 Hey, it's Sandy. Happy Friday. Today, I'm going to be talking about changing the ink in a piston fountain pen, drawing a bunch of whimsical birdhouses and watercoloring them, in case you missed it, some free stuff that happened this week. And if you want to color this image rather than draw your own birdhouses, you can do that, make some cards with it. All of that ahead in this video. Let's get started. Today's project required that I refill my pen because I wanted to try some new ink. So what I do when I fill my piston pen is to run the nib of the pen, the silver part to the left of my hand under the running water and then pump the piston up and down. And mine happens to be a clear pen so I can see the water in the ink as they mix and it eventually turns clear. If you don't have a clear pen and you can't see it, just wait until the water that's exiting the pen is running clear into the sink. It'll be the same thing to refill it, submerge the nib in the ink and then raise that piston and it sucks in the ink like a turkey baster would filling your pen and then just wipe off the ink from the outside. And you're done. Really easy to refill these pens. I love that about them because I don't like it. My fingers are messy. So now let's start the illustration itself. I bought this pad of illustration board on sale a little bit ago and had to use it. You can see how thick it is and it works well with fountain pens. I used to use it back in college and in my early graphic design career for doing mechanicals when everything used to be pasted up on boards like this. We used a lot of illustration board back then, but I haven't had cause to buy it since then. But since I do so much work with my fountain pens now, I thought it would be fun to get a pad and see how well it really does work with fountain pen. And it does a really great job. There's no feathering or anything really nice and clear. Basically, given if you make clear lines, if you make messy lines like I do, you'll still get the messy. Paper is never going to clear that up, but it doesn't add to any of the mess that I already make. The style that I'm using here is what I call whimsical. It's not trying to be perfect. There's a lot of people who try to do perfect illustrations on their computer so that all the lines are exact and everything is the same thickness. That kind of thing. And I just have gotten irritated by that in the last number of years because there is so much digital art that's created digitally. It's not stuff that's digitized after it's hand drawn. It's just basically made in the computer and I'm at the point in my life when I like to see the process. I like to see the hand drawn things. So this makes me happier just to do something loose and whimsical this way. So I had sketched everything out in pencil and I did use a T square to try to get a few lines straight so not everything would be totally kitty wampus. But as you can see, I'm not using a ruler to draw any of this. It's the same style that's in the whimsical sketching class that I've had for a number of years. Lots of people have gone through that class and I have to say I'm surprised how many people love it because it seemed to me at one point like I don't know if anybody else but me is going to care about a class like this. And it's kind of fun to see a lot of people take it on. You don't have to use a fountain pen to do it, but you can because fountain pens are fun. In that class, you can use a Sharpie and a piece of computer paper if that's what you want to draw on anything at all goes because it's whimsical just learning how to draw some objects and some pictures that are in a very whimsical loose style. Lots of fun and very forgiving. So if you're somebody who's wanted to try drawing and hasn't gotten around to that, then by all means you might want to give that one a shot. To create these birdhouses. What I did was Google homemade birdhouses because I wanted some ideas for crazy shapes, crazy ways to build them and you would be amazed at what's out there. If you look up handmade birdhouses, there are things that look like the Coliseum or they make it look like an old Western saloon. And really, all it does is have a hole in it so the bird can get into the bird seat. That's really all that a birdhouse is. But people get so creative with them. And I thought I would do it and owed to that by making a bunch of crazy ones. So I have one that looks like a French lantern because I saw one like that. Another that center one at the bottom with all the dots in it kind of looks like a gnome hat. Because I saw one that had grasses on the top of it. They built it so that grass would grow on the top or moss or something. Just kind of really funky, crazy shapes and different styles and different types of wood. People were using all kinds of scraps to nail things together. And I just loved looking at all those pictures. It's very inspirational to see that. And the idea for Monday's video, you might be able to tell, came out of this drawing because this drawing has a lot of wood in it. So I decided on Monday, I would be talking about wood and all week on social media. This particular birdhouse has a design that was kind of borrowed pieces of it borrowed from one birdhouse builder. And then another one had something that I thought was so fascinating. It looked like parquet flooring on the outside of it. But it was wood going every different direction and they were all different colors of wood. It was like a patchwork quilt of wood. And I thought that was the coolest thing. This is by far my favorite of these birdhouses. I'm going to be doing other things with it. So I'm kind of excited about that. Decided to plant a flag on top of it on a little tree stem, little branch up there with a flag. Just because, yeah, silliness. Things occurred to my brain as I was working on this that I don't even know where they came from. But that's what the whimsical style does for me. It allows my mind to just play and think about shapes and colors. And I'm trying to balance which ones have a lot of detail in each section and which ones have less detail so that they almost look like lights and darks. Because when I go to color them, all I have to do is a wash of whatever color I'm putting in and then all the shading is practically there because of all of the pen work that's been done. So add some text on a few of these signs. I decided on joy, peace, and happiness because I am determined that is what 2022 is going to be filled with. Joy, peace, and happiness. Because I'm tired of the not happiness that has been part of our world of late. So let's just spread some smiles and joy around. So the drawing here is just about done, although I need to get rid of all of those pencil lines. I tried a kneaded eraser and it worked somewhat, but I needed something with more strength that would push into the paper. So I used that credit color eraser and it worked really well. It made a mess with all the shavings, but boy did it erase perfectly on this illustration board. And I know some of you were probably worried about that last little birdhouse hole and was I ever going to get to it. And yes, I did. So now I'm going to watercolor it just do a couple of loose strokes. Remember, I said all the shading is already there because of all that pen work. Well, all I have to do is paint over it in different kinds of browns and grays and purples. And I was going for all neutral colors because that's kind of the theme I've been on this week is using real natural kind of browns and mixing different colors from my palette because I only have one brown, which is transparent red oxide. And I only have one yellowish brown, which is yellow ochre. So I have to mix other things with it. So that's the transparent red oxide. If I mix it with varying amounts of paints, blue, gray, I can get all kinds of browns. I don't need a whole dozen browns in my palette. I just need one and then I can mix other things with it. So try seeing what in your palette you can mix with whether what other color to create the kinds of shades you need. So there's my finished piece kind of fun, a little bit silly, a little bit whimsical. I did put it in my fine art shop if you need to have the original in your hands. If you would rather not draw your own birdhouses and you want to color my birdhouses, there is a whimsical birdhouses collection for five bucks. You get the full picture, eight and a half by 11. The full picture reduced down to a two size cards, but they're so small. I don't really recommend that because they're hard to color tiny. But I made some a two size with just some of the birdhouses on them gave you trim lines so you can just cut along those to separate them. And I also made the birdhouses drop along the bottom so you can cut off that bottom edge. Just let your coloring rag off the bottom end. And then I also since I'm a not about slimline cards decided to make some large birdhouses on slimline sized ones so you can make all different size cards using just this $5 set. Now to finish off my cards. I used a tutorial that I had done maybe 10 days ago or so ish with a new sunny studio stamp set with these little birds and I colored them all lickety split. It was so easy. A link you to that video on Instagram in the doobly-doo made all these cute little birds by fussy cutting them and then they worked with the birdhouses. Look how tiny and cute they look with the big birdhouses and they look more normal sized with the smaller bird or the shall we say the medium. Birdhouses those tiny ones. They look like giant birds on those don't use these birds for that. But the stamp set is linked in the supply list as well. Now in case you missed it. There's a few other things going on out there Monday. I had a video all about coloring tree bark with Copic markers Thursday was a tiny tutorial on doing different colors of wood and I just showed you what colors. You could use to create different wood textures more of furniture and flooring as opposed to bark. And that you can either get by the link in the doobly-doo that I will send you to over on Instagram or in the app. If the app has launched and you'll know what I mean because I will already have talked about it. But if the app has not launched and you know there's an app coming. That's going to hold all the tiny tutorials in it. Let's cross our fingers. That's already been announced. Okay, I will see you guys later. Take care and have an awesome weekend. Go make something beautiful. Bye bye.