 Well, hi there. My name is Sandy Elknock. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to talk a little bit about some basic blending with Copic markers And I'm going to use the happy hedgehog set that I just bought from my favorite things It has a bunch of different hedgehogs in it and I'm just so cured. Oh my gosh, Birdie Brown is an amazing designer Let's get some regular hedgehogs that lean toward each other a couple that have scarves on them one That's holding an acorn so you could use them for fall cards for winter cards or spring and summer cards So this is a great year-round set and it's got other accoutrements to go with it little pieces that you can make a scene out of But what I've done is stamped the three little hedgehogs that I chose for this one And I'll show you another card at the end with the ones with scarves on them And I'm going to make a really simple card with them I've masked out the one in the front after I stamped it and then stamped the other two behind it So that they could be a little happy family of hedgehogs and I'm coloring in some basic skin tone for their underbellies I don't know what it's called for hedgies if they have an underbelly name, but it's kind of a fleshy color So I'm using some of my flesh combinations that I've done in a lot of my other videos And you know, I like to use blue violets when I'm doing my shadow areas put down my base color first and then add Blue violets this one is a really strong blue violet a baby zero one is more than most people can handle And when you start putting your mid-tone over that you may end up with some Challenges in trying to get that to blend out softly So I'm going to show you a trick to make that work a little bit better If you want to try some stronger color to get stronger contrast because the stronger your contrast The more realistic you'll get the more you end up with an object that looks like it's really round It's really deep in space And that is now I'm going to show you how to go around with your bv triple zero And I'm softening out all those areas around the edge of where that shadow is Because that means when I go over it with other colors. I don't have a harsh line underneath of it so for those who struggle with Flicking to get that sort of a soft line using another color a lighter version is One way to get that color underneath to blend so when you go over the top of it It just starts to pull it all together another tip because I've seen this when I've colored with other folks in classes and otherwise is Using a good bit of pressure with the markers. Don't feel like you're going to ruin your marker nibs or anything But use the side of the marker ish not I mean, I'm not using a full-on Side swipe with it, but I'm not doing just the tip of the marker I'm actually laying the marker down and pressing it into the paper It's going to give me a little bit of a wider line Because if you end up with all little tiny strokes little fussy strokes little lines when you're trying to do your flicking That's usually because you're not putting enough pressure on the pen. Don't use just the tip You I'm using probably a third of the tip of that pressing that onto the paper And now I'm taking my lightest color just softening out a few of those areas and this might look really dark But as I get the rest of the image done We're going to see that a lot of that by contrast To the rest of it is going to look a little bit lighter. So they're not going to look as dark eventually When I do hedgehogs and I've colored a number of hedgehogs for some reason I keep buying hedgehog stamps Even though I'm not hedgehog person. I love coloring hedgehogs I like coloring them in a variety of grays and you can mix all of your grays together If you're ever wondering About whether you need to get the C's the ends the T's the W's I would get just the C's and the W's those are the ones with enough difference between them that you actually can see that difference The difference between the toner and the neutral is very minor and unless you you have an artist's eye to see it You really don't need those pens I use them often when I'm doing my coloring just because one runs out of ink and that just gives me more options Not to have to go re-ink a marker But I've got a cool gray as my base tone and now I'm going to add warm grays on top of it You could go the other order the reverse order do warm grays underneath and cool grays on top Lots of different ways to do that. Oh, and there's puppies out in the backyard I tried sending them outside so I could do a voiceover and Instead they're out there arguing now and playing and wrestling right outside the door Oh, goodness life with puppies. If you haven't seen my puppy video I will try to remember to put a link in the description so you can go see what my puppies look like because they're adorable But I'm getting very little done Anyway, now I'm taking a lighter warm gray to blend out the darker warm gray Putting the darkest area right around the fleshy parts Is going to give me that contrast between the area in the back All all of that the spines and everything on them and then that fleshy area. It's going to pull it toward the front So that it ends up looking Like like that part is is pushed back in space And that's that's one of the ways that you can get that kind of a difference When you're coloring an image is like look for which part is further away from your eye, which one is closer to your eye And I'm using like I said enough marker that I get a real soft blend between them Now you can go back in and add more if you want a linear texture to this if you want to add a real kind of a line Line feature to it. So it looks like there's all those little spines Oh goodness those dogs are having a hilarious time right outside the door. God bless them Uh, okay, so now we're on to the acorn and I'm coloring it with a few colors down in the bottom section I'm just using a couple of really dark browns so I can have a difference between the The bottom part of the acorn and the top part and then I wanted to create some texture on the top as well So I'm making like just little C Half c marks little rounded things and then I'll use the same color as I did for the color underneath And I'll just be tapping some of that color on top. So softens all of that And then I'm going to do some shadowing underneath and I'm going to use two different grays And I'm using cool grays since I have Visually a little more of the warm gray showing on the hedgehogs themselves So I just put a little bit of color down Underneath of them and then add it a little bit of lighter to soften out those edges And here's where I'm just going to add a little bit more depth because when I went over That w6 the first time It ended up softening it out enough that I wanted more contrast So I'm going and adding back more back in and don't ask me why my camera got like really fuzzy for a few minutes here So very strange Anyway, here is my finished card and what I did was Mount that panel and cut it a little bit short So I'd have the a black strip of paper on the card base that panel is mounted and popped up And I used just a couple little bling underneath of my sentiment to draw a little tension to it The other stamps that are in here you could use these for christmas cards I just used the fall kind of colors and I could send this either during fall season or during christmas season if I want to send Hedgehogs, but I use the same coloring techniques and everything on this one as I did on the other one that I showed you how to color So thank you so much for joining me Here's a couple other videos if you're interested in seeing something else I'm going to go outside and see what the puppies are doing Because they've been deciding to dig holes So I'm going to go see if they've gotten themselves into any kinds of trouble while I'm between this voiceover All right. Thank you so much for visiting with me hit that subscribe button if you haven't already You can always hit that like button as well. It helps to Grow the channel by letting people know that other people like the videos that I post out here Thanks so much. Have a great day