 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to show you how to make these crazy wacky trees and To color these cute critters from Avery Elle I Got a little peek ahead at the Avery Elle release And I picked out this stamp set because I thought it was so cute it has these critters and they have little feet And I wanted to do stuff with their little feet. They were so cute So I stacked everything up in my misty to get my layout kind of organized in my mind and Have things layered from the back to the front. So the thing in the front is going to be the little feet So I'll just close the misty on it. It'll leave the feet there. I'm going to stamp them in Excuse me twilight ink And it's a dye ink So I'm going to be able to use this gray ink to make what we call and I don't know why we call it this I still haven't figured it out. No line coloring Basically, the idea is to stamp in a light color so that all of your coloring seems to be Hand drawn as opposed to stamped and having cartoony outlines to them And I wanted this thing to be kind of fun and whimsical. So it was pretty much a blast to make I'm using a clips tape for all of the masking just going from the front to the back Stamping something stamp the thing behind it stamp the thing behind that Building up little by little and I got really tired of cutting out masks. So when it came to the giraffe I just put a little whack of scrap paper or scrap Masking paper down and didn't bother to cut anything out for that one I got out my polychromos pencils, which I keep in a case and this is the colors used For this card and that image is over on my blog if you need to capture that so you can color this one the same way I like my pencils really sharp. So I wanted to show you the close-up so you could see just how sharp they are I generally use my quiet sharp pencil sharpener for the first bit And then sometimes I take a handheld and I do just like one quick turn in the handheld too because that will get them a little bit sharper, but My handheld gets jammed all the time So if I try to sharpen the whole thing with handheld I waste a lot of pencil So the quiet sharp really helps quite a bit in that particular case. So The colors that I'm using on this. I'm trying to unify the whole picture And that's important because I don't want it to look really disparate So you're going to see some colors repeated throughout here, but used in different ways The sharp pencils are really good for getting this kind of detail Especially when you're doing no line coloring and you're drawing back in things like the eyes or the whiskers Because those details need to be sharp. So getting a good sharp pencil is good Now this color is the same yellow that's in the leopard, but I'm going to change it by adding Kind of a brownie orange or orange brownish color on top of it And then even some darker shadows with a brown because those are colors that I know I can use in the giraffe So I'm trying to think ahead to colors that I can use in different proportions on each animal So that they all look like they're in one drawing. They're not all in like completely wild colors that are Not the same as each other But they they work together this way So each one has different colors in different proportions on it, but they're the same pencil colors So limited palette tends to help with things like that So little by little getting him done getting all his little details in there and then comes the crazy trees now these trees I saw on a veggie tails video a while back and I've been wanting to put them Into a card and these guys seem perfect for this. So I'm gonna have a wild jungle full of these crazy mushroom trees or kind of I don't know Parachute trees, maybe not really sure what they're shaped like But they look like giant mushrooms on the top and then they have these like funky stems on the bottom So they still have branches And so I've put the light green color down and I'm using a blending stump to blend the color You don't have to use blending solution And I didn't want these to be really smooth because the animals are not gonna be really smooth I didn't blend those So I just wanted this to be blended enough that it falls into the background I don't want them to the trees to fight for the attention with my little critters I just wanted them to be somewhere crazy and whimsical So after doing these sort of mushroom shaped top to it I'm gonna put an oval down here in the bottom and I'll do three of these I'm just gonna show you one of them, but they're all the same process and Then I'm doing negative coloring around the branches that allows the light green to kind of peek up into the dark green and Look like it's kind of coming from the bottom and reaching up into that open area and Just using a slightly darker color for that It's a little bit tedious to do but it was so much fun And I finally got the idea out of my head because you know ever since I watched that little video a couple months ago I've been thinking about it and thinking I gotta find the right stamp set to do that with So if you are a VeggieTales fan They have a bunch of really good ideas for crazy background type things cartoons tend to simplify The scenes quite a bit. So it's a great kind of source for inspiration So I've got my three trees there with their wacky branches and stuff coming down And I realized the giraffe also needs to be finished off He doesn't have that long of a neck in the stamp set So I would have had to draw him in there anyway, but since he's sticking up so much higher than everybody else He just needed to be finished off before he got down there And I had to finish off my tree branches bring those down a little bit the tree trunks behind the animals and then came finishing off the bottom and I realized after I started putting this grass in that a really cute idea would have been to just stamp their feet In front of the banner at the bottom, too So they have like little hands on top and their little feet on bottom would be really cute But the grass solution was not a bad one. I just did two different greens To fill it in and to get a little more depth on the bottom But I didn't want a ton of detail down there I just wanted enough that it starts to feel kind of like a forest and give some reason for Not having the animals finished off down below And then I used my blending stump to do just a little bit of quick blending on the grass Just to create something a little bit smoother there and Then came putting the sentiment on now This was probably the hardest part believe it or not trying to get that curve to match because the sentiments are straight and I just kind of kept moving it up and then moving the other part down and closing it and Fortunately, I have a misty so I can do that this misty stamping tool helps and then I used a Yeah, a green that didn't quite work So I went over it with a black pencil and I apologize for this being out of focus The camera apparently wanted to focus on my hand For whatever reason it liked my purple nail polish There you go So that's my crazy card for this blog hop with Avery L and Ellen Hudson So go over to my blog and even if you don't have time to visit the whole hop and see all of the different cards Go over there and leave a comment because you know what happens in blog hops You don't want to miss out on the chance. There's a link in the do we do it'll take you right there It'll only take a second Thank you so much for spending just a couple minutes with me today I will be back with another video very soon Let me know in a comment below if you think these are mushrooms or parachutes or what should we call them? I'll see you guys later. Bye