 Thank you for tapping on that play button. My name is Sandy. I'll knock and I'm an artist I work in a lot of different mediums and the fact that I work in so many mediums means I have a lot of supplies around and sometimes they Try to play together and they cross contaminate each other And I use things that you shouldn't use together and they work out terribly and then sometimes they work out great. I Recently found myself wondering why it is that I no longer use the technique of adding color pencil details on top of alcohol marker drawings Because I used to use that all the time, but I haven't in a hot minute or two Well, I realized the reason is because I discovered Stonehenge drawing paper for my colored pencils and I love the experience of drawing on that paper I love the way the pencil lays down. I love the way I can blend it I love a lot of things about it and I Couldn't do that on marker papers. It didn't feel the same So I'm just not drawn to trying to do that technique anymore Well, I wondered instead of bringing the colored pencils to the alcohol marker paper What happens if I bring the alcohol markers to the colored pencil paper? Hmm Would it work and would the paper retain the surface that I love so much for colored pencil by the time I got all that alcohol marker work done I'm going to share a few techniques that I found work really well using the markers pencils and paper I'm going to also Show you a demo from something that's coming up in the near future that I'm very excited about. Are we ready? Let's go do this The feel of drawing with alcohol markers on drawing paper is going to be very different just so you know It's got more friction on the surface because there's a Soft or texture to it and there is on marker papers that you might have been used to so on the left is Nina Solar white on the right is the Stonehenge. You can even hear the difference between the two The coloring is also a little bit lighter on the drawing paper due to that bumpy surface I'm going to turn this into a chunk of fur Which means I need to have a dark color at the base where it touches the animal and then lighter toward the tips of the fur So I'm going to start by doing just some blending not massively trying to be perfect in my blending Because I'm going to add pencil to it when you have that that kind of backup in your mind You're going to use pencil anyway Then you don't need to kill yourself But we're trying to get the color underneath to be perfect to just get it good enough that you have some sense of Roundness and get rid of the white of the paper and then when you put the pencil on top You're going to be able to achieve a lot more of the look you're going for So here I was trying to see how light of tips I could get on the light end And I was able to get much softer tips much lighter look on the drawing paper than I was on the Nina So that was a huge benefit And then we've got adding more of the darks more of the specific texture of the hair itself drawing in individual hairs And you get very sharp lines on the marker paper, but you get broken lines on The drawing paper now you might say oh, I don't like that, but hang tight Just stay with me a minute putting in some even darker colors still And then I wanted to do something I I do a lot which is going over a Texture with another color a lighter version of the color just to start to bring it all together so it doesn't look like it's overdrawn and immediately the Texture on the Stonehenge softened much more than on the Nina So now let's switch over to pencil and see what happens Just adding some brown pencil and they'll add some black to try to get some good contrast And this was where the night and day difference started to come in because The texture of the paper actually pulls more pigment off of the tip of the pencil That's why you get stronger color for your colored pencils on a drawing paper than on something really smooth At the risk of giving you a heart attack Yes, I'm using a Copic marker on top of pencil I know we've been told not to do that But alcohol is a blender solution for pencil pigment and look how much richer and darker I can get the color on the drawing paper because the drawing paper has so much more pigment All I have to do is scribble off the color on scratch paper and my marker is fine It could get discolored if that bothers you don't do this But I find that it works really great and doesn't affect the performance of my markers My white pencil even comes out more white because of the texture pulling more pigment onto the paper itself It's kind of crazy what you can learn when you start breaking the rules about what you can and can't use together Now for that project I spoke of For a long time I've had people asking me for classes on drawing animals and as someone who aspired wants to be a wildlife illustrator I really wanted to do it There's a lot of reasons I didn't but as I started playing with this paper marker pencil combo I got excited about teaching an animal class But when I added up just how much footage I had suddenly collected Almost seven hours of drawing for this level four class It's it was orders of magnitude more than I'd ever put together in one class and it was gonna have to be expensive because of that But it's also one reason I'd been putting off an animals class Because the way I had been structuring my classes five to ten bite-sized lessons You know a series that builds on each other you learn one thing and then in the next piece of art You learn something to add to that knowledge that was how I taught and I had thought through that kind of process with these animals, but with that much content it would the class was just gonna be out of reach But I've been pondering whether or not I have to keep that model for all my classes or not I mean really I'm not even sure anybody notices all that structure that I follow. Maybe some of you teachers do Well, anyway, I'm gonna be separating all my little animal friends into individual classes instead of one big class There's also gonna be a big one but I'm gonna separate them so that they're smaller classes that will keep them more affordable and then you can also just pick the ones that you want I'll have to do some duplicate explaining of some of the very similar techniques, but I think you'll manage with that just fine there will be that big kahuna class with all 10 images in it and This little bear cub is number 11. So he's gonna be a bonus only in the big class So if you really get invested you'll get a narrated version of him But this is all part of a new category of classes that I'm gonna be calling drawing on nature with realistic drawings in various mediums in smaller classes like this on various topics in nature and I would love your suggestions of topics and mediums as well I Expect it'll be about a week or more until I get this first group finished and ready for you But I want it to at least let you know that this is coming If you'd like to be first to hear about the progress I'm making on drawing on nature Please do click on the link in the doobly-doo to subscribe to the art dash classes comm email list Because that's where you're gonna be first to hear about it And I will see you again on Saturday. At least I hope I'll be here Saturday I'm supposed to be on jury duty. So maybe you're gonna get courtroom waiting room sketches I don't really know Stay tuned and find out who knows what's coming go out and have a great week Create something every day, and I'll see you soon