 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Alnok and I'm going to be coloring some social media princesses today using MFT's new pre-princess stamp set. And I've stamped the three standing young ladies along with their carriage, wanted to use some Stonehenge cardstock in order to start my coloring with Prismacolor pencils. And I'll be floating the colors that I'm using above their heads if you're interested in what those color choices are. Notice that this little girl is using one color for the base and then another pinkish color for the shadows. This other girl is using a different colored base with the same colored pink shadow color. And the two girls come out with different skin tones. So you can mix and match your pencils to create different skin tones just by changing one of the colors in the combination. And I'm only using two in these, but you can use three colors. You can use all kinds of colors when you're doing your color pencil work. If you're interested in more on the human rainbow, the whole series and everything, over on my blog I have a whole page that collects all of my color pencil and Copic human rainbow stuff into one spot. So you can check that out. This little girl, the brown got too dark, so I added a lighter color, which is the base color for the girl on the left, on top of the brown and it lightened it. So the order that you put colors down makes a big difference because you can lighten something or darken something based on the order that you put it in. This is the place in which my card went a different direction than my expectation. So if you've watched many of my color pencil videos, you'll know that I generally use a much lighter touch. I like to layer colors and kind of let them let the under colors show through more, let them blend nicely and that sort of thing, but here I started using heavier pressure. I just got real excited about her hair getting nice and dark and started using like a four or five pressure. In my color pencil jump start class, we do an exercise in which you get to practice using a very light to a very dark pressure and decide which is right for you. This is exhausting. Your hand gets really tired by the time this whole thing was done. I was beating myself up for having gone down this road, but once I started, I kind of couldn't figure out how to stop. So there's that. But it's also okay to have something that's outside of your normal genre. This is not my normal kind of color pencil coloring because it's so heavy. Not that it's wrong by any means, but it's just different. I recently went on a tour of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and it was a virtual tour. So it was kind of fun to be able to visit Amsterdam during a pandemic without leaving my studio. I got to sit here and watch it on Zoom, which was fun. And one of the things that struck me in that little tour, not that I didn't know this already because I already know Van Gogh's work fairly well, is the difference in styles that he had. And they talked specifically about where he was and he had maps showing where he moved from one place to another. And that his style changed, his color choices changed, his paint application changed. And it made me realize that the times that I beat myself up, like I said on this, I'm coloring with a heavier pressure than I normally do. And I'm like, eh, should I refilm it? Should I start over? I gave myself permission to be Van Gogh here and to just do what I was doing and let it go. And the card came out fine and the end is just not my normal. And it was also exhausting for my hand because using this much pressure is a challenge for coloring this much stuff because I actually ended up doing a background too. Crazy, crazy. It's a choice I probably won't make all that much more in the future. I will know better because I will remember this experience, but it doesn't mean this is bad. It just means it's different than what I normally do. So if this is the way you color normally, that's okay too. Like all these, my social media princesses, because the colors that I chose to color them in are the colors of some of my favorite social media sites that I use. And yours may be the same, they may be different, but this is Facebook girl. You might notice that blue. I did give her a little bit more of a teal blue for the highlights on her little dress just because I wanted something a little bit different. And then added some white pen. Now white pen sometimes works over colored pencils, sometimes doesn't. It can be affected by the types of pencils that you use, the amount of layering that you use, and whether or not you use blending solution of some kind on it. I find that once I put some blending solution down, I don't get a very good grip from the white pen. So at the end, when I do the background, I wanted to put stars in the background and I will show you what I used in order to put the stars in there since the white pen didn't work. Instagram users might recognize the coloration on this young lady. I would love to have a gown that looks like this. She has a rainbow dress and I'm having to go back and forth between the different colors to get the rainbow effect to blend across the dress and using the colors in forward order and backward order in order to get that rainbow to happen. I'll catch up with her cape later on in the video, and yes I did catch up coloring her neck. I forgot that when I was coloring her skin tone in the first place. So if you were worried, have no fear. It got taken care of. And then her rainbow bow on her head also matches her dress. The third little girl is inspired by YouTube's colors, of course red, black, and white. And I've chosen a medium red and I'll add in a dark red for shadows and some white pen. Now you could use other social media for your inspiration for colors too. You can go make a TikTok girl and a, I don't know, a WhatsApp person. I just found out by the way that my mom is now on WhatsApp. Shocking to me, we just got her a brand new smartphone for Christmas and she is just having a blast learning how to work apps and things. And I just think that that's amazing and crazy and wild all the same time. So her cape, I wanted it to feel transparent so I colored it purple with a little bit of white over top of it. Then comes the carriage, which is Google's colors. They have a red, blue, yellow, so the primaries plus green. They throw in a green which throws the whole color scheme of the card off. I was trying to figure out where to use the green because there's no other green on this entire thing. So the green is going to stick out like a sore thumb so I wanted to find some places to put it where it would be present but not overbearing, I guess. So first got all of my primary colors in there and then just added the green to some of the smaller bits. I had the roof left and I was gonna make it all green and I realized that all green is too much so I just put a little green on either side and then blue in the middle to join it. I used a white pen to make more glassy looking windows. I'll add a couple of white pen lines to them as well as some white pen detail onto the roof to put the scrollies back in. And then I was faced with what to do with the rest of the card because I had, you know, my vision so far was to just have this much and it felt very plain. So I had it first establish that they're standing on the ground so I put shadows under them. That was a little darker of a gray than I would have liked so I put some white over top of it. Nice thing you can do with colored pencil. But then I realized that the little girl in the rainbow dress, her cape didn't show up as a transparent cape very well so I had the brilliant idea, okay, not so brilliant, of putting a night sky behind them. Like they're going to the ball and they're outside and it was going to be a purple at the bottom toward blue at the top. And since I'd already started with this heavy pressure then I guess I sort of needed to do heavy pressure on the sky in the background. If I had suddenly switched to doing a light pressure sky that might have been a little weird. So I proceeded for the longest time to color in my entire background. Do not do this. Just going to recommend that. Your hand will get very, very tired. And I sat there for the longest time trying to get this all nice and smooth, trying to figure out how to get the blend right. And it was not a fun process. This is my Van Gogh moment of trying something completely different. Van Gogh at least came out with paintings that were still hugely valuable. I'm not sure that I am achieving the same thing as he did. But nonetheless, I finally finished getting the coloring in there and then I cheated and went in with my blending stump and tried to get rid of all those little white spots so I could get a smoother blue background back here. The thing that that did to me though was make it so that my white pen would not work on top of all of the blending solution and fully blended color pencil. Now I have not done a full test of that to find out if the blending solution always causes the white pen not to work. I've just noticed that most of the time it does work and sometimes it doesn't. That might be the thing. So I had to come up with an alternate solution to make my star. So I got on some watercolor grounds from Daniel Smith. And I have the big jar, but it does come in smaller ones as well. I highly recommend the smaller one. It's taken me years to go through this bigger one. And I got a little teeny tiny brush. Doesn't have to be a good brush. And I'm just going to make little stars with that. And this actually works over a lot of different mediums. So if you're looking for something other than a Uniball Signo pen, because my Signo pens work well. Some people can't get one to work. This is a really good alternate. And I find that it also doesn't tend to suck up as much color from underneath as white pen would. So, Daniel Smith, watercolor grounds, thank you for saving my bacon. Well, this card may be my Van Gogh card that does not suit my normal style of color pencil, but it was still a fun process and I still learned a lot from it. And that makes it valuable in my book. So if you learned something from this, please click the like button. You can go see more of the Human Rainbow over in the link on the doobly-doo. And yeah, that's about it for today. I'll see you again really soon. Bye-bye.