 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olok and today's video is an exercise in shading and I hope you'll enjoy it. I'm coloring this in Prismacolor pencils. These are the very small selection of colors used for this entire card and I wanted to share it with you in kind of sped up form but you can do this kind of thing in any medium and I just want to talk a little bit about the shading that I'll be using here. The fact that these were shoes and they had openings and that sort of thing reminded me of the Casting Shadows class that I launched quite recently and a lot of people want to know more about shading. This one has some interior shading that I want to talk about as well as the outside shading on the tops of the shoes so I'm picturing my lighting coming from the right hand side so the shading is going to be on the left. The highlights will be on the right and I chose to use a brown color because if you've been around dogs like I have and if these are your park shoes they're going to be brown. There's going to be brown all over them because that's what happens to all of my shoes that go with us to the park including all those areas inside the laces. Those are going to be the darkest shadows because they're deepest down underneath. They're furthest away from the light. They have shadows from the laces, they have shadows from the flaps of the shoes and everything so you want a little more dark color in those types of areas as well as on the left hand side of the shoe. For my transitional mid-tone color I'm using more of a golden warm kind of yellow going over top of the brown as well as into the the brighter yellow area. That's going to give it that roundness. I hadn't decided at the beginning whether or not I was going to end up using any blending solution for this and I recommend that as a way of doing your coloring in general is assume you're not going to because it's going to help you to work harder on your color pencil technique. If you're one of those people that doesn't try something until you have to until you're forced to like if you're taking the color pencil jump start class when I made you do things in the class because that was your homework this is one of those ways to just constantly remind yourself of your skills and working on those basics because in any kind of art when you work on those basic skills it's going to play out into everything you do but if we kind of do some cheater things as we're doing our coloring thinking well I'm going to use a blending stump on this I'm going to use Gamsol on this so I don't need to blah blah blah then you're going to lose the ability to learn the very simple blending techniques that are going to give you like in this shoe a larger area that's going to go from light on the left hand side to a darker color on the right hand side and if you challenge yourself to still do that and still try to create some semblance of light area to dark area and to get it relatively smooth although with a shoe again these are dirty shoes they would have my feet in them so I do have to get some yellow shoes like this I think that would be really fun to take to the park but I digress but I do recommend practicing your pencil technique now this is done on the drawing paper that I've been recommending and if you are one of those people that has not tried it yet it's called Stonehenge and this is the Stonehenge White and I really really really recommend it for color pencil and if you're still using other papers this might be one that you want to treat yourself to a pad of it is quite nice paper and it makes all of your blending techniques whether you're using Gamsol or not it makes them all work a little bit better and a lot of the students who have taken my classes and seen that recommendation there have said oh my gosh it's revolutionized my coloring so it's not just me I'm not telling you that because I want you to do what I do or anything I want you to be successful and getting this paper is going to help you to be successful just like I was my hand just went off camera so I could sharpen my pencil I don't tell you to get the quiet sharp sharpener for my health I tell you to get it because it's going to give you that nice sharp tip on your pencils and that's going to make your coloring not only better but easier I added a little shading to those shoe laces on the left hand sides of each one of them where they go into the holes but also a little bit on the curly lace portions and those are they're kind of random I didn't talk about that as I was doing it because there's not there's a whole lot of real science I could apply to it but I decided not to and I'm going in with my black pencil and I should have I'll tell you this now I'm going to use my my blending solution I should have waited to do some of this black portion because you're going to see some of the challenges that I have with my my blending solution blending in just a few minutes but it's still worked so it's okay but I'm adding my darkest shading on the inside of those shoes on the right hand side and you might think well Sandy you always tell us the shading is on the left when the highlight is coming from the right well on the inside of an object it's the opposite and in the casting shadows class I talk about that to a greater extent but when you've got an an inside object that you want to make it look hollow like it's hollowed out it's a bold shape like the inside of these shoes then the shading is the opposite because the wall on the right side of that shoe is what's going to cast that shadow on the inside of the shoe on the right side and the light is going to hit the left side I didn't show you all the coloring of that crazy mat because it took me forever to do that but I wanted to do like a floor mat in a mud room and then some tile floor I did them at an angle just because it was fun not because of anything other than it adds some movement to it rather than just having some static shoes on the card and then I got out my baby oil and the little jar thing that I have here has a cotton ball in it that I've poured my baby oil into you can do the same thing with gamsol I have another one with gamsol in it and I keep it in that because then it won't spill I have this nice big thing I can dip my blending stump into and it it just isn't going to slosh around onto the paper if I bump it or anything like that it's just going to stay in place so I will put a link in the description to the little jars that I got to there just some makeup jars but you can use anything that you can put a cotton ball in and a lid on but look how nicely that shading comes out with the gamsol really darkens it up nicely but the one thing of course that it did do is I had to work carefully around those black areas where I did the shoelace shadows so that was a little more challenging than it would have been had I waited to add that afterward for the mat I wanted to make it fuzzy so I'm letting my blending stump do the fuzzing work on the edge of the the mat but just kind of coloring it in on the rest of it so that it's relatively uniform shaped if you want to add some decor to your your mat or anything the word welcome on it or anything you can draw that underneath of it but I just wanted to have a mat and the flooring so that the shoes could just be sitting there having just come in from the park which is where all my shoes sit they they all are on the floor by the washer and dryer because the shoes have to come off after a trip to the park because I live in Washington where it's either snowing or raining all the time it seems lately and we don't come home from the park with clean dry shoes very often so that's all kind of colored in and I let it be a little bit mushy so that it feels like there's some texture to it so I didn't go for perfection and smoothness and now I'm going to quickly go over the yellow portions of the shoes as well and with each one of these if you're transferring your color like here I was going to use the brown color in the shading portions on the yellow anyway so I didn't have to clean my nib off on my blending stump but I did clean it off in between the the gray portion inside the shoes and the brown part because I didn't want to transfer that color so be aware of what color is on the end of it you can scribble it off on a sheet of paper or use a little sanding block to sharpen it up as well as clean that off I'm adding some more dark shadows on the left sides again where the light is casting a shadow onto the mat itself and following along where I think the the curve of each one of my shoelaces is going to go and again there's a lot of science you could apply to this to try to make it look perfect but I like to just think about it as making it believable just so that people think oh wow look she did that shadow a little bit away from where the shoelace is so it looks like there's air between it and that's good enough for me I don't worry about whether somebody's going to go the light wouldn't do that that shadow would go over to the left more I just look to make it believable I added a little sentiment to it out of some black card stock a hello by Ellen Hudson from the one of the recent releases and I'll have links to all the supplies in the doobly-doo as well as over on the blog that is about it for me for today I hope this was helpful to you and I will see you again in another video same bat time same bat channel and I hope you go out and make something beautiful and then send it to someone else because why are we hoarding all the beauty share it with somebody else and make them smile at their mailbox I'll see you guys later