 Hi there, I'm Sandi Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I want you to give me your input on whether this is a big snail or whether it's a normal size snail who has a little palm tree because I'm not sure which it is but these are not really appropriately sized for each other but I think it's cute anyway so I am coloring it mostly because I want to let you know that Purple Onion Designs has their annual sale. They do this big sale so you're going to want to check it out. Links in the doobly-doo if you want to go check out some of the images. There's the cute snail, they had the whole release that I did recently, I'll put a link at the end of this video. I did a video talking about the rule of thirds and that was a very popular one. You guys liked it so I will link that in case you missed it and it has a lot of the new release in it but Stacy Yakula or Yakula, I'm not sure how you pronounce it. These are amazingly cute designs and I always like working with her stamps so thank you to Michelle the owner of Purple Onion for sending them to me so I can play with some and I've got this little snail and a little palm tree and some sand and I'm just going to color the three items together and try to find a way to tie them together. That's one of the things when people are making scenes, tying things together so that they look like they fit even though the palm tree is outsized or undersized should I say maybe the snail is the thing that's outsized. When one thing is a wrong size it doesn't matter as much if they feel like they're nestled together so with this one I've got the sand that's in the foreground so I masked out that whole line of sand before stamping the other thing so that they would feel like they are in the sand not sitting just floating on top of it which is one of the things that lots of folks do but then I'm also tying them together in the center I'm tying the objects together in the middle. My tree is not perfectly centered so it feels like it's got some interest in the layout and it's a little bit low on the horizon it's not right smack dab in the middle it's not all the way down at the bottom the cinnamon is down at the bottom so it lifts everything else up a little bit and the focal point is right there in the center so I'm gonna finish coloring up my tree and I'm gonna do a couple different browns here and use just a little bit of texturizing of the bark in the palm tree and not really worry a whole lot about the shading I just want to give it a little bit of other color and then let a little bit of the bark show through see how I'm letting some of the lighter stuff come through and more in some areas than in others doesn't have to be even because mother nature is not even and now I'm gonna throw the sand across here I'm using my e4s which are a pretty good combination of sand colors there's a there's a 4-4 that's a little on the dark side so if you have wet sand that's a good color for it but I'm gonna start with the 4-3 I'll jump down to the 4-2 and then the 4-1 you could even go down to a 4-0 if you really want to blend it out to white but the 4-1 is usually about enough I'm starting off with my darker colors at the top working toward lighter at the bottom which is in contrast to what you would think when we're doing normal blending because normally the darker colors are at the bottom if I wanted to anchor this with really dark colors then that's how I would do it but in this case I want to fade it out toward that sentiment down the bottom so I want the darker colors to be toward the center and the top of the whole sand area so that it ends up kind of pushing the eye into the scene into where our little snail is sitting and I'm gonna tie that together even further when I get to that grasses because even though beaches don't have much in the way of grasses a lot of them have some really dry beach grasses and I'm going to really make some dark areas in the center of the image and see that dark from that that green grass it's gonna start to tie the dark of the tree to the dark of the snail and I'm going to go in with an even darker color my darker of the the two YGs that I used in the top and I'm going to add even more right in that center point see how that draws your eye into it it makes that that whole scene kind of tie together they're not disparate images they're linked to each other in some way so that is one of the little tricks to making a scene work so that it feels like it's one scene rather than an image here an image there and they're not all part of one thing my last little tidbit is going to be to add some sand to some sand to the sand so I'm gonna add some white dots using a gel pen I am a big fan of the Signo white gel pen you probably know that by now but some people don't find that it works for them I never have figured out in all these years what is it that causes it to work for some people and not work for others but I'm just adding my highlights with mine in order to add just a little bit of sparkle and pop to the image itself the finished card all I did was add it to a layer of black and then pop that with some dimensional adhesive onto a desert storm card base which worked really well in terms of the color of the sand really pulled that out and that's about it for this card nice and simple quick and easy since it's summer breezy there is a sale going on at purple onion designs so go check them out during August and see what they have got for you percentage wise etc details are on their website and I will talk to you guys later have an awesome day be sure to subscribe like favorite share all that good stuff and I'll see you later