 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock, and today I have a never-ending sketchbook to show you, and it's never-ending. It kind of keeps going around and around. There's pocket areas that you can tuck something into, like seal the pockets and put treasures in if you want to make one of these. I've made one for a specific purpose that's going to prove to you I don't always follow my intuition well, and at the end of the video I have a giveaway, so be sure to stay tuned at the very end to find out how you could win a seat in a class for free. So the first part of this video as I said is something that I learned about trusting my intuition. I had a pen on the way, and the pen I didn't know anything about, the company or anything, but somebody emailed me and said, hey would you like to try our pen? And you know me in fountain pens? I love me a fountain pen, so why not? So I got out some mineral paper that I've had for a while and I made a little mini sketchbook, one of those kind of never-ending sketchbooks because it has stuff you can do on both sides and the way that it flips, you fold it in half both directions and then fold each of those halves in half. I was doing this with gloves because I didn't want to like wreck the surface of the paper. This is a mineral paper and I haven't played with mineral paper like folding it like this in a while. I've done stuff in sketchbooks, but I didn't want to get the oil from my fingers all over it in case that caused any problems with the color that I was going to put on because you know me, I'm going to do my color first and my inking second. So I decided to wear gloves, but once you fold this thing as I'm showing you here, it's really easy to just do some quick trims. So you take one side of it and trim three of the boxes. Take the opposite side and do three of the boxes, turn the whole thing around and then the middle, you do three boxes the other way because you want a big like snakey shape. You want them to be connected and that's what this is going to give you. So you have one piece and when you fold it every other one, it starts to turn into a tiny sketchbook. Now I have done this with a full sheet of watercolor paper to make sketchbooks for classes. So this is a technique that many of you will know because of that, but I decided I wanted to do a small one because I wanted to put a pen through its paces. So I needed something to do it on and they asked for a video in a time frame that I wanted to make sure I met their time frame. They were going to be so kind as to send me a pen. So I've got my sketchbook all done inside. Okay, now it's time to add color. So I used a bunch of different mediums to just see what would happen. I used some alcohol inks and just dropped some ink on. I was trying stuff because at the end of this video, you'll see I have something else going on that I was going to need some alcohol ink stuff for. So I wanted to kind of get back in the swing of it. I haven't played with alcohol inks in quite some time. So this seemed like a great way to kind of knock out a bunch of projects at once, test a pen, play with the alcohol inks, just let them kind of float around on the paper. And on a sketchbook like this, I didn't really want to use my airbrush to move things around too much just because it's so small. And I wanted to have some consistency across maybe, I don't know, I wasn't thinking real clearly. I just wanted color on there. So I could start doing all kinds of fun stuff to it with the pen. So I got out some acrylics. And there were a couple of panels I did in acrylics. I even used some thick acrylic paint you can see in that top one with some shimmery shiny color. And I use bubble wrap on this. I just went crazy. Anything I could find in the studio, I made a mess with. I was reminded, of course, of the fact that distressed inks are water based and distressed oxides are water based. And I had to wipe off most of the color by the time I was done or else it would never dry. But it was fine. I mean, it was just a reminder to me. Sometimes when you don't use something for a while, you just need those reminders. I decided this, I'd try it like a Halloween kind of panel with some orange and black and see what would happen using a baby wipe to blend the colors. And just seeing what would happen. But remember that all of this is going to have to dry. So I ended up putting together the whole book, right? I've got all this color on here. I'm ready for the pen. Let's get here, watch in the mailbox to see when it arrives. But you can see I've got all kinds of fun things. A book like this has pockets. As you can see, I'm kind of flipping through some of them. So you can see there's panels underneath the panels. So you can do all kinds of fun stuff with it, seal the pockets and put things in them, etc. So then the pen arrives. And this is the box that it comes in. And I looked it up on Amazon, and it's about $30, I believe, for the set that they sent me. And I say a set because it has two nibs in it. And they have a bunch of them for $20 that are one nib. And I trusted my intuition. Yeah, just send me this thing. But I was not really impressed with this. Yes, it has a little baggy for the pen. Maybe that's a nice add-on, I don't know. But it just didn't feel quite great. The nib is not a proprietary nib. It's just a generic nib. And it's not a bad nib. But okay, fine. That's the extra one. And then the pen, when I started twisting it to try to take the cap off, the back came off with the piston converter inside. So I put it back on and, you know, realized it's a pull-off lid. But the pull-off lid has this other plastic lid inside of it, which we will get to in a moment. And the other nib is kind of an interesting shape. So I thought, oh, okay, I at least want to try that interesting shape and see what's up with it. I could have filled that thing with my own ink, but I decided to use their inks, these little refills. And you have to press it in really hard and kind of poke through one end so that the ink flows and screw it back on and then see if it writes. And this one wrote okay. It wasn't great. It wasn't a huge, ginormous, wonderful experience. It was just okay. The pen is very lightweight. But the other nib, I could not get to work. I tried three different refills on it, and I could not get it to work. And I was kind of frustrated, so I didn't even bother adding my own ink to the piston converter because the piston converter is broken. It has like a loose spring in it. And then the cap. The cap doesn't stay on by itself, even though there's little screw spindle thingies in there, like the cap just falls off unless that plastic thing is in. And unfortunately, it's useless as a pen. Like the cap does not make me happy. So sadly, I said yes to a pen without doing my smart thing, which was going with my gut. And my gut generally says, when I get emailed by some random person and says, hey, do you want to try one of our supplies? I like to do my research a little bit more, or at least have heard of the thing before necessarily trying it. And I did not do any of that. I just said, yeah, okay, fine, send me a pen. And that was a waste of their money, a waste of my time. And instead, I decided that I would still use my little sketchbook to create a piece of art using my Peter Pen. The Peter Pen I used a few weeks ago, and I had some mixed feelings about like a stop start that it would do on occasion, like it would just every 20th line, it would just have an eighth of an inch hiccup that it just needed to get past that. And then it would write fine again. That was the paper pretty clearly because this one did just great. I was able to just blast through this and do wonderfully and be really careful, of course, as I was going because touch wet ink on this paper, it takes a while to dry. I had a few smushes and had some cleanup that I had to do, let's just say. But the Peter Pen passes the test. It is more expensive than the Twizby Eco that I generally recommend. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's a better pen than a Twizby Eco. Aside from the fact that it's heavier pen, it's just got more weight to it. So if you're looking for a pen that has weight to it, this might be a good option. So I will leave a link in the doobly-doo to that so you can check it out if you're interested. But trusting my intuition was something I did not do in the just blindly saying okay to this company about sending me a pen. But I got right back to it when I started doodling because I've had some people say, hey, how do you just do the doodles? How do you just make stuff? How do you just make the lines? Because my stuff looks like a kindergartener did it. Well, I'm just going by intuition. I'm not thinking about very much. The only thing that I'm thinking as I do this is are there places where I can create some motion? And I want to create something that's different between one panel and another, or some connection between one panel and another. But that's really all. I am not thinking, okay, I should make a line here. Okay, should make a line there. I am just going for it. I am tracing around shapes that I see. And it's only in between some of those areas when I'm trying to figure out how to transition from one color to the next, or I get tired of making one kind of line, tired of making bubbles so I start making swooshes and get tired of making swooshes and start making straight lines and kind of bouncing around between different types of lines. But if you think about it too much, that's when your lines get stilted. If you just look at the character of the color that's underneath, and that's what I was looking at here. I was looking at some more ethereal kinds of color, some soft cloudy distress oxide inks versus some really hard edges that were in others where you could see the color flowing on the paper. And trying to capture that characteristic in the lines that I was creating, but not in like every line is going to be a character building type thing. But it was just going to be something where little by little I could I could build a piece that went from one end to the other and each one of the panels kind of connects to each other. I did decide what I'm going to do with this sucker is I am going to send it to Peter. Peter draws is the guy who I got my fountain pen fetish from. And he accepts mail and he opens mail on YouTube and everything. And I have never sent him anything. And I thought it'd be kind of fun to send him this drawing that I have done with his Peter pen since he makes money off his Peter pen and I like to support artists that way. So I'm going to send this to him in the mail and I'm going to do look hard for him too. I wish I had thought ahead and done a better flip through in the first version. Instead, I got hung up on showing the pockets like where the book flips the other direction so that I didn't have these two lined up. But you know, sometimes best laid plans of mice and men don't work in video. But I hope Peter will like it. Hope he'll be excited that somebody's using his pen to make some fun doodles. And for the giveaway, we are finally at that part of this video. I am going to be teaching in the gratitude junk journal class again this year. And I have a seat to give away. So to enter that giveaway, you need to comment what you're thankful for this year, but do so using the word grateful. If you don't want to be in the class, if you're not going to take the class, even if you win, then use the word thankful and tell me what you are thankful for this year. And I have been working in my journal already. This one is one that I made. I'll show you on Friday how I made it. And I am using alcohol inks as much as I can. I'm just exploring techniques and seeing what does it take to make a stencil work, etc. This page was all about my aunt and it was very therapeutic as I'm grieving her loss. She was a writer. She wrote stories, lots of romance stories and Christmas stories and Christian stories and just those chicken soup for the soul things that are fabulous. And I just miss her so much. So it's great to do a page about her. This is the one I'll be doing in class. So if you want to learn how to do this, learn the layering techniques that I did on the grapes or some of the fun that I did with the stenciling, then join me in class. Just have some flower stencils and whatever medium you want to use at hand. And that is about it for me. Just don't forget to leave your comments if you want to be entered into the drawing. And if the class is available for pre-registration, I'll put the link in the doobly-doo. But I don't know at the time of filming this whether it's going to be available quite yet. All right, I will see you guys later. Take care. Bye-bye.