 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm using Lawn Fawn's Winter Skies stamp set. I picked up this really cute Lawn Fawn set that has foxes and bears in it, both pairs as well as singles and some trees and snowflakes and things, and a Santa Claus flying through the air. And I pulled out a couple Copic markers so I could make a scene card here on YouTube. This is related to two of my classes that are on my teaching site, art-classes.com. And I wanted to mention a little something. I've been talking here and there, random videos about classes and some of the things that we've learned in classes, some of the things that you may want to learn in classes, and I don't do that because I'm trying to sell classes. I'm doing that for two reasons. One is I always have new people coming and joining here on YouTube and finding me and I want them to know that there's more in-depth teaching available. But also I want my students who have already taken the classes to see some of the concepts from the classes in context so that they can see how it works with stamps. Because in classes we kind of just do a background of some sort. We don't really do stuff with stamps in all the classes and it's helpful to see them that way. So I like to call that out when I'm doing videos and there's content that might be related to something people have already learned. So I'm not doing that to make you feel like you have to go take a class. Please just enjoy the video and learn from me for free on YouTube if that is what you need to do. So I'm making this sky here and I'm not too worried about the blending in a lot of areas. One of the cool things about having a Santa Claus flying across the sky is that I can use that spot right where Santa's flying as a place to start and end my stroke so I really only have to worry about the ones else wise in the sky. But even though this sky looks like it's got some intense color, it's going to look really pale by the time I finish with everything because you know me in contrast. I love my contrast. So I'm going to kind of work on trying to get some of the blending going here. But by the time everything else is done, it's not going to matter because we're going to put trees in front of a lot of that. I found a scene on Google because I was just looking for different winter scenes. I kind of run out of stuff in my brain sometimes. So I just Google winter scenes and go to the images tab and I saw this one that had these trees that were all kind of pointed up at the sky and there was a road with a vanishing point that went down way down the road down the middle. And I thought that would be perfect for this stamp set. So that's what I'm trying to create here and the colors in that one were really dark and intense and the darkness and intensity made the snow look brighter. So I wanted to see how that played out when we did our coloring and how much color can we get in there and still have it look like snow. So some of this is going to be scary. Some of you guys are going to have your heart and your throats. Trust me, wait for it because you know how that goes. Here on YouTube with my videos, just wait for it. It'll be fine in the long run. So in the scene, there were all these grasses on the side, on both sides. And I'm going to add a little bit of those and then trees coming up from them. As far as the classes, there's two winter classes. Winter background classes. One is city sidewalks and that's kind of a more urban one. And then the winter wonderland class has a little bit more of the kind of outdoor type of snow scenes and things. So that's what this scene is a little more related to. There is one with a vanishing point, but there's a little more focus on the sky and the trees and that sort of thing. But in the underwater scenes class, which is going to seem like a surprise, underwater scenes meets winter. In that class, I talked about how the kelp type of art that we did in one of the lessons looks like trees as well. But I didn't show any examples of that. So this is an example of the kelp. If you can picture this as underwater, then that could be what the kelp looks like, these just long strands with little things hanging off of them. But when you do it in terms of a snow scene, it looks like trees. And when it's underwater, it looks like kelp. So there you go. That is your little mini lesson here on a turn underwater scenes into mountain snowy scenes. So I'm taking my mid-tone color and yes, this is a mid-tone color. You might have thought, oh my gosh, that's a dark color, isn't it? No, we're going to get much darker than that. And I'm adding more to the grasses and letting kind of the light on the edges of the grasses be at the top, but blending in some of that mid-tone color and then down to darker at the bottom. Adding a shadow, really strong shadow behind my two main characters because I want that light to be really prominent down in the center. And as I get darker in colors, watch that light in the very center of the card start to get brighter. So I've got my shape down there behind my two little foxes and I decided to add more color to the snow. And that's what I got from the picture. I was looking for how dark is that? It really was dark. So let's try getting darker. Now, I'm using a BV29. The BV2s are kind of a grayish sort of color, but they have a little blue flavor to them. They're really great for doing winter things because they have both the dullness of a gray, but a little tiny bit of that cool blue added to them a little bit of purple-ish. And so they're a little more interesting than just using a gray for something like this. So this is a second row of trees, second layer of trees. You can add many layers as we did in the underwater scenes class. And then I'm gonna add really dark shadows elsewhere. Remember I said I was gonna continue to get darker? And as it gets darker, the contrast starts to pop up and that center light just gets brighter and brighter and brighter. With the grasses on either side, you can make them tall grasses, you can make them little scrub brushes. I'm gonna do some white pen work later on with them to try to make those ends look kind of lacy, but I'm just gonna get some nice, heavy color in there so that those disappear. I want the snow to be the thing that gets the attention, the snow, the little characters, and then pointing right up to that Santa Claus. The trees, by the way, I didn't mention this earlier, the trees are tilting inward. And that kind of makes it look like you're really looking from down low and they're really tall trees. You could also do them straight if it bothers you that they're at an angle because we don't really see this kind of an angle all that often. So that's another way to do it. And we also talked about that in the underwater scenes class and that kelp lesson. So here on the foxes, I was originally gonna make gray foxes or silver foxes because I thought that would be kind of really coolish and winterish. And I went, you know, I don't really see them very much. They didn't pop out. So I then added my orangey color. This is something that you can do in either order. You can either do the orange color first and then add your gray shadows to darken it and dull it or you can do it the other direction. And in this particular case, it gave me the chance to see if gray foxes would work or silver foxes. And then when I found out I didn't, I could just go over it and that just kind of gives you more options. And here on the green, I did the green color first and then the gray afterward. And on things like this, when you're mixing grays in to get your shadow, sometimes you'll have to add another layer of darker brown on the foxes or a different kind of green or something to get some of that modeled look to go away because the gray will sometimes do some funky things to it. I'm adding a little bit more of the light trees in there and you can add as much or as little as you want. And I'll put a few stars up in the sky. I decided not to do snow all over everything like I do in some of my cards, just have the stars up there and kind of let just that part be there because I really liked what else was going on in this one. Here I'm adding a little darker color onto my foxes and trying to get that texture to go away like I had spoken about. And then took the white pen and just added kind of some scrubily lines to make the moonlight really hit the tippy tops of all of the grasses and stuff on there. And the white pen really gives you a lot of control over getting that kind of detail. And then I layered it and stamped and embossed my sentiment. And I did another version of this with fall colors and I didn't have the road going down so it almost looks like they're just kind of tucked behind a row of bushes but it's the same sort of an idea just using fall trees and a few pines in there instead of the winter ones. So you can do the same kind of thing with other times of year. And this one is from the autumn scenes class. And I haven't seen many people use this lesson which is these trees that kind of cascade off into the distance. You have these purple trees in the distance and all that sort of thing with the birch trees on the sides. I wanna encourage my students to use that one because I really like that type of tree scene. So there you go. My video for today. Hope you will go out and make some beautiful Christmas cards or maybe you'll try one of the fall ones with whatever stamps you've got or if you need to buy these then the link is in the description down below as well as over on the blog. If you need to pin anything and I will see you again next time. You have a really great day. Go make something beautiful.