 There, it's Sandy, and I'm going to be coloring the ballpoint pen. How weird is that, right? And this is just an average old regular ballpoint pen. This is a promo pen. Some company sent me to try to get me to make pens for my business. I get a lot of weird freebies that way. And I'm also going to use a uniball pen. This is a gel pen, so only one of them is ballpoint, but I didn't have a ballpoint red pen. But I wanted to use it with this stamp set, and I'm so excited they put Stacy Yakula's images into the squares. I love the square images, but putting hers in there is super sweet. One of the reasons that it makes them extra fun is there's not a whole lot of background you have to do. You can give a hint at a background, but you don't have to do a ginormous ton of it. So I decided that doing these with ballpoint pen would be more doable because it's a smaller area to have to cover. I've done a ballpoint pen video here on YouTube before I did a shark during Shark Week, and hardly anybody watched it. So I thought I would show you a little bit on a card so you can see that you actually can do something with a ballpoint pen, and it can be quite beautiful. A lot of it has to do with doing a lot of cross hatching. And cross hatching can be done just two directions, and that's what most people think of going vertically and then going horizontally. You could also go at angles, and there are some artists who will do like five, six, seven, eight different angles in order to get a really nice, rich black. And there's different issues you have to deal with when you're coloring with ballpoint pen in that if your pen is bloopy at all, you know, you get that little extra blob of ink that comes out sometimes when you're writing, you can end up with the same thing here with a ballpoint pen, and it's a little harder to fix. So just be aware of that. You can see I'm just using the pen to go in different directions and create a nice black texture, and you can decide whether you want to make it really solid ish or if you want to go from dark to light, that sort of thing has some gradations in it. And for these images, I had to worry a little bit about how dark or light each of the images was next to the background section, because having a black penguin go right into a black background was not going to work. So I had to figure out how to put the highlight on the penguin so that the background went to the back and pushed behind it. So the background had to be darker in that area and that sort of thing. So, you know, lots of different things you have to think about when you're doing this kind of art with just one color with your black pen. But that's one of the reasons why I introduced the red into making these cards, because I was realizing, you know, I think I need a little something different here. I need to, I need to spice it up because just as black and white, they are beautiful, but it would really help to have a pop of color. I made the mistake of trying to do crosshatching with the gel pen. I realized real quickly, the gel pen puts down a lot more ink than does a ballpoint pen, and you may know that from experience with them, but it was a very clear reminder here because the crosshatching on this didn't look nearly as nice as the rest of the cards when I started doing just solid coloring with the gel pen, because the gel pen is capable of doing that solid coloring and looking nice, whereas a ballpoint isn't that way. You kind of have to do the crosshatching in order to make the ballpoint pen look right. Otherwise, you just get warped paper and it kind of makes wrinkles in it and that sort of thing, because the pressure just has to be so high to get that much color on it. So I'm going to zoom through more of this so you can kind of get an idea of the ways that you can get a little bit more smooth areas, because I was struggling with some of this, trying to get that black to be even, and hopefully the red is a good distraction from it, because it's not super easy to get that even when you're trying to do just a solid area. It's not hard at all to get the roundness of an area. So when I was doing the penguins and wanted some shading on one side and bright color on another side, that worked just fine. If you hear any dogs crying in the background, by the way, that is my dogs who are really excited lately, because in the fall, the squirrels decide to come down into the yard as they forage, instead of just hanging out up in the tree, because all the leaves and everything have fallen from the tree. So I guess they're looking for whatever they're looking for underneath and getting down on the ground and the dogs get a little excited. I keep trying to remind them we do not live in a kennel. It is not appropriate to bark like crazy dogs, but they don't seem to care. So here I decided to add a Rudolph nose to the reindeer. I thought that would be kind of fun. And on this one, I wanted a lighter background. I wanted to see how I could accomplish that. And it didn't go real smoothly. I was tempted to want to add more gray to it, make it a darker background. And then I realized I could just draw trees in it. So I decided to do that. And I think the trees actually looked way better than the other solid background. So if I were to do this again, I would probably do that. You could also do the same kind of an idea and real simple coloring using any medium. Just use the black in that medium or if you're using Copics, use blacks and grays to do all the black and white work and then add a pop of red. And on each of these, I'm adding the black shading on top of the red gel pen. So you could do the same thing with whatever else you're using, if you're putting a solid red colored pencil in there, then use a black pencil to do some shading on that. And it starts to give it dimension and that sort of thing without having to get out a whole ton of colors. If you're going traveling on a trip and you want to take some coloring with you, this would require a lot less markers to take with you or just a small handful of pencils if you're watching the kids' game at the, wherever the kids play games at now, I don't know how much kids' games there are anymore or people still playing soccer and stuff. But you can take a few coloring things with you and not have to take a whole bunch of it. But one of the reasons that I decided to use this video for today and to color this today is that the inktober word for today is roof. So I had to put Santa on a roof and giving him some backlighting was a challenge as the lighting comes from the moon behind him. But there you go. My little bit of inktober for today. If you want to see more of my inktober, that's mostly over on my Sandy Olnok fine art Instagram account. All right, if you want to see these cards finished, hopefully I will have them done before the blog post went live. So I'll post it over there and I'll see you guys again soon. Take care.