't think there's a market for. That's just normal business. And as long as most of the crafting that they see going on, and the journal pages and all that stuff that that gets in front of their eyes using their products, as long as that stuff is all very white, they're going to believe that that is what the market wants. I have been calling the Human Rainbow for like 10 or 12 years now, something like that. And I have not been very good about sharing that with the companies that I'm using the stamps and changing into the Human Rainbow. And I am planning on doing that. I definitely am. Because we need more than these wonderful Etsy sellers who sell Digi stamps that there are a ton of them out there to have great images. But I want to see them in the regular product lines. And in order to get them in the product lines, we need those companies to see that there's a market for it. And if they think that a tiny, tiny percentage is going to want to color the images, they're not going to make them. So my suggestion is that we all start going out there and finding the companies that make good people stamps, don't go to the ones that make little apples, and the ones that make text stamps and stuff, and ask them to try to make some stamps like this image, they're just not going to be able to. There's nothing that translates from drawing a cute little animal to drawing an elegant, powerful woman like this. That just doesn't translate. And I can tell you as someone who can draw that it is really, really flippin' hard to draw a person in pen and ink that doesn't look awkward. I have tried it. I really have. I am terrible at that. I can color it like nobody's business, but I am just not capable of drawing it. So I'm not going to go to companies and say you need to start drawing these kinds of images. But I can go to them and say, hey, look, I took this great image of yours and I changed it into this other kind of person and they changed the hair and the skin tone and let them see that, not to put it in their face or anything, but to let them know there's a market for that. And the way that we let them know about that is to tag them on social media because that's what they watch. They watch people who tag them. They don't watch us for what we use from other companies. So you want to use the tagged button on Instagram and the tagged button will put you and your picture that you've posted into their tag feed. The tag feed is going to stay there. They can always go back and reference it. Whereas if you're just in the notifications when you use, you know, use at and their name, that's going to disappear down their feed and they're not going to see it again. But they're going to find you again if you're in their tagged feed. And if we can as a unified group of colorists, go out there and start sharing human rainbow images and start coloring those images the way we want stamps to look, that's going to start getting into their heads and they're going to say, boy, there's a market for this. I also want to get more people applying for their design teams. Even though they don't currently have images of color, boy, oh boy, can you imagine if you can get in being a design team member and start coloring them that way when you're doing your design team assignments, that's going to encourage them again, to consider that kind of a line of stamps. And they're also going to know that they have you who can do this, who can make those products look really amazing. I need to do more of this tagging thing myself. I will fess up that I'm just terrible about remembering to tag the right people at the right times on social. I'm just a flake about that kind of thing. But I'm going to start making an effort to do that. And I want to encourage everybody to do the same. Let's go convince these companies that we really do we exist. There's a market for these stamps. We really do want these products. And that is I think one small step that we can take as users to be able to convince them to do something different. So here is my finished card. I'm doing some last minute touches on it. I wanted that yellow to be toned down to match the skin a little bit better instead of just being a solo yellow part of the only yellow I used on the image. And so this kind of brings it into the same color as her skin tones and just kind of goes together a lot better. Just matches and coordinates better. I also now that I have this great highlight on the top side I want to just knock that eye back a little bit with a bit of gray so that it matches the curve of that shadow a little bit of a gray on the inside of her other eye. And then again that section over there that has the shadow from the hair casting on the eye. So that is my card for today and my chat for today. Leave me a comment let me know if you're willing to dive in on my world-changing adventure. Go see Pam. Her links are in the doobly-doo. Go follow her subscribe to her YouTube and tomorrow all of the fun is going to start on my Instagram and my Facebook. So I will see you there. Take care guys. Bye bye.