 Hello there! It's Sandy and I'm back with number four in the six series videos of my 24 Tags of Christmas for 2021. And this time I got out my colored pencils. And we're going to talk about sloths and snow and branches. And it's a stamp set from Sunny Studios Stamps. And I started by coloring a lighter brown in the face. I had to look up which parts of the face on a sloth are which color. And they have sort of a light brown in there. And then we get to a darker brown around the outside edges. And then through the body it fans out to be more of a lighter-ish color. So then it's a matter of figuring out how much dark for a shadow you want versus the color of the sloth itself. So I'm using my dark brown to carry the shadow. And note on this stamp set there's two of these different sloths. One hangs from the branch so his shadows are going to be at the bottom. And the other is sitting on the branch and his shadows are going to be on the bottom which is his feet side. So they're both sitting different directions on the branch itself. So I added the lighter color, same color that I used on the face. But I'm using it here with the darker brown to make that transition from the lighter color at the top to darker down at the bottom. And then sloths have a dark color either a black or a dark gray for the area around their eyes and their nose. For this I did decide to get my gamsol out and do a little colored pencil blending with it. And while I have an entire drawer full of blending stumps because I apparently have loved them and I've bought them for many years from college days till now. It's what I had this huge collection of them. And this one is tiny. There's a whole bunch of them that I had that are itty bitty. I want to know what size hands they were making these for because it's so tiny. My hands can hardly hold it. It's just ridiculous. But nonetheless I prefer one that's a little longer. And normally I use those but I'm trying to use up the ones that are in the worst shape so I can toss them and get down to a smaller collection of sizes and things that I actually like. But I figured for this tiny image having a very tiny tip on it was going to be helpful and that was the one that had the tiniest tip. So there you go. Adding a few stripes onto the scarf. And then for some tips here on doing the background I decided not to stamp the tree because a tree is going to take some masking in order to get that to work right since I don't have the die. So I wanted to color a tree branch myself. I decided not to put the lights on it because on the stamp there are lights on it. So I just used the same two browns to make the tree branch and then started coloring in the navy blue. Now the reason that I'm doing this on black I have a black scrap of paper. I actually have a huge stack of black scraps from a massive project I did a long time ago and I still have these two or three inch strips laying around just tons of them. So I decided to use that underneath because one of the things that happens when I color with colored pencil around to the outside edge of something and here I'm not going to be trimming it because I've already die cut a circle or punched a circle for the tag. I end up with a little halo around the outside edge where I didn't get all the way to the edge when I'm using white paper underneath of it. That's because I couldn't see the edge of the paper as easily and make sure that I get it completely covered. But on black I get it completely covered by the boom by the bang. So I'm using a bigger pencil blending stump at this point because yeah that other one was too tiny. So as long as I have this nice big area I thought I'm going to switch to one of the big ones but it doesn't have a very sharp point on it so I can only use it in wide open areas. So for the top of the branch the snow is going to sit on the top so you need to leave some white area and I took out the snow that's where the paws are because I didn't want his paws to get cold. He would have knocked off the snow so he could hold onto the wood right? That's my logic at least that's the logic I'm using because yeah I don't like to think about them getting their little little tozies cold. To finish this off I decided to add some snow dripping down and you can do this whenever you're doing any kind of snow that sits on top of something a snowman's hat the roof of a building etc make some lumps of snow that are hanging downward from it and then it looks like really generous copious amounts of snow and on color pencil you can do that real easily to fix that but here you can see I have different branches on the other one so let's look a little bit at the branches you can do it real simply or you can add complex ones. The way I did that was to draw the branch first and then add in some smaller branches down below smaller branches up above add some shading onto them so that I get some dimension onto the branches themselves and then with the snow you have to add the blue color touching the bottom of the branch and then leave a space on the top where the snow sits on top of each of the branches and if you have a fork in the branch like I do remember to leave snow on the other half of the fork. Fortunately the blue color here is dark enough that if you forget it just whack off the branch and no one will see that it was ever there but for my particular case I did remember to leave the snow on that portion of the branch and then I'm back to using my teeny tiny itty bitty blending stump again because I was trying to get into all those small areas and then for the top again there's a fork in that branch so make sure you leave the snow open on both parts of that fork in the branch blend blend blend blend blend and then you get to move to the portion of adding snow now you don't have to add falling snow to these if you don't like adding snow some people find that to be really not of not a fun thing to do I personally enjoy it myself so I put lots of snow on lots of my Christmas projects to tie my ribbon on this one I put two holes in it so that I could tie a very simple knot out of this silk ribbon from May Arts and then I folded the ends in half if you fold them in half and then cut it so that the folded end is lower and then the non folded end or the open end where you want the points is pointed upward then you get a v shape so you know if you if you can flatten your knot out and make it work better which is sometimes a challenge for me then you get beautiful points on the ends of your ribbons so there is the sloths of Christmas and make sure you leave comments here and over on the blog so that YouTube can have a chance to win a tag see you tomorrow for the next video