 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnhuk, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to make a card with the three kings and make them out of gnomes. I saw these cute little gnomes from Reverse Confetti and I thought I really want to play around with making them into the magi. So I grabbed some markers, each of the colors I'm using. And I stamped the first of the two gnomes, there's two gnomes in the set. I stamped them each beside each other with a gap in the middle. One of them I masked off the top of the hat so I could draw them in another hat and try to make them look like he's different than the other gnome so they don't look like I used the same stamp twice. I did one mask and cut it in half because I only need a little bit masked out and since it's the same gnome of course I can use one half on the left and one half on the right and make it really easy on myself. And I'm using a little extra piece of sticky note down there just to make sure the thing's stuck down and I've got everything checked out where I want to put the gnome but I want to leave a space so that I can draw in what a gnome king is going to carry. The other gnomes have a big white beard and I can draw a little thing that the magi are carrying on top of the beard but I had to create one and I did so by just adding that sticky note onto the stamp itself and then I would make sure that it was going to line up in a spot where I could draw something else in. So I took a Copic Friendly pen which is this one is a Copic Multiliner and drew in the top of the hat with just a little different thing on the very top of it and then added packages and you can add different kinds of shapes to them. I decided one would be more of a block shape one would be a box with maybe a rounded top on it of some sort like a red roof kind of shape and the other would be the bag of gold so it would have to be a bag type of a shape and now I am ready to do some crazy coloring. I'm doing this on some Desert Storm paper and Desert Storm receives color a little bit differently than other papers it is in Nina so it's going to act like Nina in terms of its blending but it's got color in it already which means all of the colors are going to be duller and darker and you'll probably need to think about going darker with your color when you're going to color on this and I always suggest that you print one of your hex charts out or whatever kind of color chart you use print one out on the paper you're going to color on so it's helpful to know what the colors will look like before you get started and I'm just going to toss in a whole bunch of colors on this and using just some Christmasy colors some red and some green and a little bit of blue and yellow in there along with the base colors that I have for their hair and their mustaches and that sort of thing and in actuality the gnome that's in the middle those are two pony tails on the side of the gnome so it is a girl gnome I don't think I've ever seen anybody make a girl gnome in a stamp set before and I want to commend reverse confetti because I think that is genius but I decided to hide the pony tails because I'm not really sure there were any girl kings out of the Magi I'm not really sure about that but if somebody wants to think that there is one of these that's a female then you can always just imagine that one in the center with big long pony tails but what I wanted to do here is going to be creating some really dramatic light and what I just love to do is create really strong light and what I tell a lot of people my real life friends when I talk to them about what makes artwork really sing is if you have something really strong in it your composition should be strong or your lighting would be strong your colors something has to be really powerful if everything in it is wussy it's not going to get attention by the viewer their eye is not going to be drawn into it they're not going to be excited to see it but when it's something like this where I'm going to create a really dramatic sky in the background then you know I've got a chance at doing something really cool so I'm doing some trees back here I wanted to do kind of some palm tree type things like they might have in the the Middle East where these kings would be running around at so I'm I just scribbled in some dark green over top of the blue and then I'm drawing me drawing in my trees with a black pen and then pushing some YG03 into it and I discovered that when I was that whole technique idea when I was doing the underwater class over at art-classes.com and realized it would work really well for trees too so you can see it created just a tiny bit of light on the trees so they look like their trees in the darkness but there's just a little bit of light coming through so you just see a little bit you could use the light green even more and pull more color out of them but I don't want them to scream for attention I just want the kings to get all the attention but have a little bit something in the scene behind them besides just a blue sky. It also helps because it's hard to kind of make a sky look perfect and when you're doing a large flooded area so when you add some trees or something else then it covers the fact that things might not be totally perfect. For my kings I am doing my shading with grays and shading with grays is something that a lot of people don't like to do because they don't really understand how it works but boy it's powerful and it's super easy when that time comes and you start using it and get yourself excited about it because you can take any color and knock it into shadow just right away. Now here's a mistake I made this color I'm using right now is a green it's the green that I used in the trees up there oops the the dark green color and accidentally grabbed the wrong marker so I just went in with a little more of a brown color to push that green back out a little bit so you and I will know that it's green no one else will know nobody else is going to look but look how cool these guys look when they just have that gray in them so that their tops of their noses tops of their mustaches and those gift packages get a little bit of highlight but the rest of them is in deep shadow it looks to me like the stars right over their head or the moon is right over their head just casting down a really strong shadow right on top of them using a white gel pen to get a little bit of that overall high you know highlights popped in there a little bit of that super light super bright color that draws your eye to that contrast and little by little covering all the rest of it though with gray to just knock it back you could do that with other colors but a gray is just an easy one to do it with on the whole thing and I'm I've drawn some nice attention now to each of the gifts I've got a gold pen as well I can add some gold pen details on to each of the gifts and make them look like they have fancy patterns on them kind of go crazy with that now it's time for finishing off the rest of the scene and I was debating what to do you can kind of see me being hesitant trying to decide am I going to make the shadows go out sideways I was debating if the light is overhead what do I do with their shadows and then I realized I was using such a light color it was really going to disappear anyway so all of what I'm doing right here is kind of for naught there's you're not going to see very much of that because on this paper while the paper is wet you can still see it but then as soon as it starts to dry and all that alcohol comes out of the paper it's kind of gone so I went with strength at the bottom to anchor the image down here I wanted to use a white sentiment I want to emboss the sentiment in white at the bottom and in order to do that I needed some darker color so I just went in with again more gray so that I could get that that overall darkness on the bottom and then finishing off a little fine details in a few spots with a white pencil on top and you can burnish that in if you end up getting too many pencil lines in there and stuff but just a few little highlights make a really big difference you can make the sand into looking more like sand by making polka dots you can do that with your Copic markers and then add a little bit of the white pen and of course since the kings are following the star you've got to have the big north star in there and then add all of the little stars in the sky I did not make it snow so the stars are in the sky not in front of the image itself and I added after I got my sentiment all embossed on there joy to the world it's from penny black set that I've been using a lot this winter I added glossy accents onto the packages which draws a lot more attention to them adds a little more dimensionality to it and the whole thing is added onto a card base without even any dimensional adhesive I just glued it on there so I have a little frame around the outside edges of it I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please click the like button and make sure you're subscribed if you have not yet done so there's more videos on the screen you can get the supply list down in the doobly-doo or over on my blog either one and I will see you guys later take care bye bye