 Hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to do some color block doodling and it's inspired by an illustrator. I made a whole bunch of cards with it. I'll just make pieces of a few of them here because they took quite a while, but they were a lot of fun to do and they're very easy. So I'm going to use the new Colorado Craft Company release. Home Sweet Home has the whole scene at the bottom in one stamp or the pieces are separate at the top of the set. We've also got this coffee house set, lots of mice in it, brewing the coffee. We have puppies because who doesn't want puppies. This is called what this. I'm not really sure where the name comes from, but there you go, birthday set. And then this one has hedgehogs in it that are sending mail and reading mail. Well, this is the illustrator that inspired me for today, Isabelle Arsenault. That's how I'm guessing she pronounces her name. And I'm going to just use this first inside spread. You can get the book and read the whole thing. It's very cute. I love her work. I love her illustrations. I like the giant flood of orange with just that pop of the teal. And I made one card as a reel over on Instagram. It's kind of their little mini version of like TikToks on Instagram. And I've been doing those like every two or three days. Sometimes it's a card. Sometimes it's just a crafty thing. But I made that card over there. And then here I am going to be working on the puppy dogs. So you can see how this whole idea worked out in terms of how I approached it. I started by stamping on watercolor paper. You could also do this with Copic markers or colored pencils, just whatever it takes to create a space that you can color in one section. And I colored one section in the cobalt teal blue. Now the colors are really off here. I don't know what was going on with my camera in this first section. But trust me, that's cobalt teal blue. It's not this weird neon color. But I've taped around it with my white artist tape and then dried it and then took the tape off. And then I've got a nice block of the blue and then did a reverse taping. So I taped off the inside portion, which if you're careful, it's just painting a straight line. It's really not all that hard to do. So you don't necessarily have to tape it all off. But I painted the orange around the outside, had to mix an orange color since I don't have any pure orange. And I used some new gamboge and a little bit of anthraquinoid scarlet to make an orange. And then once all that was dry, I just got out a watercolor pencil. This is a black watercolor pencil from Faber-Castell. It's an Albrecht Durer watercolor pencil because I wanted to be able to use it to make some grays as well. You could also do this with any kind of a black pen or something. But the style that Isabel Arsenal uses is a little softer and she uses some very thin, very light lines with light pressure, some that are heavier. And I didn't try to mimic this exactly necessarily. But I did have it out during some of my early attempts at doing this so I could stay a little closer to some of her marks and the way she made them. A lot of what she does also includes scraping things off. So I didn't include that in mine, but you could also do that because some of it looks almost scratch-bordy in certain sections. Really beautiful style that she's got going. And then I'm going to make another one in doing it slightly differently. Each one of these taught me something so I adapted from each one to try something different. Here I moved that blue block to a different place. Instead of being vertical, it's going to be horizontal on this one. And not for any super spectacular reason other than I just wanted to see what happened if I did it. And that's where being inspired by another artist can lead you to do something different rather than trying to replicate someone exactly. I'm trying to find out where is the sweet spot that I could learn from something she does. So I'm using a little bit of her for inspiration. I'm using her orange and her teal, even though I'm adapting it because I'm mixing the color. My orange didn't always come out perfectly, that sort of thing. But one of the great things about this for new people is that if you don't get a really solid flood of color, and I wasn't really worried about getting a solid flood of color on here because there was going to be so much doodling, but you can do right over top of any areas that don't work out perfectly. So I decided to make the puppies look like Vienna because that is just what happens when I start making dogs nowadays. But one of the things that all of this whole process of looking at Isabel's work did for me is to have me leave the image without any real color in it and put all the color in the background. In some of them I tried putting a little bit of gray shadows in the animals and stuff. But for the most part, it was more fun in this particular instance to try moving the color to the outside only and keeping it in the doodling. Some of the doodling I doodled with the pencil and then sometimes I would grab the brush and wet that down so I would get more of a gray look because she got all sorts of different types of lines and textures and colors when she did her doodling in her book. And she's got other types of imagery that I wouldn't do in future videos maybe if I continue to be inspired by her. I'm also taking your suggestions. So some of you on my Maury Sendak video left me Isabel as one of your wishes that I should go and look at her work. I already was a fan but I have a pretty good size collection for myself of children's illustrators. So if you want to throw some names in the comments and then be sure to go see the Maury Sendak video as well. I'll link that at the end of this video. So here are two cards made from the hedgehog set. One of them I kept it really clean by putting all of the doodling on one side rather than having it all over the whole card. And then here are the dogs. One of them had more complex doodling and heavier doodling. The other one had it that was lighter. So there's lots of different directions you can go. For the coffee cards I did have to add some color for the coffee. I started by adding an orange and then realized I needed to add some brown because it needs to be brown if it's coffee, right? And then for Home Sweet Home I opted to add a yellow because I started by painting the orange and the teal and then it just needed something else and I was debating whether to add a third color or not but I kind of like that I did. It's a very soft pale color and having no doodling everywhere kept the scene a little bit nicer, a little bit cleaner. So here's my whole collection of cards. I hope this might be something you might try whether it's in these colors or any other pair of colors that you like and see what happens. Just grab a pencil and do some doodling over top of whatever you have colored. Be sure you subscribe to my channel. There's a link down below and a bell right beside it so you can get notified when I've got new videos up which is every Monday, Wednesday and Friday-ish. I'll see you guys later.