 Hello there. It's Sandy and I'm asking the lollipop question today. How many layers of color does it take to make realistic leaves? I picked these up when I was on a walk with my dogs recently, and that day I spent the whole day coloring leaves. I traced them onto a piece of drawing paper. I just made a whole sheet of these, which I then used in a tiny tutorial as well that you might have seen and I thought I'd color one of them here for you. I didn't think about filming until I was partway through it, but let's do a leaf and do some color matching. I'm using Luminance pencils here because Luminance has the best color selection for doing natural objects because they don't tend to have a lot of the screamy bright colors that Prismacolor and Polychromos do. You have to do a lot to those colors to make them more neutralized, but here even with a yellow, I'm going to have to do a lot of that because they're bright leaves, they are yellow, but they have a tone of some other colors. I'm going to be mixing it with a lot of other things. I used a little bit of Gamsol to blend the first layers of color together. That's going to just give me a coat of yellow underneath everything made up of several yellows and then start adding layer after layer after layer. No, I didn't count them. I didn't count the number of layers. I didn't count the number of colors, although they're still sitting here on my table, so I will put the swatches for them so that you can know the color numbers that I used. I'll put them over on my blog so you can check that out. But for now, I'm just going to be coloring layer after layer after layer, several layers of Gamsol in between. I wanted to mention a little bit about Gamsol. If you've watched a lot of my videos, you know that I've also used Baby Oil in place of Gamsol. On something like a leaf, you could definitely use Baby Oil because if there's any oily stain left behind, the color pencil will cover it. The Baby Oil becomes a little bit of a problem on some papers and you have to test whatever paper you're using. It comes a little bit of a problem because when you're trying to blend into white, the oiliness of the blending solution can stain the paper. So you want to be careful of that with whatever it is you use. I know there's some other people that have mentioned in comments recently that they used Zestit, which is a third kind of blending solution. And that one is apparently completely odorless. Excuse me, although what I'm finding is the recent bottle that I bought of Gamsol is odorless. I don't have a big smell thing going on, so Zestit is just another option. And I will try to find a link for you and put that in the doobly-do if you're looking for another solution for your color pencil blending. So I am using more and more colors to try to make this richer because the color that I'm seeing on my paper is not the same as the color on the leaf. It's more orangy. It's more dull. And I'm using a purple color. This is a desaturated purple, meaning it's very grayed out. It's not a bright purple. If you've tried using a bright purple with your yellow pencils, you might find that you don't get a lot of nice blending in it. But with something like this, I can add a very light coat of it to make shadows. I can use it very lightly to make those veins. And they come out looking much more natural than they would if I were strictly using a brown pencil, which is what a lot of people will go to when they're trying to do something like this. But when you use complementary colors, which is what purple and yellow would be for each other, you end up with a lot of natural desaturation because that's what complementary colors do when they're opposite on the color wheel. So I'm adding in more color because I want to keep making this deeper so that it matches that leaf and using a more desaturated kind of yellow color. And I'm getting a little closer to the goldenness of it, although I want to make sure that I retain the brightness in certain areas. So I'm going to have to go back in with an orange to brighten some of that up even further. So a lot of back and forth is what I do when I'm creating with my color pencils because I can always see there's just a little bit more. If I push the color a little bit this way or a little bit that way, then I can create something that starts matching the color that I'm seeing on the leaf itself. I started looking even closer and when you really zoom in on a leaf, when you have it right in front of you, I saw green spots. There were little areas that had not changed to yellow yet. And so I started drawing in a few of those and adding in an overall tone of that greenish color very, very lightly to a few areas of the leaf which started to darken it along with that purple and then a little bit of a rusty kind of brownish orange color. All those colors together when you use the blending stump and the solution start to create that really nice neutral shadow area for the yellow. But of course, I had to add more to it because that's just how I roll and back and forth between all the colors. Now while I'm still sitting here chatting, I want to let you know next week is the 24 tags of Christmas, which is one of my most popular series every year. And it's probably going to be my last normal giveaway because I don't tend to have anybody answer my giveaways. They all enter and then nobody responds. I had some envelopes full of stamps and dyes that I gave out recently and I tried three times to post different names and nobody replied. So I sent them to random people who I knew because of other things. I had their addresses because they're students or had addresses because they had sent me things in the mail and whatever. So yeah, I'm going to start doing that more and not doing giveaways. But for the tags, I'm going to try it again. Most years I end up with 16 to 18 of my tags still left in my possession to use on my Christmas gifts because nobody claims them. So if you enter to win, make sure to check back on my blog the week after for a couple of days, a couple of times to make sure that you don't miss the announcement when it comes out. Before I take off here today, I want to let you know if you're interested in coloring leaves, they're a really easy thing to get your brain around. If you're trying to learn how to color match, if you're trying to learn how to do shadows, that sort of thing, I do have two classes that I offer one in color pencil and one in Copic marker and they're both more on the advanced side. And one of them teaches leaves like this, the other teaches a pile of leaves and both of them include the digis, the printables for the other class. So the color pencil one shows you how to do the entire picture all together with all of the shading underneath of the leaves and that sort of thing. The Copic one teaches you just the leaves themselves and both of these are taught on a toned paper. So it's kind of a fun interesting way to approach leaves and have that toned paper to work off of. All right, that's it for me today. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I will see you next week for the 24 tags of Christmas. Take care. Bye.