 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock and today we're going to talk about contrast and why it makes your art pop. And I'm going to start though with coloring the beard and doing that in a little slower motion than the rest of this but I wanted to talk about hair a little bit as well since I had this beard to color on this stamp set by Trinity and I'm going to use these colors. It's more than three colors, notice I'm not just using three. A lot of times people try to get away with using fewer colors so they can just get on with it quicker and hair is one of those things that has a lot of color in it and when you're trying to make transitions of color sometimes just using a few more colors is going to help your hair look more alive. I started with a yellow color, it's a desaturated yellow so that I can set that as a highlight area and then start adding in my shadows. Now I'm adding in my shadows with a bright orange, why am I doing that? Because you guys are probably afraid of jumping in with an E59 which is what I would normally start with. This is the E59, that would scare most people so work with a lighter color if you need to to put a layer in there to set that shadow because now I have a couple shadow areas right under the chin and the nose, one in the middle and one at the bottom so that the beard is going to flow, it's going to come out and in and out and in. Notice that the ends of all these flick marks are flicks on both sides, top and bottom. This is why in the Copic Jumpstart class I try to emphasize that it is really important that you learn how to do that pendulum flick so that you can get both sides to not have that big old blunt marker mark that gets made when you just lay the marker down on the page and then start your flick. You need to get that lighter touch developed so that you can get really small lines. I know for a lot of people that's not easy, well it might be that you need a different technique to color hair, if you want to color realistic hair like I do, that's just what's required is having a really light touch and barely touching the surface of the paper. I started taking a lighter brown and pulling those colors out toward and into the highlight areas so that I didn't have a strip of the yellow and orange. A lot of people will color hair and I call it helmet hair, it looks like it's metal. It looks like it's a shiny piece of metal as opposed to strands of individual hair that flow in the wind and if you want to do that that's fine but what I like to do is make it look like it's all realistic, which means going back and forth with some lighter colors and some darker colors to start building those edges of those highlights and shadows as they merge into each other. They crisscross from one into the other really regularly from top to bottom. Notice there's not very much of that yellow left, just a tiny bit in a few spots, there may not be any by the time I'm done, depends on how careful you're being and how much of that yellow you want to remain but it does help to give the whole thing a little bit more of a glow. I'm also adding in some darker colors so that I have some nice deep dark contrasting shadow areas and one of them is a dark E08. It's a very very reddish color so it's going to add a lot of ruddyness to the beard itself because that's what I was looking for in coloring this but when I started with the lighter colors it meant I don't have as much coloring over top of the darker colors with lighter colors to use. If you wait to try to tone it when it's all finished, when you've got all your shadows in, the colors you put on top are going to soften everything and you're going to lose any detail you've put in there. So the rest of this picture I'm just going to warn you now is going to be colored quickly and I'm going to skip a few parts because this video is not about that. It's going to be about contrast and I want you to watch what happens to the image as the contrast is added when we get to the background. Quickly first this is a desaturated yellow. It's the same yellow that I used under the beard and I'm using a V22 and a V20 to do the shading on it rather than trying to use a color that's going to pull it more into that orange feel because then it's going to look just like his beard and I want it to look very different. So I go over that with the yellow again that turns it more into a yellowish color. Now I added just one layer of color to most of these flowers and notice that like the leaves behind his head looked kind of the same tone like they were all the same medium color as the hat. The hat was just disappearing into everything and I wanted him to start to pop and that's when I decided I'm going to try to put a black background behind this. I don't do this real often but once in a while I do and I'm just going to color with a black marker behind everything and this is a 110. You can use a 110. You can use a 100. It doesn't really matter. Both of them are equal as far as I can tell. I can't see any visual difference myself between the two colors. I'm just going to fill all of that in and watch what happens to the tones of all the flowers and the the pop of the gnome itself because as I add this black the contrast is going to show you the image. That's how we see objects. We see them by the contrast in light and shadow. Now sometimes the color will make a little difference but if the whole world around you was medium blues, medium greens, medium reds, everything was medium you would probably start bumping into walls because your eye picks up on the contrast in between things not just the color. We think of it as color but it's the contrast that catches the eye and defines space in between one object in another and here you can see the space is definitely differently aligned because with all this black in here some of the shapes start to pop forward instead of everything fighting for attention which is what was happening before. There was just this cacophony of too many flowers, too much detail and this gnome who just needed a little extra TLC was not jumping out because there's so much white surrounding him but as I start to knock back everything else I want you to notice how those things disappear and the gnome becomes more important. I'm also adding in some more dark into the gnome's beard because when all that black happens around it it starts to make his beard look weaker. So every time you do any coloring always make sure you go back and revisit the first areas you colored because the contrast is going to make a difference in what the rest of it looks like. So I'm going to zoom real quick through the coloring of this the coloring the flowers is not the point of this particular video except to show what happens when we start to darken all those. Watch how the gnome starts to pull forward because everything else in the background is going to become less important because I'm coloring them all darker and darker. So I'm going to real quickly put the card together. I've got a die cut in the center of my card front and it's a black card front so I can keep on that contrast and I'm putting the dimensional adhesive that I've sliced long ways so I make it last longer and then as I tore it off it was all in mostly one piece so I could peel that background off easily and attach it onto the front of the image. So voila beautiful little it feels like a clean and simple card even though it has all that going on in the background of it and it's because of that contrast. I decided to put a little extra detail on this by adding in some gold pen work. Yeah I know it's not my white pen but it's a gold pen and adds just enough detail and the sentiment on the inside of the card. I do hope that this video illustrated for you the importance of contrast and maybe you'll try pushing some contrast a little bit more the next time you make a card just nudge it a little further than you feel comfortable with and see what happens because I can guarantee you if you try it you will fall in love with contrast and you'll need to do it a lot more. Alright thanks so much for watching click the like button share it with your friends if you'd like and I will see you again very soon with another video. Bye bye