 Hello there, it's Sandy and I'm going to draw a flower garden today. But first I want to talk about that sharpener that I showed you in my last video. If you missed that you might want to go check it out. I did not give a full explanation apparently in that video because I had a lot of very upset people watching my pencil get eaten away and they thought this is terrible, it's just going to eat your whole pencil. And it is going to surprise you. So I've measured exactly where the pencil is, the exact length of it with that piece of tape stuck my pencil in it. But now you can hear when the sharpener stops sharpening. So it hasn't auto stopped definitely. And then you can turn the handle the other way to back the pencil out which means you can sharpen nubs in this, little tiny pencils which my regular sharpener can't. And even with that really long point the length is the same. It might have taken off maybe a 30 second of an inch and I checked my quite sharp takes off way more than that as does my handheld sharpener. So you're using up more lead with those other sharpeners than this one. One of the reasons that I bought this sharpener in the first place is because so many of the fine art sketchy people like the people who do lots of big sketches on big paper that kind of stuff they use this sharpener a lot I shouldn't say they as in one homogeneous group but there's a number of them on Instagram that I have seen with this kind of pencil point and this kind of sharpener. So that's what I wanted to test it out for because I am about to embark on a new class. I'm so excited. There's a group near me that does life drawing on Monday afternoons. And so I have bought all kinds of fun supplies to take with me big pads of paper and charcoals and big wacky things and I am just tickled pink to get back to my college days. I used to love life drawing classes. I was terrible at it but it was really a good exercise. So I'm going to be embarking on that soon and I was thinking this sharpener might be a good thing to take with me. So I could work with some nice rich pencils and have this to sharpen them rather than a little handheld because I sort of wanted to see whether this eats up more or less lead and the fact that it eats up less might be a good thing. If I'm going to be doing a lot of sketching this might be good. I don't know. It's very lightweight. It's going to fit in my bag so I might try it and I'll keep you posted as that goes forward. What I'm using supply wise here is paper that I now know how to pronounce thanks to Lori who is a French teacher and sent me an Instagram DM with herself recorded saying the word so that I could know. It's called Métain and the paper itself, this Métain paper which I have heard pronounced so many ways in every art store nobody knows how to pronounce it. This paper has a very broad wide texture to it. So it's good for bigger drawing so that's why I'm doing this larger one. The full size of it is there on the screen. I'll make sure I go measure that for you. And I'm using Caron Dash number 9B for a black pencil and I'll be using a white Prismacolor because I also wanted to test the Prismacolors in this sharpener. I wanted to find out if this really long, long, long crazy point is actually going to be a problem with softer pencils because Prismacolors definitely break more than the Polychromos that I tested out and throughout this entire drawing I had not one breakage with this white pencil. Now through the whole drawing both of my pencils turned into nubs as you saw at the beginning that was them after I had finished my drawing so I did use up a lot of pencil because I was doing a lot of drawing however I didn't find that it was a problem for the Prismacolor pencil to have this kind of a point on it and that was a good thing. As far as use of the pencil I found that I tended to hold the pencil back a little further. I didn't get my fingers like way down on the tip of it so it made me a little looser to draw with this kind of a point. I don't know if that's something that is going to play out to have any major difference because it's not by a whole lot. You can see I'm still holding the pencil relatively close down there but when you grip onto any tool that you're using whether it's a marker or a brush or a pencil and you just choke down on the tip of it you lose that free kind of line that you can get when you hold back a little bit so that's when I was also hoping this would do for me. We shall see how that works in the long run but the flowers that I'm drawing are just from memory they're just random flowers in my brain they're not flowers that I was looking at anything for but they're really easy to draw it's just find some shapes of flowers and leaves and connect them to each other you could do the same kind of a thing with stamps but then you would have to mask out all the stamps and if you're somebody who loves masking that might be a lot of fun for you but you might also want to try to see if you can draw your own flowers you could do this with pencils you can do it with a marker you can do it with a black pen you can do all kinds of different things to draw your own art instead of always using stamps so on colored paper like this one the texture of it is something to take into account most card stocks are going to be way less textured and you'll know what they're like to color with so if you're thinking of drawing on one just know what that texture is going to work best with in terms of which kind of pen or which kind of medium to use with it but I challenge you to try something different maybe try drawing some flowers all on your own and you can certainly watch this video while you draw them and try to mimic some of the flowers that I do here I'll also have a picture of this posted on my blog so you can go and save that to your reference photos and maybe try some of these flowers yourself I'm also going to be using this drawing because I made it really long on purpose because I'm trying to do some fun things on Instagram on both my personal account my sandy allock account and my sandy allock fine art account on Thursdays I do tiny tutorials on my main account and on my fine art account I do them on Saturdays and I did one recently that just had an inspirational quote and people just loved it and I was thinking this would be a nice background to put behind it and have a whole bunch of screens with just some of the flowers at the bottom so that it looks like one long drawing I don't know if you've seen any of those tiny tutorials you know what I mean about joining them all and so you can look forward to this one being in a tiny tutorial sometime coming up soon here's one that I cut a scrap of this paper and put it on a slimline card and could then design whatever kind of flowers I wanted however big flowers whatever kind of arrangement I could fill in in between them with small flowers and not have to worry about stamps so if you're somebody who doesn't like masking but you like cards that are covered with flowers then learn how to draw flowers to fix this so it doesn't smush and the color get all over the place you can spray it with a fixative the Delacroix fixative from Sennelier is the one that I tend to use and just do one coat of it let it dry for an hour and then another coat just very light coats works better to do a couple light coats rather than a heavy coat of it and that is all for me today I will see you guys again of course in a couple days with a new video I hope you try drawing some flowers of your own and I'll see you later bye bye