 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today we're gonna talk design. I saw this really cute sunny studio stamp set with a bunch of little cute gnomes and mushrooms. They've got little bird friends and a little worm, a little pumpkin house, just lots of really fun images to color and I had so much fun coloring them that I just want to show you the finished cards and talk a little bit about the design of them and how I made some improvements to my layouts. I used my luminance colored pencils to color all of them. This is not going to be a coloring video, but I hope you'll get something out of it anyway, so let's get started and take a look. Just for the sake of teaching, I stamped the gnome girl, a few of the mushrooms and the worm in ways that are very common. Just I've got three images. I want to make this one feel like he's out in front. I can't really tell whether she's supposed to be on the same plane as the mushrooms or not. She's down below and yet she kind of looks like maybe she should be on the same plane or she should be more exaggerated down here. There's just not enough distance there. None of them are also touching each other. There's no connection between them so they don't really have that sense of depth, but I did do some improvements and re-stamped these images and want to show you what I did and how it came out. So I moved her on top of these guys, so she's about right in here now, and I added an extra mushroom over on this side because I wanted a little balance. I didn't want her only on that side. I wanted a little bit sticking out, so when I masked her in order to stamp these background mushrooms, I did that on both sides. I also eliminated the grass because over here it was really really busy and I wanted to draw attention to the right things. So I masked that out entirely just with a post-it note and then drew that little curve in for the ground, then drew the lines down to join it. So what all this has done when I took out the color down here as well is put a lot of focus on this area on my little gnome girl. She's got a lot of detail in here and your eye goes right for her. Rather than here you're not really sure which one to look at. The little worm friend, instead of being way back here now, I've put him in a place where he's going to draw the attention across the image as well. He's drawing attention up to the top of the picture and I stamped him by masking out the very top of my mushroom, so he looks like he's climbing up the back side of it. You could also stamp him first and then have his little tummy sticking out over top of the mushroom, then he looks like he's coming over the ridge. But I think this one came out much better than this one. It's colored better of course because I did finish the shading and everything. Another thing that I did was change the shading so that I have some strong lighting coming from the upper right, so it's kind of coming from down here. Whereas here I was just kind of doing some soft shading kind of in the middle. I didn't finish it over here, but I decided I wanted something bright. I wanted a brighter highlight and so I did that. The finishing off of the card was just to put the sentiment down in the bottom and I added the word gnome on a piece of coordinating cardstock so that I could draw a little of that color down there and draw attention to the gnome pun and keep the whole card clean and simple. Here's another card that I made with the gnome that's pushing a little card with a mushroom in it. I stamped a mushroom up here and ended up actually masking out the bottom so I could create another hillside and join that hillside with the side of the paper. That makes my scene feel like it's going on and I have some connection now between the elements in the picture. This one I didn't have to mask him out. I just stamped him on top after I got this done so there was no masking involved in this card and then added my little sentiment right here. The border that I put around it is just a white on white border and I just added a little tiny bit of curve to the bottom with a corner punch and called it done for a nice clean and simple card. Here's another card in which I joined the image with the side of the card including having the bird coming out from the side. So that means I don't even have the whole image finished and you get the sense that this bird has just flown in and landed to sit down next to the little gnome. I added a strip of color over here for a little bit of balance and that's on the card base and for those who are in the color pencil jump start class I did that using the powdered pencil technique so I could get some really soft light color and then added my sentiment across the bottom. Leaves all this beautiful white space for the eye to rest and you immediately go and look at the images. It draws attention to them. This one I think is my favorite. I had the little gnome here and I wanted to put him in the same way as I did with the little girl gnome. I wanted the little mushrooms behind him and I was going to put the other mushroom here and then I saw wait a minute there's that pumpkin house. So with all of them again I masked out that grass because it was going to be really confusing with all this detail in here and I didn't want to lose my gnome so I masked out the bottom of them and drew kind of a lumpy line because I didn't really feel like it needed to be straight and perfect so that all those things are kind of behind him on the hillside and it draws the attention to him. I also had to keep in mind on some of them whether I was going to color in the beard whether they were going to be white bearded gnomes or whether they were going to have dark hair and this one in particular needed light hair so he would pop in front of the image. The grass again down here was created with the powdered pencil technique and the rest was just colored wonderfully with my colored pencils. So fun and so relaxing even if it takes a lot of time. I did add some other color to this one. I added his beard color so that he could he was going to be against white so I could definitely draw attention to that. I had to add black hair for her because every other color that I was going to try was going to compete with the background so I needed something really strong to make her hair show and then this little guy since he had a little bit of green behind him and he since he had all that color behind him could have a white beard. I hope you got some good tips out of this video for laying out your stamped images so that they connect with each other and I will see you again in the next video. Be sure to click the subscribe button so you can get all of my videos delivered to your email. You don't miss a single one. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye-bye.