 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnock, artist and crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to be coloring a realistic bumblebee. Colorado Craft Company is out with some new stamps, of course, as they do each month, and they sent me this lovely bee. And why not color a bee? Because it's yellow! So I stamped it with some no-line ink, and this is a special ink that is kind of grayish, so that you can do no-line coloring on it. And I'm going to use Copic markers and then add details on top of it with pencil. So I'm really just looking to get some color blocks in here, because I'm going to be doing a lot of coloring on top. And when you're coloring something fuzzy, especially, it's really easy to do because nothing has to really blend. You're going to be doing all the blending really with the pencil when you get to that stage. I looked up some bees online to figure out what the heck a bee actually looks like. And one of the things I noticed was that they have sort of a glow around their legs. So they're black legs, but there's, I don't know if it's orangey or golden colored hairs they've got on them or something, but I wanted to give it that look. So these are all colors that are going to be underneath of everything else. I wanted to have some of this yellow across all of it, including on the legs. So then I started going in with my Copic marker and making the bee stripes with it. And again, it doesn't matter a whole lot how well you do this portion. This is setting the tone for when you add the pencil later on. And just adding more details on top of it, you can cover up anything that doesn't work right. So if your stripes aren't straight, and I wanted to make them so that they're not perfect because it's an animal, it's not, well, I don't know, maybe bees do comb their hair. I suppose that's possible. Comb their little furry bodies and make them all perfect and straight. But I'm going to guess they're probably not perfect and straight. I did make my bees eyes blue, green and green because it seemed like it would be fun even though none of the bees that I saw had blue, green or green eyes. I'm going to add some black over top of a lot of this later on. So I'm going to look a little less kind of creepy, starry eye kind of a bug. And now I'm going to start putting in a little bit of the color so you can kind of get an idea where the legs are going and how that's going to work out with the pencil when I put that detail on top is going to be to extend this. But this just kind of sets the tone so that when I go back in with the pencil, I have something underneath of it. If you've ever noticed sometimes when you're drawing with colored pencil, you end up with a lot of white spots in between. You spend a lot of time trying to fuss around to blend it together. Well, this solves that because then you have that color underneath already. So I'm going to do a little bit of something just to create some shadows under here. I just put shadows that touch the toes. So the toes are hitting the ground. I forgot to add the ones at the very top, the other two legs. So I am going to add those later on. So have no fear. Blended that out with a lighter gray. And then I started adding a little bit of color here and there onto the wings and adding just very, very pale color because the wings are basically see-through. And they from what I can tell from pictures, it looks like the color is almost reflected from the body onto the wings. But I'm making mine a little bit more exciting and adding some fun colors to it just because I can because it's art. So next up is the colored pencil work. I'm using Polychromos, but you can, of course, use Prismacolor or whatever you want. And I'm just going to add the fuzziness of each one of the stripes. And they get nice and intense. I don't have any of the white spots in between because if there's any places where I don't color completely in with my black pencil, it's the Copic gray underneath of it. So it's going to work just fine. And I'm going to be adding a lot more to the yellow in between as well. So I'm not even really worried about the edges of the stripes being particularly even. Next up is going to be a sort of a dark reddish brown kind of color because I want some dimension and you can add dimension, even though you're doing fur by using a darker color in the darker areas and then pick up a different color to do the next tone. Like normally with Copics, you would have a light, a medium and a dark. This would be considered the dark. So anywhere you're putting that dark area, you'll be adding in that deeper color. But the next color you're going to grab to go alongside of it is going to be a lighter color. So it looks like you get some transition in the darks as well. But first, I got to get all my dark areas in around all of his little fuzzy body parts. And I'm not a big fan of bees necessarily other than, of course, that they're yellow and that's always fun. But they are kind of cute when you get really close up to them. They have little fuzzy butts and little fuzzy bodies and things. So as long as you get a cute angled picture, they can be adorable as opposed to some of them look like like weird, creepy things that you would be haunted by in your nightmares. So be careful. Don't be looking up too much weird stuff about bees unless you don't want to sleep. So there you go. I'm going to add my shadows onto the the top portion of this. So it kind of is a little bit even. And now for the legs. And I'm going to use that dark reddish kind of a color and add the like furriness onto the legs because his legs have these little teeny tiny hairs on them. And I want, like I said, I wanted to have that sort of a a goldish color on the outside and then black on the legs. So I'm going to first put down the gold part because I can cover part of that with black and create that effect that I saw in photos of bees. Now, this bee in particular, the way the stamp is drawn from Colorado Craft Company. There is a design on the back, you'll notice. And then on like on his schnoz, he's got a little little graphical design. If you're doing no line coloring, you could actually eliminate that and just color it as if it weren't even there in the stamp. If you're using this no line ink, it'll just disappear for you. But I decided to include it and not worry about making this hyper realistic that he's got a little little gem on his back. I did eliminate some of the details from it. But look how nice those legs look now that I've got the black in the middle of them as well. So that created that glowing color on the outside of the legs that I wanted to try. And here's the detail in the eyes to make them really shiny looking. So I went over the shadow areas with black and let the color and the highlight still stand out. And here is my little tiny details added into the design on the nose. And I'll add a little bit of shadows onto the gemstones on his back. So he has a little decor. Now, as for the wings, I was debating how much more to add. I used a gray pencil and then I'll switch back and forth to with a little bit of black pencil to have a few darker edges. But on something like this, since you're working on a no line thing, it's not really all that helpful to add lines to everything so that it looks like it's outlined. So I'm adding some sketchy outlines here and there and making them uneven so that it's not as though I'm just really tracing over every single line. But I had a couple areas where I started accidentally goofing things up. And that looked really good to have a second line around some of the edges, almost like there was an extra detail in each section of the wing. So I started deliberately adding it very, very lightly. You just barely see it. It's like a second line right around the the outside rounded edge of each one. And I did around most of them, not all of them, but just to give a little bit of form to the wing without adding too much. It's always hard to know when to stop, but I really love how my B came out. Haven't figured out what I'm going to do with them. I'm probably going to just put him in my sketchbook. I'm adding an extra portion to this video at the last minute because I have this other stamp that's at Colorado Crafts Company stamp as well. And it has yellow in it, so it fits my yellow theme for the video. And for my Copic colorists, you might enjoy this. I extended the fence out to the edges and then just started coloring. This was originally going to be for my social media. I've been posting a couple of Instagram TV videos each week for quite some time now, and it's been a lot of fun. They get lots more views than my YouTube videos ever do. They'll get like 10,000 views in like a day or two, whereas I get very little over here, but I am not going to be posting this one over there. I'm taking a break from social media about you, but I've had enough of people name calling each other. And I posted some things recently about some of the current events that are going on you may know from my YouTube channel. That I have more than a little appreciation for diversity with my human rainbow campaign and coloring people with different skin tones. And we are not all the same, but we are all valued. And I am finding out that right now people are showing their true colors. And on my social media, I did post some personal opinions about things and I'm fine with people disagreeing with that opinion, but I am also not fine with people treating each other. horrendously and calling each other names and my sites will not be a platform for that. So I am signing off from my Instagram and Facebook for a while. I don't know if it will be for days, if it will be for weeks, or if it will be for months. I really couldn't tell you right now. I'm going to watch what people do on other people's posts and see if the community writes itself and decides to be kind again. We've always prided ourselves on sharing handmade kindness. And I want to see evidence of that in words rather than just as a hashtag. So I am not going to be posting this on my Instagram TV. So you get to watch it right here instead. What I am going to be doing, I think, because I am an obsessive share of my art and I'm always making things and I always want to share it. So I'm probably going to be posting more on my blog. Just in blog posts, not in videos. And I'm probably also going to post more on my Patreon page. So if you're interested in just kicking in a buck a month to keep up with my shenanigans, you can join me over on Patreon. And if not, then you can still watch here on YouTube because I'm going to continue to post here on YouTube as well. So I will see you guys later on. Have a good week. Don't be kind to each other. Just be nice. That's really all we need to do. Just, yeah, that's it. I'll see you later.