 Hi there, it's Sandy, and I'm going to be coloring a enchanted winter fairy for you today. It's a digital image from Sweet Escape, and I have added the oval myself, so the stamp does not come with that. But I got tired of doing squares and rectangles, so I'm going to do an oval today. But first I want to talk about the Winter Copic Enchantment class that launches today. The cards you're seeing are from the class. If it has no stamped image in it, then that's the demo from the class. If it has a stamped image, that's just an extra sample. Because what I do is what I am working on a class and the ideas for it, I'll color like 20, 30, 40 different things and then pair it down to the ones I think will teach the best, which ones will teach the most useful types of techniques and images and that kind of thing. So that's why I have so many samples and it is a Level 4 class, by the way. There's no numbers on the screen, so if you're a person who needs that kind of hand-holding, it might not be for you. If you've taken the mini classes and you've done really great with them, you felt really comfortable with them, you're probably ready to move on to a Level 4 class, but you'll be given the list of markers that are in each lesson and then you'll need to just watch which one's the dark green and the light green. And I think at Level 4, you're smart enough to figure out that. And if there's any subtle differences in color choices, I'll be talking about that in the voiceover, so don't worry about that. And you can always substitute any of your own colors. The pre-class lesson always has the color list in it so that you can see all the colors that I use and then figure out if you have something comparable to use yourself. The idea for this class, for doing a winter version of the Copic Enchantment class that we did this summer, that came from patrons. And my patrons are wonderful, awesome, fabulous, fantastic, super califragilistic, expialidocious people who decide to contribute for the cause of my art and anywhere from a buck to five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever a month and support my work. And in exchange, they will get sometimes coupon codes. If they're at particular levels, they'll get cards in the mail sometimes or art in the mail and they also get access to other things that I share. Sometimes I'll sneak peek a video. Sometimes I'll ask them to help me name a class. And if somebody picks the name that wins, they get the class for free. There's all kinds of different things that we've done there. We've done some live videos, haven't found too many people interested in live videos over there, so haven't done much of that anymore. But they are my people, my tribe, really nice folks who care about my art enough to support it. And I really love that. So grateful to them. And yeah, so I am not watching the video you're watching. Just thought I'd let you know that the computer that I'm working on is dying ever so slowly and it's making me crazy. Lately it started doing this weird thing where all of a sudden it just shuts down and it displays the icon that's normally the out of power icon. And I jiggle the plug and I'm checking it to make sure that it didn't just run out of power while I was working away and when I reboot it, it says it's at 76 percent. So it just decided randomly to pretend it was out of power and lose all my work. Since this was going to be a really long video, I decided not to tax it and not make it display the video as well as record my audio. So I thought I'll just talk about random stuff and let you watch the video and see how that goes and if my computer will cooperate with that. And so far so good in just a few minutes, it has not crashed yet. Keep our fingers crossed. And I want to apologize for some portions of the video because my camera was focused in the upper right corner. And you'll notice whenever my hand goes up into that upper right corner, the focus goes wonky because it's focusing on my hand instead of on the paper. And I decided not to recolor everything in order to reshoot all of that because there was way too much work. So I I also was editing the video down. What I did was try to chop out all of the places where I went to search for a marker. But you get to see everything else in real time, all the coloring. And I almost was going to when I found a first a couple of the spots where the fuzziness happened or the focus weirdness. I almost deleted those and then I realized I'm going to be deleting a lot of that hair section because that's usually when my hand went up there. So if you have run into any of those sections yet, I have no idea where we are in the video. But if it's gotten to the hair, then you're probably annoyed with me by now. But at least you can see where the color goes. And that might still help to show you how to color an image like this. Speaking of an image like this, I would like to ask your help with something. I want to do another in the Human Rainbow series classes. And in order to do that, I have prevailed upon Sweet Escape to help me by creating some images at my direction for the class. And I don't know a whole lot about what's going on out there in Digiland, as well as in Stampland. I don't have time to keep up on everything. I keep up on some things. But I would love your help if you're somebody who colors people. Let me know where you get your stamps from, your digital stamps or regular stamp stamps to color. Because I want to go and survey them, not for like, I'm going to steal that idea. I'm going to not send them any stamped images. When I send in my request for what I want, I'm going to send in photographs. But what I'd like to do is do a survey to see our braids popular right now, our afros popular right now. Like, what are the kinds of hairstyles and ethnicities that everybody's doing so that when I teach you how to color something, I can combine a number of those ideas into one image so that you're going to be able to not only color this one, but you can go and color that other stamp that you may already have. Because I like to make my things broadly useful. I also don't know how many stamps I'm going to need for this class. And I need to just sort of figure out some stuff. And it would help if I had a head start because I've got to get on this soon. My hope is to launch it for my Black Friday sale, because I usually try to have, you know, one, two, maybe even three classes available for that big sale. And if I'm going to do that, then I've got to get the artist busy right away on getting the drawings done. So that I leave them time. So I'm really excited about that. I love this style of drawing. I love the realism without like having giant eyes, but they're bigger eyes than a regular person would have. So there there's some stylized aspects to it. But it's not like the super big heads, you know, things that are out of proportion. I want to do realistic stuff. And I'm also not going to do things like I want a birthday themed image because I don't want to teach you how to color balloons. This is going to be a class focusing on the person and drawing that person and coloring that that particular image, not on drawing like all the accessories that go with it. There might be something like wings, you know, if there's a lot of fairies out there and that sort of thing. Then maybe I will do something with wings. But I don't really know yet because I haven't done all the research, but you guys can help me by giving me a head start about which companies are the ones that have the best images out there right now of people. So that is a little bit about that class coming up for Black Friday, maybe. Knock on wood, knock on wood that this computer stays in intact until then. I've also had some of my keys on the computer start to come off. Like I have the E and the C key, which don't set down in there. They're not attached anymore, so they're loose. And if I have fingers that are at all damp in the least, then I when I type and touch one of those keys, it pops off and sometimes goes flying. And then I also have several keys that have rubbed off the letters on them. That's how much this computer has been used. God bless it for lasting as long as it has. But I have since college, like when I was in college, I got into deep debt and in the few years afterward and I spent a long time spent decades trying to get that all paid off. And I finally did and I promised myself I was never going to get in debt again. So I have never had to borrow money for my business ever, which I know a lot of people can't say that. But I am just blessed that I have not had to do that. And I'm hoping not to have to to get this silly computer and to get the new lights that I need. Some of you guys have been pointing out. Thank you so much that my lights are doing a little flickering here and there. And it's random with the lights, like one of them has decided it's going to do this flickering thing on occasion. I don't know why, just one of them. And they no longer make these lights. So I'm going to have to switch to a new kind of light. I did find some that are cheaper than these, but they're bigger. And I'm trying to figure out like if I can set the wattage on one so I can buy one at a time and make both of them work, or do I have to buy a full set of lights? Yeah, you know, we artists should be able to just focus on the art and not worry about all the tech stuff and the cameras and the lights and the computers and all that stuff. I just want to snap my fingers and all that icky part of doing this would go away and I could just teach. That would make me so happy if I could, you know, like hire a munchkin or like train the dogs to do all the computer work. Wouldn't that be nice? If that would happen. Oh, and as soon as I mentioned dogs, Beanna got up. She knows I'm talking about her. I have to not look in that direction. I'll she'll get all excited. Let's see. What else did I want to talk about today? Oh, since we're talking about doing people, I thought I'd maybe tell you about my new drawing group that I'm part of. I mentioned it in my clouds drawing video that I posted a couple of weeks ago and we've been meeting every week since then, which has been really fun. The group is somewhat small, but that's good because the gallery we're in is small and each one of us pays $20 a week to be there. And that covers the model and the space that we're in. So the rental of the space. The group is made up of just a bunch of artists. There's mostly older people. I am usually the youngest one there. There was one week when there was a young guy who was an architect and he had the day off so he could come. And most of the rest of the time it's retired folks because we're doing it on the middle of an afternoon and most people are working. But it's been super fun to be with these people because I feel like they're my tribe. We talk about things during breaks, like having been to a gallery in Paris or Amsterdam in, you know, 2003 and what you saw there. And oh, I saw that painting in 2007. And just the conversation that we're having about art itself is one that I haven't had since college back in the day. And really talking about art at that kind of a level. I just haven't had those kinds of friends in a long time. I have my sketcher friends and we go out and do urban sketching, but it's a different kind of crowd, a different kind of vibe. And these people, like one of them is an abstract painter and he does his drawings in our group are like Picasso-esque and has this really interesting line quality that he has. There's another person who was an illustrator and designer, graphic designer, an illustrator like me. And he tells me stories about back in the day and showed me his portfolio. I mean, it's just like really cool to meet this kind of a group of people at this stage in my art career and talk to them about about things that I haven't talked about with anybody in so very long because I haven't had those kinds of contacts with people. So it's very exciting for me being in that I bought myself this really cute plastic tote and I felt like a kid going back to school. I packed all my my charcoals and my my vine charcoal and my erasers in all the little containers, the little slots in there and my pencils, my charcoal pencils, my blending stumps, all my blending tools, like just packed this whole little box. And I feel like I'm carrying a lunchbox. It's so silly. It is just so, so silly. But I love it. I really am enjoying it. And if if it's something that's ever occurred to you to do, I suggest just going ahead and doing it now. Just in case you're wondering, because you probably are, what is life drawing? Life drawing is drawing people. And yes, they are people who don't wear clothes in general. There was one week when our model didn't show up. So we all modeled for each other and we modeled clothes. Nobody wants to see this. But generally, you have a model and they will take different poses. We start off with, you know, usually ten practice poses, ten warm-ups, and they're a minute to two minutes. So very, very quick, just doing some barely gestures to just try to get some form in. And then we do usually twenty five minute poses the rest of the time. Twenty five minutes is not all that long to get something done. It's interesting to see each artist's approach and, you know, when when each person feels done and, you know, like, have they have they gotten very far in their drawing and some people are faster and some are slower and some just focus on a hand. Some will focus on different things. It's it's an interesting thing to be there with a group of artists all drawing the same thing. You know, we're all gathered around one spot. I'm a member of those sketch groups, as I said, and plein air groups. And we're all dispersed, drawing and painting, whatever we feel like in the area. And then we get back together at the end. And this has a different vibe to it just because we're all doing the same thing. And we're not really talking to each other while we're doing it. We only talk in between. But we're all engaged in the same activity, drawing the same subject. So it's just kind of interesting to experience art in that different kind of a way. In addition to joining art groups, I've been doing it feels like creative things everywhere I go and everywhere I look anymore. Not much rest for the weary around here. I was listening to the radio last Saturday morning and the woman on the radio said, if you have anything you want to do today that's outside, you should do it right now because by the end of the day, it's going to start raining. It's going to be raining for five days. And I kind of panicked because I had a project that I needed to get done, which was painting a cabinet. Now, there's lots of other things I should have been doing outside. There's lots of weeding to be done. But I thought, after it rains, the weeds will be easier to pick out, right? So I decided to focus on painting instead. And I had this cabinet. It was one that I bought at Ikea probably 20, 25 years ago. It was really old. And I had covered it in patterned paper when it was in my studio. It used to hold, it had lots of little drawers. It used to hold all of my embellishments, my stickers, all the little tiny itty bitty things in these drawers. And eventually I'd gotten rid of all that stuff. So I moved the cabinet out, replaced it with something else that was better storage for the things I was using. And the cabinet sat in the hallway for this entire time for years and years and years. And it was just a dust catcher and a stuff catcher. I just kept setting the mail on it or whatever. And I needed to either use it or get rid of it. And I realized when I was thinking about renovating the laundry room, that's the second room that I wanted to renovate. When I started this back in May, and I only did one room, didn't get very far. Second room, I realized that this cabinet would fit in there and I could use it to hold all of my hardware stuff. The nails, the screws, the hammers, all of the tools that I use around the house. I can't tell you how many times I've bought another screwdriver because I couldn't find any screwdrivers. I have so many of them, like I have to have a yard sale just to get rid of all the extras that I bought. But I don't even know where they all are. So I thought if I start putting everything in that cabinet, then it's all going to be in one place and I can at least sort through what I've got. Well, I needed to repaint this thing because it had patterned paper on it that was now coming off. It was falling apart, so I needed to do something. So I had to peel off all the patterned paper and then I repainted it using the colors that I'd used in the bathroom because I'm going to use the same colors in the laundry room. In the bathroom, the blue is on top and the white's on bottom. So I'm going to flip that and I'm going to do the blue on bottom and the white on top in the laundry room. But I'm going to use an ocean theme because, you know, water, laundry, get it. And the bottom is going to be painted like the ocean. And then the top is going to be clouds. So this cabinet is going to be the first thing that I handled in that laundry room. I painted the cabinet. You can see over on my Instagram, there's a short video I did of it and I painted clouds on the doors using just the regular brushes and paint that I was going to use for the walls eventually so I could practice to see if this was going to work on the walls. And it really came out cool just using the regular wall paint. I didn't get out any acrylics or anything. I just use the paint for the walls to make swishy marks to turn them into clouds. So I think the laundry room is going to work out really cool if I ever get around to getting it done. Maybe, maybe this fall I'll get to it. I don't know, I'm going to cross my fingers that I find some time under the sofa cushions or something to get that done because I have all the stuff for it. I already bought the paint earlier this year. So let's see if I can get to that. Another area that I've been dabbling in something that I haven't done in forever is some graphic design stuff for my new church that I have just joined. And they have started this food bank and clothing bank and I've been doing all the signage, just making handmade signs for them. And at first when we were talking about, you know, I said, do you need any art type of stuff for this new food bank that you're launching? Just knowing that you need signs, you need a sign that says shirts are here, diapers are here, you know, like just to direct people. And they kind of looked at me weird and I had all of this extra poster board that somebody had donated to me years ago. And it was in the garage for, I don't know, 10 years at least, a huge box of this poster board. And I've been trying to find out how to use it. And when I saw this thing, I said, hey, can I use this poster board and make you guys any signs? Do you need any signs? And I came in with the first set of signs and their jaws just hit the floor. They were like, we just thought you're going to like take a piece of paper and scribble something on it, not like, and here I am, like measuring the letters and making sure everything's straight. So now I'm making like tons of signs. And then the pastor messaged me on Instagram and asked if I would do some environmental graphics for the church. I haven't done environmental graphics in, oh, gosh, 20 years, maybe? It's been a long time. And, you know, starting now to research who can install all these graphics and I'm designing and stuff and get some estimates and all that sort of thing is a whole different ball of wax from the kinds of things that I do now. And they chose a design that's just got lots of great color on it. I'm I'm excited to see this thing come to fruition. They've got to have a lot of meetings and figure out wording on stuff. But it's going to be pretty cool when it's done. And it's always nice to be able to use the skills that you have as an artist to help in something else that you care about in, you know, helping this church. And I think it's going to be really fun as well. I am guessing that we must be getting closer to the end of this video because I'm I'm watching my timer. I have the timer set for the full length of this video. And I can't see where we're at. But let me say that you're not going to see the background colored. Just in case you're looking at how long you have left in this video. No, I'm not going to zip through and do that background really fast because the background is one from the class. And I never put class content here on YouTube because people are paying for it and I don't want them to feel like they're not getting the value of the exclusive content in the class. But for those who do take the class, you'll have to note that the colors that I'm using for the background in the class are more traditional types of greens for the trees. And in this particular case, I'm going to be using the blue green colors that I'm using on the girl. So on her outfit on the flowers in her hair and some of the color in the wings, I'm going to pull into the trees and the darker color that you're going to see in those trees is actually one of the purple colors that was using her hair. So I pulled colors from the person to pull into the background. So anytime you're trying to coordinate the color of the image with the colors that you're using in the background of whatever it is that you're creating, it's really helpful to bring some unity to the whole thing and and some balance and harmony by using the same colors. So I often set all the markers out as I'm coloring something. I usually start with the main image and I set all those markers out so they're on the table or in a basket or whatever you want to put them in. And then when you go to create your background, don't just grab new colors from your marker bag. Use stuff that you had already used in the picture itself. You may have noticed as I was coloring her hair, it were like, I don't know, it felt like 70,000 colors in it, but I counted at the end and it was only 10. On my blog, there are two photographs. One photograph has my hand holding all of the colors that were used just in the hair. And then the other handful is the skin tones and the outfit. And then, as I said, the background color is combining purples with the blue greens to create all the colors that you see in that. And then of course, the white pen at the end is always the biggest deal for me because I love my white pen. It's the Signo Uniball gel pen and it is a fantabulous, fantabulous pen. There's a video next week that I will be posting all about a white gel pen and how you can unstick it if it gets stuck. And I actually tried some of the methods that I had posted on social media a few weeks back and I'm putting it here on YouTube so YouTube people can also see it because y'all are missing out if you're not coming over to Instagram and Facebook to see what is going on in the world. So we must be at the end because my timer is about running out, so I am going to call it a day and give my voice a rest after all of this because I feel like I've been talking forever. I hope you're not bored. If you're still here, thank you. Thank you for sticking around. I appreciate you very much. I appreciate your likes on this video as well. If you hit the thumbs up, if you've made it this far, you should hit the like button because if you're watching this long to just hate watch it, then you need to go doing something else with your day, okay? All right. There's links in the doobly-doo to get to the Copic enchantment class, the winter enchantment class. And I'm probably going to put, yeah, let's put the regular Copic enchantment class on sale too. So I'm going to put both of them down there in case you want to see the other one as well if you aren't into coloring winter things because I know my friends in the other side of the world on the upside down part of the world have their warm weather coming right now. So you might decide that you would rather have the regular Copic enchantment class. So I will put them both on sale and you can enjoy those. And all of the other holiday and winter and anything Christmas related classes are also all on sale this month because that's what everybody's working on right now. So go find yourself something to inspire you and I will see you again soon and hopefully not with a video that's this long and full of me yammering about all kinds of useless things. Alrighty, I will see you guys later. Thank you so much. Have an awesome day. Bye bye.