 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, welcome to my YouTube channel where I'm usually making art, but today I'm just gonna talk about art. I have two updates for you, very important ones. One is about my book and two is about commissions. So first the book, you might remember in 2018, I had published two books. One was a book called Bible Journaling Made Simple and that's the main book that is an instructional. It has a lot about materials and about ghosting on the paper and lots of the questions that I always get about Bible Journaling. And then I have a whole bunch of step-by-step tutorials. There's lots of information about art, like color theory, cause I'm me and I gotta have color theory and everything. And then there's a whole bunch of inspirational stuff to it as well. But the main lesson that I wanted to get across in this book was the fact that the important part of Bible Journaling and journaling in general is the heart that you put into it. It's not about the art, it's about what you're learning and what you're growing in in your faith or whatever it is that you're journaling about. Lots of you have told me that that's how it came through and I am super pleased with that cause I was successful in my mission if that's what happened. Now the second book that I published at the same time was a companion book and it was a workbook that is printed on Bible-like paper. It's not Bible paper, it's Bible-like but what it does do is give you the chance to practice in this book. There's lots of prompts to do some journaling and you can see the different kinds of things that I've created, but you can just practice different techniques, practice an image that you wanna paint in your Bible and try it here first to make sure you can work out your colors and your technique and then you can transfer it to your Bible or you can just take the pages out of this and glue them in your Bible as a tip in whatever you'd like to do. This book has chapters that go along with the main book so the two of them kinda coordinate with each other and there's just lots and lots of space to work. Now the publisher has told me, as of like a couple weeks ago, that the workbook is going to go out of print and I have what's called the first right to refusal or whatever that means. It seems to me that I have the right to buy the rest of the books and then do with them what I will. Now I don't know if they're gonna put them in a burn pile or like what they're gonna do with them. They didn't really say but I have just a short period of time to decide what I wanna do and I sat down and did some math. I looked at what it would cost for me to buy the books from them, have the books shipped to me and then I buy all the packaging to package them all up and ship them out one by one and the cost of that. And then if I pay myself like $5 for all of that work, then I am basically charging you the same price as Amazon charges you. So you could go get the book for $19.99 on Amazon and it would make no sense for me to be handling all of that just to get $5. So I'm not gonna do that but I do have a plan that I wanna offer up to anyone who's interested. If you decide to pre-order a book from me so that I can go buy the book, you'll pay for it up front so that I have the funds to go get the book and when the book gets here, I will sign it and I will also paint something in it in the back section so that it doesn't interrupt the flow of the rest of the book because there's a big blank section in the back and I will paint something in it and send the whole book to you. So you could take that page out of the book and cut it down for a tip-in in your Bible if you want or you can just leave it in the book for inspiration if you would like that. Now in order to pay for some time to do the painting, I'm going to tackle on another $15. So it's gonna be $35 if you want to do that option and that 35 includes the painting and the shipping and the everything. And if you would like that, then there is a link in the doobly-do that's gonna be over on my fine art webpage as opposed to on my classes page because I wanna be able to keep all those orders separate and there's less traffic on my fine art website. So that's where the orders will be taken. And if you want it for Christmas, if it is a Christmas gift, then put a note when you order it saying that it's for Christmas and I will be 100% sure to get yours done first, but in general, I'm gonna try to get them out to everybody as soon as possible after I receive them. And there might only be two of you and that might be really easy to do. So just let me know by ordering one if you would like one of those books. Now, the second thing I wanna share with you today is commissions. One of the reasons I have not taken commissions before, at least not publicly, I've accepted a few by email when I felt inspired to, but I generally don't do so because a lot of people want a pet portrait for $100 and given the amount of time that it takes to create something like that, it doesn't make financial sense for me to do that. I could do a different kind of project that is gonna generate more income. And I know that's monetizing art and that sucks, but when you're living as an artist, you have to make some decisions about what makes the most sense to spend your time on. But I do love doing animals. I just love drawing and painting and creating animals of all different kinds in different mediums. And I want to give it a little try. I just wanna see what happens. So what I'm going to do is starting in November, not yet, but in November, I'm gonna open a window for applications for commissions. And the reason I'm calling it applications is that it gives me the right to look at the photos and say, hmm, I don't think I could do this animal justice or that one is really inspiring and I think I could really rock that because if I'm gonna charge what it's gonna take to actually make a piece about your pet, I wanna know that I can really do a good job of it in order to make it worth the value of that money for you. So in the meantime, while you're waiting for that to open then gather some photos and kind of think about what you want. And in the next month or so, I'm gonna be creating some sample portraits and figure out some sizes and what some pricing options might be. And in November, I'll share that so that you can apply to maybe have your pet done as a portrait by me. So yeah, I think I'm done babbling now. Aside from the news that this coming weekend, I'm gonna be launching some new classes. So please do pay attention. Social media doesn't always let you know when I have exciting things going on but there are going to be four new classes launching and they're small classes. There are many classes but they're gonna include the images. So they're including some printables so they'll be a little more expensive than your traditional mini classes but they're gonna be in alcohol markers, watercolors, color pencil and gouache. And the reason I'm launching all four at the same time is they're all based on the same theme. I went with inspiration from the Julie Andrews song My Favorite Things, you know, whiskers on kittens and blue satin sashes and all that kind of stuff. Well, there's some great imagery in that song that I've turned into images that we can use for holiday greeting cards. These are gonna be level two classes so they're not gonna be hard, no crazy backgrounds but I have lots of techniques that I've packed into the videos and I'm really working hard to get all the editing done so that this weekend everybody can get started making their holiday cards. In the meantime, go out there and create something every day and go collect those pictures of your pets. I'll see you guys, bye.