 Hi there, I'm Sandi Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I will be sharing a song with you today and not singing. You don't want to hear me singing, but the stamp set from Penny Black is called Sharing a Song and we're going to make a Christmas card with the scene. This is the stamp set I'll be using today and all week long on the Penny Black blog I will be using these other stamp sets and using the same kind of techniques and the same ideas to make a full set of cards. On each one I'm going to be using a different background stamp. These are all so gorgeous and I'll show you how you can make full scenes using just those single stamps. Now I've used some Nina to stamp my image and before I go any further I need to make a mask. So I'm using this masking paper for my mask so I can cut that out. I've stamped my image onto it and it's sticky back. It's like post-it note type of sticky and all the supplies for everything, by the way, are in the doobly-doo down below as well as over on my blog. And I'm going to trim it out and I'm trimming it out along with the snow at the bottom. So I drew a line across the bottom to create some ground for her because I want to make sure that the background that I stamped doesn't go down into the snow. Now I've taken my pad out of the misty because this is a thick stamp and put it right down into the misty itself so that this will fit and I'm aligning the stamp. It's not full width for the card so the design will actually cut off that part over on the right. Close it so that the misty picks up the stamp and then place down my image, my little mask that I've already cut onto the image. And then I can ink up my stamp. I'm going to use two different colors and you can do this very easily using the misty. You can do a couple of re-stamps. You can stamp it in one color and then in the second color or you can just tap other colors in and I've got a gray and a blue-green kind of color. And I'm using dye inks but you could also use, if you don't have any dye inks, you can use some pigment inks for this because as long as you don't touch them while they're wet then we're not going to color on that portion. That's just going to be the background. You'll see how that worked out in just a few minutes. But for the time being, I'm going to do a shading map. I've done these for some stamp sets before. It's been challenging to do them for many because I got a secure permission from companies and that sort of thing. But since this is going to be on the Penny Black blog, I thought this would be a fun project to do. Each one of the stamp sets this week is going to have shading maps that you can download and use for your stamps. And I'm creating a shading map on this scrap piece of paper, this scrap stamping, so that I can tuck this in with my stamp set. And each time I go to stamp and color it, I have this map. I've already worked out where the shadows would be if the light's coming from one direction or another. It's actually going to cover all of those little doohickeys all that I'm brooding on her jacket. So kind of cover that up as well. Going to give the bird a little bit of shading. Any round objects when the light is coming from the upper right are going to be on the left and bottom side of everything. And I will ask your forgiveness for my wrestling dogs outside the window. They're having way too much fun. This might be a Christmas card, but they still think it's July. And I'll bring my shading down her legs, down the left side of her legs, adding a little extra shading underneath of her dress, that sort of thing. And just following along where that shadow would hit if the sun is coming from above. And then some shadow on the ground too. Now this is the background that I stamped. And you can see there's a little bit of blue-green, a little bit of a warm grayish color. And so I picked out two different colors that match those inks. So before you do your stamping, try some inks and see what matches your Copic markers because you will need to fill in probably. That masking paper is really thin, but it's not thin enough that the stamp can basically get around it in some cases. So you're going to want to be able to just sketch in a few of those lines so it joins up with her. Otherwise, you could end up with some big old weird gaps. If you have a really light color, it's much easier to fake it. So don't use a very dark color in that background. We're going to put all that color, the saturated color, on the girl herself so that that background will recede. And whether you sketched it out perfectly or not will not matter. It's just a matter of getting it a suggestion of a background in there. I'm known for my backgrounds on a lot of my cards. People say they scroll down my Instagram and they know it's me because I've got crazy backgrounds. But this is one way to get a very soft, very realistic looking background without actually having to know how to draw one. And you can just do it with stamps and ink. And these background stamps for Penny Black are fabulous for that. So I'm going to use a particular colorway in this. A lot of colors that were are going to be on this one are going to be on the same, the rest of the series of cards, the same colors. And it was inspired by first starting with that blue-green from the background. I wanted a stronger version of that in the foreground. And then I wanted a little bit of Christmas red and green in there too. But I didn't want this to feel like a traditional red and green. And with all that blue-green in there really helped. So she's going to have a blue-green and green outfit on. And then I'm going to look for some spots to put a pop of some red. Because this allows me to really make her coloring stand out really well in the background and not scream Christmas, but still have a really holiday feel. So the pops of color I'm going to put in are on the dress, which is a great place because she's just got this little dress hanging out. Her bird little friend, which makes sense to have a red bird, as well as on the sled. And throughout all of the series of cards that I'm making, I'm going to use all three colors as accents at different times, along with black and that sort of thing, to make a full set of cards. That if you were making a set of cards, say for a bazaar or something, for a Christmas sale, it's a great way to make a whole group that's very striking. But each card will still be unique and different, even though they they go together well. The colors for her skin, you might have been scared that I used purple. I like to do that because it gives me a more natural shadow, but you can use a darker brown instead. And here I'm going to use a little bit of that red for my deepest deepest darkest shadows. Why red on a blue-green? Well, blue-green and red work really well if you don't have a super dark blue-green color. And the blue-green family in Copic Markers doesn't have a really dark, dark, dark blue-green, not dark enough for me. This is one of the darkest ones, PG09. And you can see when it's by itself, it's not all that dark. It's somewhat dark, but it's not super black dark. So if I go over top of that red with it, then it actually looks like a blue-green. It doesn't look like red anymore, but use it judiciously. And if you're nervous, then don't go there. You can always just use your dark blue-green colors. If you want more information on how you can use really different colors like a red for a shadow, the Copic Jumpstart class is a great place to do that. There's a link in the doobly-doo to the Jumpstart class here. A link in the doobly-doo on YouTube, shall I say? It's not going to be over on Penny Black, but it'll be here on YouTube if you're interested in more information on classes that I teach. So I've added more of the blue-green to sort of match what's on the shading map a little bit more. I'm extending that shadow from that red, that really dark, dark, dark part. And then I'll go back to my BG15. So basically, the red is acting like my really darks. The BG09 was acting like the mid-tone, and the BG15 is the light. But you might have another color in the middle if you don't end up using that dark red. Now, here I'm going to use my favorite red combination, which I find works really, really well. And that's an R89 for the shadow. It's the darkest of the reds, and it does make some people nervous. I love contrast, and that sort of thing. So I like to use that along with an R37, which is a great mid-tone red. And these two go with all of the regular reds that you would use. So now I'm going to add some shadows to my green. And again, with the green, I could use a pinkish kind of color, but I wasn't too worried. The G28 is a fairly good rich green. And now that I've got enough of that pop in the blue-green color, it doesn't bother me so much if the dark green isn't perfectly super dark. But you can use a similar trick for that. So I'm going to add my G28 in a bunch of the shadow areas. And referencing the shading map, I could see that I had forgotten part of the image that I wanted to make darker here and there. And then I'll go in with my mid-tone, the YG17, and soften out those edges. I'm not worried about softening out where it goes into the light, just where it's going into the dark area. I want to soften those dark edges, because then I'm going to go in with my lightest color again, my YG03, and just smooth that out going right over top of it. And if you have an area on a piece of clothing, just here's a pro tip that doesn't have the smoothest blending, just put polka dots on it with a white pen. No one will know, no one will care. So I'll put a little bit of color now into the pine cones and then just start using some flicking motion to create those greens that she's dragging along. And just giving them some sort of feathery edges, but I'm not going to get real detailed into that. There's so much in her and so much beautiful color in her that it's not really bothersome if there's not a whole lot in there, but I decided I wanted a little bit more of that G28 that I had used. So here I'm using the mid-tone and dark color that I used on her outfit. So the colors all relate that way. There's a little bit more of them on the card itself. To finish off my card, I cut off that right-hand side of the panel that didn't have stamping on it, added a few layers, black and red cardstock, and then I popped it up. But before I did, I glued down a folded piece of silk ribbon and tied a piece of twine around it, which created a really unique embellishment for my card. Here's a peek at the rest of the cards that you'll see all week on the Penny Black blog. So be sure to pop on by and see the rest of them and pick up the shading maps for those stamp sets. Thanks so much for spending a few minutes with me. If you have not yet subscribed, you can click on my face to do that, watch some other videos by clicking on those, or check out that Copic Jumpstart class that I mentioned. I put out three videos a week and I would love to have you come back and visit with me again. Thanks, bye-bye!